AWS Glue vs Confluent comparison

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AWS Glue

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

Confluent and AWS Glue are data integration platforms and a choice depends on specific needs; Confluent leads in real-time data processing while AWS Glue offers an extensive suite of serverless tools.

Features: Confluent supports scalable data processing with Apache Kafka, real-time data streaming, and seamless event-driven architecture. AWS Glue provides easy integration with AWS services featuring a powerful drag-and-drop interface, an automated ETL pipeline, and a comprehensive data catalog supporting metadata management.

Room for Improvement: Confluent's complexity in navigating integration setups could be improved and expanding third-party connectors is essential. Enhancements in the dashboard user experience and reducing initial setup time would benefit users. AWS Glue's ETL capabilities need expansion to support more complex transformations while improving interface intuitiveness. Better handling large datasets and reducing the learning curve for new users are also areas of improvement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Confluent's on-premises and cloud deployment options with responsive support provide flexibility. AWS Glue integrates excellently within AWS, offering a streamlined cloud deployment model but may not be as customizable as Confluent. Customer service for AWS Glue is notable for its integration with additional AWS services.

Pricing and ROI: Confluent's pricing is oriented toward robust data streaming solutions, which may mean higher initial costs but offer greater ROI due to enhanced capabilities. AWS Glue offers a competitive pay-as-you-go serverless model appealing to those prioritizing cost-effectiveness, though real-time processing may involve higher costs in comparison.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Data Integration Report (Updated: August 2026).

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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

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Data Integration (1st)

Confluent

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (7th)

Featured Reviews

Nivas Srinivasan

Principal Consultant at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution improves ETL performance but faces challenges with version upgrades

For ETL, I feel the performance is excellent. If I create jobs in a standard way, the performance is great, and maintenance is also seamless. It is serverless, so I do not need to worry about other integrations. It runs on a serverless VM. Glue services from AWS are regularly upgraded with new properties and functions. We use PySpark and other frameworks, which help customize our ETL process in a standard way. During our process, we utilized the typical SQL ITIL process standard in Glue-oriented ETL services, which helped us improve performance and time. AWS running time, mostly during the morning, saved us time compared to the old ETL method. There are many email notifications once a job is successful or fails, and we get notifications using SES or AWS's Simple Notification Service. Glue is integrated with both email alerts, and we are responsible for managing the full data journey from end to end.

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PavanManepalli

AVP - Sr Middleware Messaging Integration Engineer at Wells Fargo

Has supported streaming use cases across data centers and simplifies fraud analytics with SQL-based processing

I recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools. They need to improve in that direction by not only reducing costs but also providing better solutions for the problems customers face to avoid frustrations, whether through future enhancement requests or ensuring product stability. The cost should be worked on, and they should provide better solutions for customers. Solutions should focus on hierarchical topics; if a customer has different types of data and sources, they should be able to send them to the same place for analytics. Currently, Confluent requires everything to send to the same topic, which becomes very large and makes running analytics difficult. The hierarchy of topics should be improved. This part is available in MQ and other products such as Solace, but it is missing in Confluent, leading many in capital markets and trading to switch to Solace. In terms of stability, it is not the stability itself that needs improvement but rather the delivery semantics. Other products offer exactly-once delivery out of the box, whereas Confluent states it will offer this but lacks the knobs or levers for tuning configurations effectively. Confluent has hundreds of configurations that application teams must understand, which creates a gap. Users are often unaware of what values to set for better performance or to achieve exactly-once semantics, making it difficult to navigate through them. Delivery semantics also need to be worked on.

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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

"I like its integration and ability to handle all data-related tasks."

"The AWS Glue Data Catalog provides metadata management and schema discovery. AWS Glue simplifies data transformation with automatic schema detection, incremental data updates, and integration with other AWS services."

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

"AWS Glue's most valuable features are the data catalog, including crawlers and tables, and Glue Studio, which means you don't have to use custom code."

"The solution helps organizations gain flexibility in defining the structure of the data."

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

"The facility to integrate with S3 and the possibility to use Jupyter Notebook inside the pipeline are the most valuable features."

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

More AWS Glue pros

"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."

"To date, we have seen improvements in performance and scalability, so we recommend this solution."

"We primarily use Confluent for service desk and task management, and it is also good for knowledge base management."

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

"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."

"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."

"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."

"With Confluent Cloud we no longer need to handle the infrastructure and the plumbing, which is a concern for Confluent, and the other advantage is that all portfolios have access to the data that is being shared."

More Confluent pros

Cons

"Improvements in the UI are needed, as it is challenging to understand some functionalities."

"Beginners need additional support as it currently lacks some features required for complex transformations, often necessitating custom Python coding."

"The solution should offer features for streaming data in addition to batching data."

"When there is a need to configure connections to different database sources in respect of the target, it would be good if it were easier to deal with roles."

"One area that could be improved is the ETL view. The drag-and-drop interface is not as user-friendly as some other ETL tools."

"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."

"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 point for improvement in AWS Glue would be the dynamic allocation of resources while utilizing Lambda functions."

More AWS Glue cons

"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."

"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."

"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."

"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."

"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."

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

"The beginner who doesn't know how to work on HTML will struggle as when you create spaces in the Confluent, if you want to have some meeting notes or anything else, you need to know HTML and which HTML tags to include."

"It could have more themes. The themes in the version I'm using are very limited; they offer two to three themes."

More Confluent cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Glue is quite costly, especially for small organizations."

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

"AWS Glue is a high-priced solution that bills the client $150,000 to $250,000 annually."

"AWS Glue is a paid service that doesn't come under the free trial of AWS."

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

"I rate pricing an eight 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."

"Its price is good. We pay as we go or based on the usage, which is a good thing for us because it is simple to forecast for the tool. It is good in terms of the financial planning of the company, and it is a good way to estimate the cost. It is also simple for our clients. In my opinion, it is one of the best tools in the market for ETL processes because of the fact that you pay as you use, which separates it from other big tools such as PowerCenter, Pentaho Data Integration, and Talend."

More AWS Glue pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Confluence's pricing is quite reasonable, with a cost of around $10 per user that decreases as the number of users increases. Additionally, it's worth noting that for teams of up to 10 users, the solution is completely free."

"Confluent is an expensive solution."

"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."

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

"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 is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Retailer

12%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	34

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	17

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?

They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.

What needs improvement with Confluent?

What is your primary use case for Confluent?

The main use cases for Confluent are log aggregation and streaming. I'm familiar with Confluent stream processing with KSQL. KSQL helps in terms of data analytics strategies because if we are the d...

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Product Reports

AWS Glue

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Overview

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service offering seamless integration with AWS services like S3, Redshift, and Athena. Known for its flexibility with data formats and automation of ETL tasks, AWS Glue enhances data management and transformation.

AWS Glue facilitates seamless data extraction, transformation, and loading for businesses, integrating with key AWS services, allowing efficient data pipeline automation. It's valued for a user-friendly GUI, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, supporting PySpark for complex datasets and includes a robust data catalog, real-time backup capabilities, and code generation. Despite its strengths, improvements are needed in documentation, training, and broader programming language support. Users face challenges with its complex interface and integration with non-AWS products, driving demand for enhancements in its usability and performance.

What are AWS Glue's most important features?

Seamless AWS Integration: Connects effortlessly with services like S3, Redshift, and Athena.
Serverless Operation: Removes the need for infrastructure management.
Flexible Data Format Handling: Supports various data formats for comprehensive data management.
User-Friendly GUI: Simplifies the creation and management of ETL jobs.
Data Catalog: Provides an organized repository for metadata management.
Real-Time Data Backup: Ensures data integrity and availability.
Code Generation: Facilitates easy script generation for data processes.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Cost Efficiency: Reduced operational costs through serverless architecture.
High Performance: Efficient data processing and transformation capabilities.
Scalability: Adapts to businesses' evolving data demands.
Ease of Use: Intuitive interface allowing streamlined ETL workflows.
Automation: Simplified data pipeline tasks saving time and effort.

Businesses leverage AWS Glue in industries for ETL processes, data integration, and transformation. It is used to optimize data lakes or warehouses integration, enhancing data cataloging and real-time integration. Its serverless feature enables efficient data processing in sectors like finance and healthcare, where handling complex data-intensive tasks is crucial.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Confluent offers scalable, open-source flexibility and seamless data replication, supported by strong cloud integration. Key features like Kafka Connect and real-time processing make it valuable for data streaming projects while ensuring high availability with a Multi-Region Cluster.

Confluent is a robust data streaming platform that enables efficient management and integration of real-time data pipelines. Its message-driven architecture and fault tolerance provide reliability, while a user-friendly dashboard and connectors support diverse data sources. Cloud integration reduces costs, and extensive documentation, plugins, and monitoring capabilities enhance collaboration and revision management. Despite some areas needing improvement, including security in the SaaS version and integration flexibility, Confluent remains a staple in industries requiring vast data processing and task automation.

What are Confluent's key features?

Scalability: Handles large volumes of data, ensuring continuous performance.
Kafka Connect: Enables seamless data integration across multiple systems.
Real-time Processing: Facilitates instant data insights for rapid decision-making.
Multi-Region Cluster: Maintains data availability across different geographical locations.
Cloud Integration: Reduces operational costs and enhances deployment flexibility.
User Dashboard: Simplifies management with an intuitive interface.

What benefits and ROI should users consider in reviews?

Cost-Efficiency: Improved processes reduce operational expenses.
Data Reliability: Ensures consistent and accurate data handling.
Increased Collaboration: Boosts team efficiency with comprehensive documentation and management tools.
Scalability: Supports business growth without compromising performance.
Integration Flexibility: Seamlessly connects with diverse data sources and systems.

Confluent is commonly implemented in finance, insurance, and software industries for applications like fraud detection, ETL tasks, and enterprise communication. It supports real-time data processing, project management, and task automation, often integrating with project management tools like Jira, providing valuable solutions for business processes.

Sample Customers

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

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

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