Confluent Reviews

I use Confluent for real-time data processing and ETL tasks.

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.

Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs, as well as enhancing the offset management tool for easier management of offset topics, reprocessing, and message filtering based on predicates.

I would rate the stability of Confluent as a seven out of ten. There is room for improvement in the usefulness of logs and metrics.

I would rate the scalability of Confluent as an eight out of ten. Scalability issues primarily revolve around the challenge of setting up multi-cloud environments, suggesting a need for better replication capabilities between cloud and self-hosted test environments to ease deployment.

We previously used MSK and RabbitMQ. We switched to Confluent because it offers a comprehensive messaging infrastructure solution, including queue functionality, which aligns better with our needs.

I would rate the easiness of the initial setup as a seven out of ten. During the initial setup process, we encountered difficulties with configuring brokers within the same cluster using Terraform, especially for connector configuration, and faced challenges in ensuring proper setup to avoid rebalancing issues.

Our deployment process involved using Jenkins for deploying services, Terraform for resource provisioning, Kubernetes for deploying services and workers, and a dedicated DevOps team managed the deployment, although it is challenging to pinpoint the exact number of people involved specifically for Confluent deployment.

We have seen a 100% return on investment from using Confluent.

I would rate the pricing of Confluent as average, around a five out of ten. Additional costs could include features like multi-tenancy support and native encryption with custom algorithms, which would be beneficial but not currently included in the fixed price.

We use Confluent for real-time data analytics by capturing user activity to build dashboards and implement rate-limiting and pricing strategies for our services.

Confluent improved our data integration process by optimizing bandwidth utilization and reducing latency by threefold through its schema registration error format, enhancing schema security, and ensuring positive impacts on our data processing capabilities.

Confluent's reliability and uptime have been good for us, as it complements our existing fault tolerance mechanisms and offers multi-version support, enhancing our overall data processing capabilities.

The CDC capability with the IBM connector was the most valuable feature for our data streaming needs, serving as a game changer in our data processing workflows.

I highly recommend considering Confluent for its comprehensive set of solutions, particularly when compared to other tools like Spark or Flink. Understanding Kafka's basic constructs and message processing is essential before installation to ensure effective utilization and a clean design for implementation.

Overall, I would rate Confluent as an eight out of ten.

We primarily use Confluent for service desk and task management. It is also good for knowledge base management.

The solution could have an extra plugin or upgrading feature. In addition, it could have more integration with different platforms and be more compatible.

We have been using this solution for six years, and it is on-site.

It is scalable, and we haven't had any problems so far. We have about 50 users using Confluent in our company. We do not plan to increase usage at this time.

We've had issues in the past and used technical support to resolve them.

We have used Redmine.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten, and I would recommend it to others. We are an open-source organization.

Our use cases include data streaming, enterprise architecture, integrations, and complete data saving needs, some AI workloads, and standardization. We work on all of these.

The biggest benefit is that it is open source. You have the flexibility of opting or not opting for enterprise support, even though the tool itself is open source. 

The second benefit is it's very modern and built on Java and Scala. You can extend the features very well, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to do so.

Then the performance and community support, which we get while we do any POT, proof of theory work. The community support we receive is also really good.

The knowledge base on the Confluent website is also a good benefit. 

In terms of the valuable features, first would be scalability, then open source. You can use it for POCs, and if you are going to production with this technology, then you can opt for platinum support. The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable.

Whether you have a custom use case or out-of-the-box implementation, you can configure it according to your needs. The tool is very flexible, so you can configure it according to your use case and it's easy to administer. Because it's open-source, you're transparent as well. Nothing is a black box when you are working with Confluent.

You can extract and look at the code of what's happening. You can customize the code also because it's open source. I find all these features very interesting and appealing.

It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well. If Confluent would publish the knowledge base, best practices, proper documentation; that would be helpful for folks who do not have support lines or are just assessing whether they can fit Confluent into their use case.

I have been working with Confluent for more than four years.

Confluent is a reliable product.

I have been working on Confluent with two companies and around ten people. We use it on a daily basis. It's basically a vertical and it integrates all the sources.

We use the solution on-premise with enterprise support. This is an open-source technology and the setup I was working on was on-premise. There are various features of the platinum enterprise support with Confluent.

We can go to them for knowledge modules and best practices. We can reach out to Confluent regarding any product which is currently active or if we identify a bug in any product. We reach out with a support request. I'm satisfied with the support.

While I was using Confluent, I worked on use cases involving other traditional message use and conventional streaming platforms. The Confluent platform actually outlines everything, so it's a great product in this field.

The implementation is somewhere in between simple to moderate. It depends on the use cases, but it is not a very difficult tool to handle. If you have a team of IT professionals then it takes less time to scale to Confluent. The setup is rather simple and the architecture is microservices-based.

A team of three to five people would easily implement. Again, I'm talking about designing and a POC implementation. So whenever you move to production or scalability, you just have to replicate the configurations.

For a general mini architecture, you can deploy very easily with three to five people.

The timeframe to implement depends on the complexity of the use cases. Sometimes it takes a month or two; sometimes it can take a week or two. 

You have to pay additional for one or two features. The monitoring simple solution call conference control center and Confluent replica for disaster recovery. You have to pay for these two use components, but it is included in the support package.

The solution requires a support team. A minimum of two people are required to administer and handle the support activities in the event of outage. So any service will need, so Confluent is not no different in that perspective.

The support is very good and it's open source. Companies can easily pre-assess whether it fits their needs. They can even do performance benchmarking. 

I would give the solution a nine out of ten.

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.

Confluent is an amazing tool. It gives you the ability to basically create nice documentation for various products. It is highly configurable and integrates very well with Jira. You can use it for reporting as well. When it comes to hosting online content, it is in competition with SharePoint.

It could have more themes. The themes in the version I'm using are very limited; they offer two to three themes. 

They should have more reporting-oriented plugins as well. It would be great to have free custom reports that can be dispatched directly from Jira.

I have been using Confluent for 15 years. 

Confluent is scalable. 

Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site. Whenever we have a query for them, they got back to us in time and with the information that we needed. 

I think the documentation that Atlassian provides has all the information you need to carry out the installation. The installation is very straightforward; I didn't come up against any challenges. 

I think Confluent's pricing is very competitive compared to other products on the market. This is especially considering its configurability and extensibility.

I would recommend this product. 

We are using Confluent for documentation. We use it to have documentation for the Agile team, as a reference or to share it with the stakeholders. It holds the project data, and what's happening right now. 

At a higher level, the business initiative and all things related to tracking high-level, enterprise-level tasks is something we are not doing it right now. We are doing that part in a very traditional way using Excel sheets, which is very manual work. We haven't automated it yet. 

A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent.

The solution is stable. 

The scalability is good.

The solution offers good dashboards for the team they are easy to navigate and you can install them on your desktop or the local machine.

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. In my earlier organization, people used to struggle in adding the HTML tags to the Confluent. However, if a person is from an IT background, and he or she knows how to add the tags and browse product documentation, for them it is easy. A new user must go through the few training sessions for Confluent.

In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options. I remember in my previous company, I had an issue in adding a query where I could pull down information from Jira. The product, the team productivity, the team timesheets, et cetera. A few of those plugins must be more advanced in Confluent.

The plugin options need to be improved. I don't know whether we have something in Confluent where we can have a plugin for support teams. If not, that would be ideal.

I've been using the solution for about six years or so.

The stability is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The product can scale. However, the person must be used to that tool. It depends on how quickly the user can pick up working on that.

We likely have as many as 300 people using the solution.

I'm not sure if the organization intends to increase usage in the future.

I don't directly deal with technical support. That's all handled by our backend team, and therefore I leave it to them. Without any direct experience, I can't speak to how knowledgeable or responsive they are. 

I've used other project management-related products and document repository kinds of products like SharePoint or Microsoft Project.

Having used SharePoint in the past, when I compare with traditional, old document repositories, like SharePoint, I would definitely recommend Confluent. Confluent have many options compared to SharePoint.

In terms of the installation, for us, we have an Agile admin person that handled the setup. I wasn't a part of the process. I can't directly speak to the experience. I remember creating the project, however, I did not do the deployment part. 

I'm not sure how many people you need to handle the deployment. It might be four or five individuals.

I don't directly handle the licensing. My license is given to me. Therefore, I don't know the terms of the licensing or the exact costs.

We're customers and end-users.

The end products we have are Jira, Confluent, Bitbucket as well as Dynatrace. I'm not sure which plugins we use. Confluent we are using just for the documentation. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's been very handy for me and the team.