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Confluent vs WhereScape RED 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
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (9th)
WhereScape RED
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (43rd)
 

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 6.6%, down 8.3% compared to last year.
WhereScape RED, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.3% mindshare, up 1.1% since last year.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Confluent6.6%
Apache Flink8.2%
Databricks7.9%
Other77.3%
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

"Some of the best features are that it's very quick to set up, very easy to have a centralized area that gives us a history of changes, and the ability to give feedback on any information placed onto the pages."
"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."
"The biggest benefit of Confluent as a tool is that it is a distributed platform that provides more durability and stability."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"The most valuable feature that we are using is the data replication between the data centers allowing us to configure a disaster recovery or software. However, is it's not mandatory to use and because most of the features that we use are from Apache Kafka, such as end-to-end encryption. Internally, we can develop our own kind of product or service from Apache Kafka."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."
"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."
"I would not hesitate to say that if someone has really limited time for a project it can make a difference and you can have the data ready for use in a very short period of time."
"Naturally produces a way to easily debug your DW data solutions."
"Embedding of standards and design patterns into the tool yields substantial quality and consistency gains."
"The product takes on much of the painful, time-consuming, manual and repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on meeting business requirements."
"It has a built-in automatic scheduling environment."
"This is a fantastically robust DW tool that will make you at least 10 times faster in producing a DW."
"Support is absolutely excellent, efficient, and timely."
 

Cons

"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"The product should integrate tools for incorporating diagrams like Lucidchart. It also needs to improve its formatting features. We also faced issues while granting permissions."
"It could have more themes. The themes in the version I'm using are very limited; they offer two to three themes."
"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."
"The solution could have an extra plugin or upgrading feature. In addition, it could have more integration with different platforms and be more compatible."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"Technical support isn't the best."
"They need a more robust support center. It has been a bit difficult to find solutions to problems that are out-of-the-box."
"Unfortunately this tool's basic architecture has severe flaws which make it likely impractical for most real world marts or data warehouses."
"There are some newer features that haven't been included in the training materials yet so they're a little outdated (although the help documentation is very good)."
"I would love to see a GUI interface for defining dependencies between build processes."
"The solution can be a little more user-friendly on enterprise-level where people use it."
"Customization could be better. When you need to modify or write some custom code, it can get a little messy."
"Jobs cannot be deleted via the deployment package. When deploying from dev to QA or production, a job has to be retired. The job has to be manually removed from the target environment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"Our company purchased a corporate unlimited license."
"Speed to market of a warehouse solution at a relatively inexpensive price point."
"Factor in the price of specialized consulting who know this product. They're hard to find and expensive."
"ROI is at least 10 times."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Retailer
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
11%
Insurance Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

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: June 2026.
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