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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 (6th)
WhereScape RED
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (42nd)
 

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 8.2% 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 Flink8.9%
Databricks8.1%
Other76.4%
Streaming Analytics
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
WhereScape RED1.3%
SSIS3.7%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)3.6%
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

"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"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 most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided; they're leading the market in this category."
"To date, we have seen improvements in performance and scalability, so we recommend this solution."
"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"The most valuable feature is the metadata generated code and data structures and that it is a fully integrated environment."
"Speed to market of a warehouse solution at a relatively inexpensive price point."
"Two months into the project we are currently 50% under budget due to how quickly it's possible to develop large-scale solutions in WhereScape."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the metadata generated code."
"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."
"Embedding of standards and design patterns into the tool yields substantial quality and consistency gains."
"The tool supports multiple target update methods."
 

Cons

"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"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."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"The beginner who doesn't know how to work on HTML will struggle as when you create spaces in the Confluent, if you want to have some meeting notes or anything else, you need to know HTML and which HTML tags to include."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"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."
"No support for change data capture or delta detection - that must be custom coded ."
"Technical support isn't the best."
"Customization could be better."
"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."
"Jobs cannot be deleted via the deployment package. When deploying from dev to QA or production, a job has to be retired."
"Project-based searching of data objects in the data warehouse browser needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"Our company purchased a corporate unlimited license."
"Factor in the price of specialized consulting who know this product. They're hard to find and expensive."
"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
16%
Retailer
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Healthcare Company
10%
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 Enterprise16
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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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 Confluent vs. WhereScape RED and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.