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AWS Glue vs Confluent comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

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

AWS Glue
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (1st)
Confluent
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (4th)
 

Featured Reviews

Saurabh Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables seamless integration and data preparation with robust transformation capabilities
AWS Glue's most valuable features include its transformation capabilities, which provide data quality and shape for processing in ML or AI models. It offers transformation options on canvas or through ETL pipelines, notebooks, and code. Additionally, it supports data preparation, cleaning, and filtering seamlessly. AWS Glue also enhances job scheduling and orchestration capabilities, integrating with AWS Glue Studio for comprehensive data workflow management.
Gustavo-Barbosa Dos Santos - PeerSpot reviewer
Has good technical support services and a valuable feature for real-time data streaming
Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance. It helps us understand the various requirements of multiple customers and validates the information for different versions. We can automate the tasks using Confluent Kafka. Thus, it guarantees us the data quality and maintains the integrity of message contracts.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"AWS Glue's best features are scalability and cloud-based features."
"The facility to integrate with S3 and the possibility to use Jupyter Notebook inside the pipeline are the most valuable features."
"AWS Glue is fast and managed by AWS. Hence, you don't have to worry about capacity and the performance of Glue jobs. It has integrations with other data stores of AWS. The product offers metadata management, logging, and ETL processing capabilities. It comes with a powerful feature, Glue Studio, which helps to do queries interactively within the community. It is a managed service and very secure. Another popular and mature service is S3."
"The most valuable feature for me is the visual interface of AWS Glue."
"For ETL, I feel the performance is excellent."
"It is a stable and scalable solution."
"The most valuable feature of AWS Glue is scalability."
"It's very good to manage."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"The monitoring module is impressive."
"It is also good for knowledge base management."
"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"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."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
 

Cons

"Cost-wise, AWS Glue is expensive, so that's an area for improvement. The process for setting up the solution was also complex, which is another area for improvement."
"I haven't looked into Glue in terms of seeking out flaws. I've not come across missing features."
"Currently, it supports only two languages in the background: Python and Scala. From our customization point of view, it would be helpful if it can also support Java in the background."
"The product is expensive for data streaming. This area needs improvement."
"It fails to handle massive databases acquired from various sources."
"In the building and deployment aspects, there is room for improvement. The current process is a bit complicated and could benefit from being more user-friendly and simpler, which would help speed up the deployment process."
"The drawbacks associated with the product stem from the fact that, based on the data volume, it can become very costly."
"AWS Glue's error handling is difficult."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"Confluent's price needs improvement."
"It would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"there is room for improvement in the visualization."
"The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Glue is quite costly, especially for small organizations."
"It is an expensive product. I rate its pricing a nine out of ten."
"I rate the tool's pricing a four out of ten."
"AWS Glue follows a pay-as-you-go model, wherein the cost of the data you use will be counted as a monthly bill."
"The current cost is around forty to fifty thousand a month."
"This solution is affordable and there is an option to pay for the solution based on your usage."
"AWS Glue is a paid service that doesn't come under the free trial of AWS."
"The overall cost of AWS Glue could be better. It cost approximately $1,000 a month. There is paid support available from AWS Glue."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Regarding pricing, I think Confluent is a premium product, but it's hard for me to say definitively if it's overly expensive. We're still trying to understand if the features and reduced maintenance complexity justify the cost, especially as we scale our platform use."
"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."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Insurance Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How do you select the right cloud ETL tool?
AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.
How does Talend Open Studio compare with AWS Glue?
We reviewed AWS Glue before choosing Talend Open Studio. AWS Glue is the managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) from Amazon Web Services. AWS Glue enables AWS users to create and manage jobs in...
What are the most common use cases for AWS Glue?
AWS Glue's main use case is for allowing users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. The product lets you use this data for analytics, application development, or ma...
What do you like most about Confluent?
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 to...
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 am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team. The lack of easy access to the Confluent support team is also a...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Glue vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,155 professionals have used our research since 2012.