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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

"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."
"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."
"Having used SharePoint in the past, when I compare with traditional, old document repositories, like SharePoint, I would definitely recommend Confluent."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"Confluent is an amazing tool that is highly configurable, integrates very well with Jira, and lets you create nice documentation for various products while also supporting reporting and online content hosting."
"To date, we have seen improvements in performance and scalability, so we recommend this solution."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"Naturally produces a way to easily debug your DW data solutions."
"WhereScape's deployment package is a fantastic feature. The application allows for selecting specific objects that you would like to deploy from one environment to another rather than deploying the entire database."
"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."
"This is a fantastically robust DW tool that will make you at least 10 times faster in producing a DW."
"The most valuable feature is the metadata generated code and data structures and that it is a fully integrated environment."
"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."
"Support is absolutely excellent, efficient, and timely."
"It has a built-in automatic scheduling environment."
 

Cons

"It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"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."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"It could use a tool to diagnose what is missing from the environment for WhereScape to install successfully."
"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."
"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."
"The ability to execute SSIS projects within WhereScape would be nice because we have a lot of packages that are too cumbersome to recreate."
"Improve the object renaming ability (it works, but it could be more automated)."
"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."
"The solution can be a little more user-friendly on enterprise-level where people use it."
"The only other thing I would note is that the IDE isn’t as intuitive as I would like."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is highly priced."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"It comes with a high cost."
"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 an expensive solution."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"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."
"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."
"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
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.
912,517 professionals have used our research since 2012.