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AWS Glue vs Confluent comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 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

"The solution is serverless so it allows us to transform data while optimizing the cost and performance of Spark jobs."
"It is AWS-integrated. There is end-to-end integration with the other AWS services. It is also user-friendly."
"The solution integrates well with other AWS products or services."
"I like its integration and ability to handle all data-related tasks."
"AWS Glue's best features are scalability and cloud-based features."
"The solution's technical support is good. Whenever we raise a use case where we face an issue in our company, we get a response from the solution's technical team."
"One of the best features of the solution is its ability to easily integrate with other AWS services."
"The two features I find most valuable in AWS Glue are its user interface and ease of use."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"It is also good for knowledge base management."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"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."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
 

Cons

"The solution's visual ETL tool is of no use for actual implementation."
"The price of the solution could improve."
"I have encountered challenges with multi-region support."
"The product is expensive for data streaming. This area needs improvement."
"There should be more connectors for different databases."
"The start-up time is really high right now. For instance, when you start up a new job, you have to wait for five or eight minutes before it starts. If the start-up time is reduced to one or two minutes, it will be great. It will be better to have a direct linkage to Redshift in AWS. If we can use data catalogs from Redshift, it will be so easy to create some data catalogs. Currently, we can only use data catalogs from S3."
"It is quite clunky and code-heavy, which is my biggest problem."
"On occasion, the solution's dashboard reports that a project failed due to runtime but it actually succeeded."
"It would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Glue is a paid service that doesn't come under the free trial of AWS."
"The current cost is around forty to fifty thousand a month."
"Technical support is a paid service, and which subscription you have is dependent on that. You must pay one of them, and it ranges from $15,000 to $25,000 per year."
"I rate the product's pricing a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."
"AWS Glue uses a pay-as-you-go approach which is helpful. The price of the overall solution is low and is a great advantage."
"AWS Glue is quite costly, especially for small organizations."
"I rate the tool's pricing a four out of ten."
"I rate pricing an eight out of ten."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Insurance Company
6%
 

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: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.