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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 (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 6.4%, 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 (%)
Confluent6.4%
Databricks7.5%
Apache Flink7.5%
Other78.6%
Streaming Analytics
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
WhereScape RED1.3%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)3.8%
SSIS3.7%
Other91.2%
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

"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"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 tools."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"Having used SharePoint in the past, when I compare with traditional, old document repositories, like SharePoint, I would definitely recommend Confluent."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"Naturally produces a way to easily debug your DW data solutions."
"Quickly develops a data warehouse for our organization with documentation and can track back/forward features."
"Data transformations and rollups are easy to accomplish."
"I found the initial setup very easy."
"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."
"Speed to market of a warehouse solution at a relatively inexpensive price point."
"The tool supports multiple target update methods."
"I like the data vault implementations."
 

Cons

"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."
"The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."
"Confluent has fallen behind in being the tool of the industry. It's taking second place to things such as Word and SharePoint and other office tools that are more dynamic and flexible than Confluent."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"The Schema Registry service could be improved. I would like a bigger knowledge base of other use cases and more technical forums. It would be good to have more flexible monitoring features added to the next release as well."
"Currently, in the early stages, I see a gap on the security side. If you are using the SaaS version, we would like to get a fuller, more secure solution that can be adopted right out of the box. Confluence could do a better job sharing best practices or a reusable pattern that others have used, especially for companies that can not afford to hire professional services from Confluent."
"I don't think the solution is very stable. Even though I like this tool numerous bugs made it difficult and unreliable."
"Technical support isn't the best."
"Technical support isn't the best. They seem to be more money-oriented than customer-oriented. We found that after the purchase, assistance and support really dropped off."
"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."
"They need a more robust support center. It has been a bit difficult to find solutions to problems that are out-of-the-box."
"I would love to see a GUI interface for defining dependencies between build processes."
"Improve the object renaming ability (it works, but it could be more automated)."
"No support for change data capture or delta detection - that must be custom coded ."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"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 expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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."
"ROI is at least 10 times."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
11%
Insurance Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Construction 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: July 2026.
907,768 professionals have used our research since 2012.