AWS Glue vs Confluent comparison

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AWS Glue

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Confluent and AWS Glue compete in data integration and processing. AWS Glue has an edge due to its comprehensive features despite Confluent's favorable pricing and support.

Features: Confluent supports seamless real-time data streaming, a wide range of multi-cloud deployment options, and integration with diverse data sources. AWS Glue provides robust ETL processes, a comprehensive data catalog, and serverless operations, making it effective for big data tasks.

Room for Improvement: Confluent could enhance its infrastructure management to simplify deployments, optimize costs for broader functionality, and expand its real-time analytics capabilities. AWS Glue might benefit from improving the flexibility of its ETL configurations, enriching documentation for advanced integrations, and optimizing costs for smaller-scale operations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS Glue leverages Amazon's cloud infrastructure, providing an easy serverless model and strong support for problem resolution. Confluent offers robust deployment capabilities but requires more infrastructure management from clients. Confluent's customer support and documentation receive positive feedback, providing a reliable service experience.

Pricing and ROI: Confluent's flexible pricing suits data streaming organizations, offering strong ROI for such businesses. AWS Glue's scalable pricing justifies higher upfront costs with its extensive range of features, appealing for long-term data processing needs.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Glue vs. Confluent Report (Updated: April 2025).

AWS Glue vs. Confluent

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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

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Data Integration (1st)

Confluent

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (4th)

Featured Reviews

Muthuvel Sivaraman

AVP at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Handles a huge volume of data and is serverless, but it can be considered costly by some users

We use Amazon's services to provide technical support for the product. If you want to have support, Oracle and others offer a single support, and other tools have a direct support window. For Amazon, we need to pay 10 percent of my billing amount for the tool to get support services. Whether to raise a support ticket or not is an issue since ten percent is a huge amount. My company ends up using all the options without help from support. It is very difficult for any common man to understand why there is a need to pay ten percent for support. If I find an issue in the product, and I need to get support from AWS to fix it, then I need to pay ten percent of the tool's bill amount to Amazon. AWS is a very tricky tool because everything is evolving nowadays. AWS engineers are getting hired from other places, and even after that, if I am not getting any technical support, then things will be very nasty. There are some good engineers who help users outside the normal support cycle, but it doesn't meet their needs. I rate the technical support a four out of ten.

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Gustavo-Barbosa Dos Santos

Software Architect at C&A Brasil

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Glue is a NoSQL-based data ETL tool that has some advantages over IIS and ISAs."

"You do not need many frameworks to run Glue."

"The solution is serverless so it allows us to transform data while optimizing the cost and performance of Spark jobs."

"We no longer had to worry much about infrastructure management because AWS Glue is serverless, and Amazon takes care of the underlying infrastructure."

"The most valuable feature of AWS Glue is its ease of use and good documentation. Additionally, we can do all the transformations that we need."

"One aspect that I would like to highlight is the Glue Crawler, which we utilize when working with large datasets to ensure the schema updates seamlessly without requiring end-team knowledge."

"AWS Glue is quite better than other tools, but you have to learn it properly before you start using it."

"AWS Glue is a good solution for developers, they have the ability to write code in different languages and other software."

More AWS Glue pros

"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."

"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."

"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."

"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."

"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 ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."

"The benefit is escaping email communication. Sometimes people ignore emails or put them into spam, but with Confluence, everyone sees the same text at the same time."

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

More Confluent pros

Cons

"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 price of the solution could improve."

"The drawbacks associated with the product stem from the fact that, based on the data volume, it can become very costly."

"There is a learning curve to this tool."

"The solution's visual ETL tool is of no use for actual implementation."

"While working on AWS Glue, I could not find any training material for it."

"We face performance issues when using AWS Glue for data transformation and integration."

"It is quite clunky and code-heavy, which is my biggest problem."

More AWS Glue cons

"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."

"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."

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

"there is room for improvement in the visualization."

"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."

"One area we've identified that could be improved is the governance and access control to the Kafka topics. We've found some limitations, like a threshold of 10,000 rules per cluster, that make it challenging to manage access at scale if we have many different data sources."

"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."

More Confluent cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive product. I rate its pricing a nine 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 solution's pricing is based on DPUs so it is a good idea to optimize use or it can get expensive."

"I rate the tool an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is expensive."

"If you are using the solution for an enterprise business, it will be expensive."

"The current cost is around forty to fifty thousand a month."

"It is not expensive. AWS Glue works on the serverless architecture. We get charged for the time the server is up. For our use case, we have to use it once in a day, and it is not expensive for us."

"I rate the tool's pricing a four out of ten."

More AWS Glue pricing and cost advice

"It comes with a high cost."

"You have to pay additional for one or two features."

"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 expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."

"Confluent is highly priced."

"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."

"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."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

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...

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Product Reports

AWS Glue

Download AWS Glue product report

Download Confluent product report

Overview

AWS Glue is a serverless cloud data integration tool that facilitates the discovery, preparation, movement, and integration of data from multiple sources for machine learning (ML), analytics, and application development. The solution includes additional productivity and data ops tooling for running jobs, implementing business workflows, and authoring.

AWS Glue allows users to connect to more than 70 diverse data sources and manage data in a centralized data catalog. The solution facilitates visual creation, running, and monitoring of extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to load data into users' data lakes. This Amazon product seamlessly integrates with other native applications of the brand and allows users to search and query cataloged data using Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

The solution also utilizes application programming interface (API) operations to transform users' data, create runtime logs, store job logic, and create notifications for monitoring job runs. The console of AWS Glue connects all of these services into a managed application, facilitating the monitoring and operational processes. The solution also performs provisioning and management of the resources required to run users' workloads in order to minimize manual work time for organizations.

AWS Glue Features

AWS Glue groups its features into four categories - discover, prepare, integrate, and transform. Within those groups are the following features:

Automatic schema discovery: AWS Glue crawlers connect to the organization's source or target data source through a prioritized list of classifiers to determine the schema for users' data. This feature creates metadata in companies' AWS Glue Data Catalog.
Schemas for data stream management: The AWS Glue Schema Registry enables users to validate and control the evolution of streaming data through registered Apache Avro schemas for no additional charge.
Automatic scaling based on workload: This feature dynamically scales resources up and down based on workload. The feature controls job resources, removing them depending on how much the workload can be split up.
FindMatches: This feature is for machine learning-based data deduplication and cleansing, and works by finding records that are imperfect matches of each other to remove useless data copies.
Edit, debug, and test ETL code: This feature helps users who have chosen to interactively develop their ETL code by providing development endpoints for editing, debugging, and testing the code it generates for them.
AWS Glue DataBrew: An interactive, point-and-click visual interface for specialists to clean and normalize data without the need to write any code.
AWS Glue Interactive Sessions: This feature simplifies the development of data integration jobs by enabling data engineers to interactively prepare and explore data.
AWS Glue Studio Job Notebooks: This AWS Glue feature provides serverless notebooks with minimal setup, allowing developers to start working in a timely manner.
Complex ETL pipeline building: This feature allows the product to be invoked on a schedule, on demand, or based on an event, allowing users to start multiple jobs in parallel or specify dependencies to build complex ETL pipelines.
AWS Glue Studio: This AWS Glue feature allows users to visually transform data through a drag-and-drop interface. The product automatically generates the code for ETL processes for users' data.

AWS Glue Benefits

AWS Glue offers a wide range of benefits for its users. These benefits include:

Users of other AWS products can easily onboard with AWS Glue, as it is integrated across a wide range of the company's services.
The solution is serverless, which allows for a lower total cost of ownership.
AWS Glue offers more power for users, as it automates much of the effort in building, maintaining, and running ETL jobs.
The product allows customers to easily discover and search across all their AWS datasets through AWS Glue Data Catalog.
AWS Glue does not require additional payment for managing and enforcing schemas for data streams.
The solution facilitates the authority of scalable ETL jobs for beginners and non-coding experts through a drag-and-drop interface.

Reviews from Real Users

Mustapha A., a cloud data engineer at Jems Groupe, likes AWS Glue because it is a product that is great for serverless data transformations.

Liana I., CEO at Quark Technologies SRL, describes AWS Glue as a highly scalable, reliable, and beneficial pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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:

Speed up application development and connectivity
Enable transformations through stream processing
Streamline business operations at scale
Adhere to strict architectural standards

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:

A free, open-source streaming platform that makes it simple to start using real-time data streams
An enterprise-grade version of the product with more administrative, ops, and monitoring tools
A premium cloud-based version.

Confluent Advantage Features

Confluent has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Multi-language
- Clients: C++, Python, Go, and .NET
- REST proxy: Can connect to Kafka from any connected network device
- Admin REST APIs: RESTful interface for performing administrator operations

Pre-built ecosystem
- Connectors: More than 100 supported connectors, including S3, Elastic, HDFS, JDBC
- MQTT proxy: Gain access to Kafka from MQTT gateways and devices
- Schema registry: Centralized database to guarantee data compatibility

Streaming database
- ksqlDB: Materialized views and real-time stream processing

GUI management
- Control panel: GUI for scalable Kafka management and monitoring
- Health+: Smart alerts and cloud-based control centers

DevOps automation that is flexible
- Confluent for Kubernetes: Complete API to deploy on Kubernetes
- Automated Ansible deployment on non-containerized environments

Dynamic performance
- Self-balancing clusters: Automated partition re-balancing across brokers in the cluster
- Tiered storage: Older Kafka data offloading to object storage with transparent access

Security that is enterprise-grade
- Role-based access control: Granular user/group access authorization
- Audit logs that are structured: Logs of user actions kept in dedicated Kafka topics
- Secret protection: Sensitive information is encrypted

Global resilience
- Linking clusters: A real-time, highly reliable, and consistent bridge across on-premises and cloud environments
- Multiple-region clusters: Single Kafka cluster with automated client failover distributed across multiple data centers
- Replicator: Asynchronous replication that is based on the Kafka Connect framework

Support
- Round the clock enterprise support from Kafka experts

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.”

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost

AWS Glue vs. Confluent