Confluent Reviews

Within our organization, Confluence serves as a versatile tool for managing internal human resources, overseeing processes, automating office tasks, publishing content, and handling a wide range of other tasks.

Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions.

Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud.

Having more control over the page layout in Confluence would be helpful, as it currently feels somewhat limited in terms of style. Additionally, we have experienced some issues with the solution's functionality, particularly with regard to document management and version control. Preferably having access to more pre-set business processes and style functions, rather than having to create everything from scratch each time we deploy. It's important to keep in mind that Confluence is not a traditional document management system but rather a wiki-style platform. As such, it can be too open for certain business processes and requires careful attention to prevent files and content from becoming disorganized.

I have been using Confluent for approximately one year.

There have been a few outages on the cloud version of the solution that lasted approximately 30 minutes.

The stability could improve.

The solution is scalable. We have some customers with approximately 70,000 users.

The setup of Confluence is straightforward and takes approximately five minutes.

By following a few straightforward steps, we were able to quickly implement the solution. We first created an account on Atlassian, registered for the solution, created a space, and that was all it took to get up and running.

The deployment does not need a lot of people. If we need to set up Active Directory and establish robust security and permission structures, the process may take a bit longer. However, despite this, the overall implementation process is still very fast.

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.

The key to success is to establish your business processes in advance and ensure that you have clear guidelines on what type of information to store and how to organize files within the system. Without such guidelines, the system can quickly become disorganized and unmanageable if left to the discretion of individual users.

I rate Confluence a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for wiki to share information with the spaces. For example, we have an idea that supports the developer team, so we create spaces to share the documentation. We have access to some data.

We're using the basic Confluent setup. The troubleshooting access control is an important feature. You can determine user access and the Jira integration.

More instructions should be included. It should guide the people to build the site in an easy way because when you ramp up conference spaces, people start making an effort with, domain providers. Easy project management tools could be added.

I have been using Confluent for three years.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

30 users are using this solution. We might increase the usage, but it depends on the cost.

I rate the solution’s scalability a six out of ten.

Deployment is instant. When you have to do it on the cloud, you just buy the license and it is ready to go.

I rate the initial setup a seven out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

The product is expensive.

I rate the product’s pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

Be careful while using Confluent. It's easy to get into a messy state in the IRR space if you try to do too much without thinking.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Since Confluent is integrated with Jira, we use it to keep our key documentation, including product development and LLD design documents. We also use Confluent to support or track the progress of the different work items spent or released.

One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira. Once you put the right URL, it gives you the live status, which is quite useful.

The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful.

I have been using Confluent for more than 10 years.

Confluent is quite a stable solution. The solution goes down very rarely when there is some maintenance activity on the Jira site.

Since Confluent is on the cloud, it's very scalable. Approximately more than 200 users are using Confluent in our company.

We use Confluent's technical support whenever it is down, and their technical support is quite good.

Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis. The solution's cost should be reduced for a small or mid-segment company.

Confluent is deployed on-cloud in our organization.

Once you are in product development and want to use it in integration with Jira, Confluent is very, very useful.

Overall, I rate Confluent a nine out of ten.

Our company has a wide portfolio of use cases in which we recently changed the entire landscape. We use Confluent to share useable dat across all portfolios through a central place.

We use dedicated clusters with four CKs. On standard clusters we are using just the standard configurations that comes out of the box in Confluent Cloud.

With Confluent Cloud we no longer need to handle the infrastructure and the plumbing, which is a concern for Confluent. The other advantage is that all portfolios have access to the data that is being shared.

We are still in the discovery phase. Currently, it's the introduction and acceptance phase for all the portfolios and helping them adopt the platform. Portfolios are using different features, some are using Publish-Subscribe to log events, some like the features that are similar to Kafka, while others are using ksqlDB or trying the adoption of Schema Registries. 

So far we value the professional service support and the full management side of things like support with infrastructure issues.

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.

Another area of improvement is on the metric side. The metrics are integrated within the documentation of the metrics and implementation of that metric. This ties back to the requirement of best practices. How to use metrics in the best possible way out of the box.

If you are using Confluent on-prem or cloud-based where you are packaging it within your own cloud infrastructure, there is a lot of documentation for that making it easier. However, if you are using only the SaaS platform, there is less support from Confluent Cloud.

We are still understanding the additional features but we have seen a gap in the features of the fully managed connector. They are lesser fully managed connectors that are relevant to our business requirements so we have requested those fully managed connectors be developed and released within the Confluent Hub portfolio of connectors.

Confluence requires documentation regarding how to manage connectors that are not fully managed, including what parameters are required for each processing connector. The documentation that is provided is not easy to understand.

I have been using Confluent for six months.

The portfolios that we have onboarded onto Confluent Cloud have been performing well. They are stable without any issues.

Confluent is fairly easy to scale. 

We are using a fully managed solution. Confluent Cloud has an uptime SLA of 99.95 broad for dedicated services, dedicated clusters, and standard clusters that we are using on the cloud. It's the support that we use for the fully managed Confluent Cloud so no maintenance is required. Customer service and support have been perfect.

We recently changed our entire landscape. In the past, every team had its own Kafka instance. Data was siloed and being used by each portfolio differently and not shared across portfolios. We wanted to find a way to share reusable data and make data sharing by default so that it was used across all portfolios and could be leveraged through a central place. We wanted to move away from a self-managed Kafka system and make it fully managed. That's why we started looking at Confluent Cloud.

We are not using the Confluent Platform. How we deploy is by onboarding people to connect to the Confluent Cloud, it's just a networking connection into the Confluent Cloud cluster, not a deployment pipeline.

From a costing perspective, there are costing implications. If you go the cloud route, as you scale there will be cost implications on a per hour basis. Confluent Cloud is more expensive, be mindful of that.

The main point to understand is that Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud are two different offerings. Confluent Platform requires you to self-manage or manage the Confluent Platform within your cloud environment, rather than Confluent Cloud which uses your applications that are deployed in your cloud to connect to Confluent Cloud.

When you decided to get into Confluent, have clarity on which route you want to go at the outset. Secondly, if you choose Confluent Cloud which is the SaaS platform, have your implementation plan mapped out before you go ahead. Lastly, have your naming conventions, implementation, and securing your topics, your service account or ACLs are all mapped out well.

Support is a 10 out of 10, but overall I would rate Confluent a 7 out of 10.

We collect service log data with Confluent and use it for fraud detection in game services.

We are a game service company, and Confluent has helped us improve our quality of service.

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.

I've been using Confluent for about two years.

For stability, I would give this solution a rating of seven out of ten.

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.

I would rate the solution's technical support at seven out of ten.

Neutral

On a scale from to ten, where one is difficult to set up and ten is easy to set up, I would rate this solution's initial setup at six. It was quite difficult.

The deployment took about a week. We had a team of four people for the deployment. A team of two handle the maintenance.

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.

We evaluated Kinesis and MSK, but chose Confluent because we wanted to use its RBAC feature. Also, the other solutions did not have a feature to clear storage.

I would recommend Confluent as an alternative to those who are unfamiliar with Kafka. Overall, I would rate Confluent at eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is processing vast chunks of data in real-time. We deploy the solution on cloud.

The processing is better, and the connectors feel better than other solutions we have used. Additionally, the solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well.

This solution is different from other products we have used. It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages. When we moved to this solution, we noticed that failed messages do not automatically go into Dead Letter Queue (DLQ), which we had when we used Azure. We want something similar to be included in Confluent Kafka.

The Azure Service Bus background should be improved where the message processing and messages fail and automatically go into a DLQ. In Confluent Kafka, there is no concept of DLQ, so if any messages fail, you have to handle it on your end and push it to another topic. But in Azure Service Bus, it happens automatically if any message delivery fails. It puts it in a DLQ. We didn't bother about anything on the code front, but with Confluent Kafka, there is no concept of DLQ, and you have to manage when a message fails to deliver. We have to push it to another topic manually. This should have been on the Confluent Kafka, and if anything fails, it should automatically move the message to another topic that has been created. Still, we have to do this using our code explicitly.

We have been using the solution for approximately six months.

The solution is stable. In our limited experience, we haven't found anything that would highlight that it's not stable.

I wasn't part of the initial setup.

We need visibility on the licensing costs.

When evaluating the use case compared to the Service Bus architecture we previously used, the performance is better and more tolerant than a competitive system. Hence, because of our data volume, it can handle high-volume data, and its performance is better than other systems.

I rate the solution nine out of ten. The solution is good, but it can be improved by including a feature that stores failed messages. I recommend this solution to new users because we went through different tech analyses and then adopted this solution. To date, we have seen improvements in performance and scalability, so we recommend this solution.

I use the tool to create documentation that needs particular specifications.

The documentation process is fast with the tool.

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.

I have been working with the tool for three years.

The tool is stable.

The solution is scalable. My company has more than 25,000 users of the tool.

The tool’s initial setup is complicated.

I would rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. Confluent is a great tool for business analysts and project managers.

We are using Confluent for the basic use cases of messaging. For example, creating a topic and posting the events on the topic.

The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category.

I have used Confluent within the last 12 months.

Confluent is a stable solution.

The scalability of Confluent is good.

We have four to five developers using the solution. Depending on our testing we might increase the usage of the solution.

Confluent has different levels of support.

I rate the support from Confluent a four out of five.

The initial setup of Confluent is straightforward.

We used a third-party CICD platform to do the implementation of Confluent. The solution only requires one person for maintenance. 

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. 

The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only.

The price of the solution is based on the capability and input and output of topics received.

We were trying to evaluate Confluent, MSK, and Kafka for our purpose. We did a POC for all three and since we had a classic use case, we went with MSK. Confluent has the widest range of features out of the three and Kafka requires more people for maintenance. We were not using all the features, which is why we went with MSK.

My advice to others is if you have extensive use cases of messaging, you should work with Confluent. However, if you only have a basic messaging use case in place, you can explore other options.

I rate Confluent a nine out of ten.