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Confluent vs WhereScape RED comparison

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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
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (7th)
WhereScape RED
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (44th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Confluent and WhereScape RED aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Confluent is designed for Streaming Analytics and holds a mindshare of 6.3%, down 8.4% compared to last year.
WhereScape RED, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.3% mindshare, up 1.0% since last year.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Confluent6.3%
Databricks7.4%
Apache Flink7.0%
Other79.3%
Streaming Analytics
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
WhereScape RED1.3%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)3.7%
SSIS3.6%
Other91.4%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

PavanManepalli - PeerSpot reviewer
AVP - Sr Middleware Messaging Integration Engineer at Wells Fargo
Has supported streaming use cases across data centers and simplifies fraud analytics with SQL-based processing
I recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools. They need to improve in that direction by not only reducing costs but also providing better solutions for the problems customers face to avoid frustrations, whether through future enhancement requests or ensuring product stability. The cost should be worked on, and they should provide better solutions for customers. Solutions should focus on hierarchical topics; if a customer has different types of data and sources, they should be able to send them to the same place for analytics. Currently, Confluent requires everything to send to the same topic, which becomes very large and makes running analytics difficult. The hierarchy of topics should be improved. This part is available in MQ and other products such as Solace, but it is missing in Confluent, leading many in capital markets and trading to switch to Solace. In terms of stability, it is not the stability itself that needs improvement but rather the delivery semantics. Other products offer exactly-once delivery out of the box, whereas Confluent states it will offer this but lacks the knobs or levers for tuning configurations effectively. Confluent has hundreds of configurations that application teams must understand, which creates a gap. Users are often unaware of what values to set for better performance or to achieve exactly-once semantics, making it difficult to navigate through them. Delivery semantics also need to be worked on.
reviewer1618884 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Analyst DW Architect at a mining and metals company with 10,001+ employees
Quick to set up, flexible, and stable
The scheduling part I don't like due to the fact that it allows you to schedule as a parent and child and other things, however, the error trackability has to be a little more user-friendly. It's also not user-friendly in the sense that it loads all the jobs and there are not enough filters so that it doesn't need to load everything. If the job fails, you don't get any type of alert or email. It would be ideal if there was some sort of automated alert message. Technical support isn't the best. It would be ideal if we understood how to do it in a card exception regarding exclusion, where the card is captured separately rather than filling the whole process on the data inbound side. Certain workloads like this are organized in such a way where you seem to be doubling the work as opposed to streamlining the process.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"The biggest benefit of Confluent as a tool is that it is a distributed platform that provides more durability and stability."
"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."
"We primarily use Confluent for service desk and task management, and it is also good for knowledge base management."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"This is a fantastically robust DW tool that will make you at least 10 times faster in producing a DW."
"Embedding of standards and design patterns into the tool yields substantial quality and consistency gains."
"We are now 2.5 years into using WhereScape and all warehouse code we have converted from our old tool to WhereScape has performed faster; anywhere from 20-80% reduction in processing time."
"During the POC myself and one WS resource were able to deliver a project in 3 days that had been in development by other resources for 6 months and still hadn't been delivered."
"ROI has been huge; we have a very large healthcare data warehouse and the amount of ETL code we have produced and continue to maintain would not be possible without a tool as cost effective as RED."
"WhereScape RED has improved our business's ability to generate needed reporting without requiring a large team of developers to manually code all of the necessary plumbing."
"It has allowed us to produce consistently created, well-documented, easy to maintain DW solutions for our clients."
"RED has provided us the ability to integrate, stage, and transform data from diverse sources into an enterprise-grade data warehouse which meets the needs of my organization, but it also enables us to easily and quickly make ETL or DW changes."
 

Cons

"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"There is a limitation when it comes to seamlessly importing Microsoft documents into Confluent pages, which can be inconvenient for users who frequently work with Microsoft Office tools and need to transition their content to Confluent."
"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."
"The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."
"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."
"As with any product, there are things that can be improved, but most are fairly minor, including things like greater flexibility in ordering job tasks."
"They need a more robust support center. It has been a bit difficult to find solutions to problems that are out-of-the-box."
"It could use a tool to diagnose what is missing from the environment for WhereScape to install successfully."
"I would love to see a GUI interface for defining dependencies between build processes."
"Project-based searching of data objects in the data warehouse browser needs to be improved."
"No support for change data capture or delta detection - that must be custom coded ."
"Data discovery would be more powerful with machine learning features."
"The scheduled jobs which are run by the WhereScape scheduler seem to be a strangely separate animal. Unlike all other WhereScape objects, jobs cannot be added to WhereScape projects. Also, unlike all other objects, jobs also cannot be deleted using a WhereScape deployment application."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"Factor in the price of specialized consulting who know this product. They're hard to find and expensive."
"Our company purchased a corporate unlimited license."
"Speed to market of a warehouse solution at a relatively inexpensive price point."
"ROI is at least 10 times."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Retailer
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
Healthcare Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

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 recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about ...
What is your primary use case for Confluent?
The main use cases for Confluent are log aggregation and streaming. I'm familiar with Confluent stream processing with KSQL. KSQL helps in terms of data analytics strategies because if we are the d...
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
British American Tobacco, Cornell University, Allianz Benelux, Finnair, Solarwinds and many more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Microsoft, Apache and others in Streaming Analytics. Updated: August 2026.
912,006 professionals have used our research since 2012.