Confluent and Amazon MSK compete in the Kafka streaming platforms category. Confluent holds an advantage in pricing and customer support, yet Amazon MSK has a stronger feature set that could justify its cost.
Features: Confluent provides robust enterprise-level tools, advanced stream processing, and seamless scalability. Amazon MSK offers seamless AWS ecosystem integration, managed Kafka services, and enhanced resource management. Confluent’s proprietary add-ons are a key differentiator, while Amazon MSK’s AWS integration is beneficial for AWS users.
Room for Improvement: Confluent could enhance feature set breadth, integration options with non-Kafka systems, and offer more flexible pricing tiers. Amazon MSK could improve its standalone ease of use, customer support specific to Kafka, and expand on customization options.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Confluent offers easy deployment with dedicated customer support ideal for enterprise environments. Amazon MSK integrates within AWS, easing deployment for AWS-savvy users while benefiting from AWS's extensive support network.
Pricing and ROI: Confluent presents an upfront pricing model, potentially higher at first but offering long-term ROI through unique features. Amazon MSK uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model, reducing initial costs and leveraging AWS optimization tools for effective cost management.
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is a fully managed service that enables you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. Amazon MSK provides the control-plane operations, such as those for creating, updating, and deleting clusters.
Confluent is an enterprise-ready, full-scale streaming platform that enhances Apache Kafka.
Confluent has integrated cutting-edge features that are designed to enhance these tasks:
Confluent is a more complete distribution of Kafka in that it enhances the integration possibilities of Kafka by introducing tools for managing and optimizing Kafka clusters while providing methods for making sure the streams are secure. Confluent supports publish-and-subscribe as well as the storing and processing of data within the streams. Kafka is easier to operate and build thanks to Confluent.
Confluent's software is available in three different varieties:
Confluent Advantage Features
Confluent has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
Reviews from Real Users
Confluent stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its robust enterprise support and its open source option. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:
Ravi B., a solutions architect at a tech services company, writes of the solution, “KSQL is a valuable feature, as is the Kafka Connect framework for connecting to the various source systems where you need not write the code. We get great support from Confluent because we're using the enterprise version and whenever there's a problem, they support us with fine-tuning and finding the root cause.”
Amit S., an IT consultant, notes, “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.” He adds, “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.”
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