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Confluent vs webMethods.io comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Confluent
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (4th)
webMethods.io
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
Business-to-Business Middleware (3rd), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (3rd), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (10th), API Management (10th), Cloud Data Integration (7th), Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) (5th)
 

Featured Reviews

Yantao Zhao - PeerSpot reviewer
Great tool for sharing knowledge, internal communication and allows for real-time collaboration on pages
Confluence is easy to use and modify. However, sometimes there are too many pages. We have to reorganize the folder or parent account. Since everyone can create a page, the same knowledge might be created in multiple places by different people. This leads to redundancy and makes it difficult to find information. It's not centralized. So it could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful. It's very easy to use, so everyone can create knowledge. But it would be good to synchronize and organize that information a bit better. Another improvement would be in Confluence search. You can search for keywords, but it's not like AI, not even ChatGPT or OpenAI. It would be nice to get more relevant or organized answers. If you're outside the company, you just get some titles containing the keyword you input. But if Confluence were like a database, you could input something and get a well-organized search offering from multiple pages.
Michele Illiano - PeerSpot reviewer
Can function as an ESB along with the core product, with decent integration of message protocols
I have noticed that webMethods ActiveTransfer has had problems when handling large files. For example, when we receive (and perform operations on) files that are larger than about 16 MB, the software starts losing performance. This is why, for most customers who have to deal with big files, I suggest that they use a product other than ActiveTransfer. I would like to note that this problem mainly concerns large files that undergo extra operations, such assigning, unassigning, or file translation. When these operations take place on large files, ActiveTransfer will use up a lot of resources. Within the product itself, I also believe that there is room for improvement in terms of optimization when it comes to general performance. I suspect that the issues underlying poor optimization are because it is all developed in Java. That is, all the objects and functions that are used need to be better organized, especially when it comes to big files but also overall. webMethods ActiveTransfer was born as an ESB to handle messages, and these messages were typically very short, i.e. small in size. A message is data that you have to send to an application, where it must be received in real-time and possibly processed or acknowledged elsewhere in the system as well. So, because it was initially designed for small messages, it struggles with performance when presented with very large files. All this to say, I suggest that they have an engineer reevaluate the architecture of the product in order to consider cases where large files are sent, and not only small ones. As for new features, compared to other products in the market, I think Software AG should be more up to date when it comes to extra protocol support, especially those protocols that other solutions have included in their products by default. Whenever we need to add an unsupported protocol, we have to go through the effort of custom development in order to work with it. Also, all the banks are obligated to migrate to the new standards, and big companies are all handling translations and operating their libraries with the new protocol formats. But webMethods ActiveTransfer doesn't seem to be keeping up with this evolution. Thus, they should aim to be more compliant in future, along the lines of their competitors such as IBM and Primeur.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is also good for knowledge base management."
"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"The benefit is escaping email communication. Sometimes people ignore emails or put them into spam, but with Confluence, everyone sees the same text at the same time."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."
"I would rate the scalability of the solution at eight out of ten. We have 20 people who use Confluent in our organization now, and we hope to increase usage in the future."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"The most valuable feature of the webMethods Integration Server is its reliability. It has a lot of great documentation from the service providers. Additionally, it is easy to use."
"Segregation of deployment for the environments is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"We can arrange data caching and look at the solid state. Also, the API gateway is a very good component that can handle relevant cachings and integrations, as well as and also load permitting."
"The development is very fast. If you know what you're doing, you can develop something very easily and very fast."
"WebMethods.io is a powerful tool, but it requires skilled people who can fully utilize its potential."
"They are the building blocks of EAI in SAG products, and they offer a very good platform."
"The tool supports gRPC."
"Within the new version, webMethods API Gateway gives us an end-to-end lifecycle from the creation of the API up into the development, deployment, and promotion into production/live. The current end-to-end lifecycle of the API gives us enough authority and governance of the API. We know what are currently live services, what is in the testing stage of development, and what version that has been commissioned. So, the full life cycle itself gives us full authority and governance of the API."
 

Cons

"I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"One area we've identified that could be improved is the governance and access control to the Kafka topics. We've found some limitations, like a threshold of 10,000 rules per cluster, that make it challenging to manage access at scale if we have many different data sources."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."
"It could have more themes. They should also have more reporting-oriented plugins as well. It would be great to have free custom reports that can be dispatched directly from Jira."
"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."
"The on-premises setup can be difficult."
"It is an expensive solution and not very suitable for smaller businesses."
"The solution has big instances when deployed under microservices or in a containerized platform. They need to improve that so that it is competitive with other integration solutions, like Redis and Kafka. Deployments under microservices with those solutions are much more lightweight, in the size of the runtime itself, compared with Software AG."
"Technical support is an area where they can improve."
"Rules engine processes and BPM processes should be improved."
"The initial setup of the webMethods Integration Server is not easy but it gets easier once you know it. It is tiresome but not difficult."
"The stability of the various modules of the product suite have been a bit of a concern lately. Though their support team is always easy to reach out to, I would prefer it not come to that."
"When migration happens from the one release to an upgraded release from Software AG, many of the existing services are deprecated and developers have to put in effort testing and redeveloping some of the services. It would be better that upgrade releases took care to support the lower-level versions of webMethods."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Regarding pricing, I think Confluent is a premium product, but it's hard for me to say definitively if it's overly expensive. We're still trying to understand if the features and reduced maintenance complexity justify the cost, especially as we scale our platform use."
"The pricing model of Confluent could improve because if you have a classic use case where you're going to use all the features there is no plan to reduce the features. You should be able to pick and choose basic services at a reduced price. The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate Confluent's pricing at five. I have not encountered any additional costs."
"Confluence's pricing is quite reasonable, with a cost of around $10 per user that decreases as the number of users increases. Additionally, it's worth noting that for teams of up to 10 users, the solution is completely free."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Most of my clients would like the price of the solution to be reduced."
"The pricing is a yearly license."
"I don’t have much idea about prices, but webMethods API Portal is not something cheaper."
"The solution's development license is free for three to six months. We have to pay for other things."
"webMethods.io Integration's pricing is high and has yearly subscription costs."
"webMethods Integration Server is expensive, and there's no fixed price on it because it has a point pricing model. You can negotiate, which makes it interesting."
"The solution’s pricing is too high."
"I do think webMethods is coming under increasing pressure when it comes to their price-to-feature value proposition. It's probably the single biggest strategic risk they have. They're very expensive in their industry. They've been raising the price recently, especially when compared with their competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Confluent?
I find Confluent's Kafka Connectors and Kafka Streams invaluable for my use cases because they simplify real-time data processing and ETL tasks by providing reliable, pre-packaged connectors and to...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?
They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.
What needs improvement with Confluent?
I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team. The lack of easy access to the Confluent support team is also a...
What do you like most about Built.io Flow?
The tool helps us to streamline data integration. Its BPM is very strong and powerful. The solution helps us manage digital transformation.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Built.io Flow?
webMethods.io is expensive. We have multiple components, and you need to pay for each of them.
What needs improvement with Built.io Flow?
webMethods.io needs to incorporate ChatGPT to enhance user experience. It can offer a customized user experience.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Built.io Flow, webMethods Integration Server, webMethods Trading Networks, webMethods ActiveTransfer, webMethods.io API
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Cisco, Agralogics, Dreamforce, Cables & Sensors, Sacramento Kings
Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. webMethods.io and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
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