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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 (5th)
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 6.5%, down 8.6% compared to last year.
WhereScape RED, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.2% mindshare, up 1.0% since last year.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Confluent6.5%
Apache Flink9.8%
Databricks8.2%
Other75.5%
Streaming Analytics
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
WhereScape RED1.2%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)3.5%
SSIS3.5%
Other91.8%
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 monitoring module is impressive."
"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"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."
"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"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."
"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"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."
"RED generates comprehensive documentation and regenerates it as quickly as things changes, but it also provides impact documentation."
"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."
"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."
"It has a built-in automatic scheduling environment."
"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."
"This is a fantastically robust DW tool that will make you at least 10 times faster in producing a DW."
 

Cons

"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"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."
"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."
"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 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 scheduled jobs which are run by the WhereScape scheduler seem to be a strangely separate animal."
"Data discovery would be more powerful with machine learning features."
"The only other thing I would note is that the IDE isn’t as intuitive as I would like."
"They need a more robust support center. It has been a bit difficult to find solutions to problems that are out-of-the-box."
"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."
"Unfortunately this tool's basic architecture has severe flaws which make it likely impractical for most real world marts or data warehouses."
"Improve the object renaming ability (it works, but it could be more automated)."
"The solution can be a little more user-friendly on enterprise-level where people use it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

 

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 Confluent vs. WhereScape RED and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
891,869 professionals have used our research since 2012.