We compared Confluent and Amazon Kinesis based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
Based on user reviews, Confluent is praised for its efficient handling of vast amounts of data, seamless integration with various systems, and strong customer support. In contrast, Amazon Kinesis is commended for its real-time data processing capabilities, flexibility in integration with other AWS services, and user-friendly pricing and licensing. Confluent users highlight the need for improved UI and setup simplification, while Amazon Kinesis users suggest better documentation, UI enhancements, and scalability improvements. Ultimately, both platforms have received positive ROI feedback, with users experiencing returns on their investments.
Features: Confluent's valuable features include efficient handling of vast amounts of data, seamless integration with external systems, and comprehensive monitoring and management capabilities. Amazon Kinesis, on the other hand, offers efficient real-time processing of high data volumes, flexible data streaming and processing options, easy integration with AWS services, and availability of various tools and APIs.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Confluent's product has mixed sentiments from users, with some finding it manageable but others finding it complex. In contrast, users have positive feedback about the minimal and straightforward setup cost of Amazon Kinesis product., Confluent's product has received positive feedback for its strong return on investment. On the other hand, Amazon Kinesis offers significant ROI through cost savings, improved data processing efficiency, real-time analytics capabilities, scalability, and elasticity.
Room for Improvement: Confluent can improve its user interface and setup process, as well as provide better documentation. On the other hand, Amazon Kinesis needs enhancements in documentation, user interface, scalability, integrations, error handling, pricing, and customer support.
Deployment and customer support: User feedback on Confluent's tech solution indicates varying durations for deployment, setup, and implementation phases. In contrast, user feedback on Amazon Kinesis shows different timeframes for deployment and setup, emphasizing the need to consider them together or separately., Confluent's customer service is highly regarded for prompt and efficient support, while Amazon Kinesis is praised for outstanding assistance and representatives going above and beyond to address issues.
The summary above is based on 18 interviews we conducted recently with Confluent and Amazon Kinesis users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Kinesis is a fully managed program streaming application. You can manage any infrastructure. It is also scalable. Kinesis can handle any amount of data streaming and process data from hundreds, thousands of processes in every source with very low latency."
"The feature that I've found most valuable is the replay. That is one of the most valuable in our business. We are business-to-business so replay was an important feature - being able to replay for 24 hours. That's an important feature."
"Great auto-scaling, auto-sharing, and auto-correction features."
"The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things."
"What I like about Amazon Kinesis is that it's very effective for small businesses. It's a well-managed solution with excellent reporting. Amazon Kinesis is also easy to use, and even a novice developer can work with it, versus Apache Kafka, which requires expertise."
"The management and analytics are valuable features."
"I find almost all features valuable, especially the timing and fast pace movement."
"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"It is also good for knowledge base management."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"The monitoring module is impressive."
"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."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"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."
"I think the default settings are far too low."
"The price is not much cheaper. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing."
"Something else to mention is that we use Kinesis with Lambda a lot and the fact that you can only connect one Stream to one Lambda, I find is a limiting factor. I would definitely recommend to remove that constraint."
"Amazon Kinesis should improve its limits."
"The services which are described in the documentation could use some visual presentation because for someone who is new to the solution the documentation is not easy to follow or beginner friendly and can leave a person feeling helpless."
"I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services."
"It would be beneficial if Amazon Kinesis provided document based support on the internet to be able to read the data from the Kinesis site."
"If there were better documentation on optimal sharding strategies then it would be helpful."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"there is room for improvement in the visualization."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."
"Confluent's price needs improvement."
"There is a limitation when it comes to seamlessly importing Microsoft documents into Confluent pages, which can be inconvenient for users who frequently work with Microsoft Office tools and need to transition their content to Confluent."
"It would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
Amazon Kinesis is ranked 2nd in Streaming Analytics with 21 reviews while Confluent is ranked 3rd in Streaming Analytics with 19 reviews. Amazon Kinesis is rated 8.0, while Confluent is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Amazon Kinesis writes "Used for media streaming and live-streaming data". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Confluent writes "Has good technical support services and a valuable feature for real-time data streaming ". Amazon Kinesis is most compared with Azure Stream Analytics, Apache Flink, Amazon MSK, Google Cloud Dataflow and Apache Spark Streaming, whereas Confluent is most compared with Amazon MSK, Databricks, AWS Glue, Oracle GoldenGate and Aiven for Apache Kafka. See our Amazon Kinesis vs. Confluent report.
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