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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
6.9
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (1st)
Confluent
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (3rd)
 

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.
PavanManepalli - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"AWS Glue has reduced efforts by 60%, which is the main benefit."
"AWS Glue is quite better than other tools, but you have to learn it properly before you start using it."
"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 scalability."
"Glue is a NoSQL-based data ETL tool that has some advantages over IIS and ISAs."
"I like its integration and ability to handle all data-related tasks."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"For ETL, I feel the performance is excellent."
"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"It is also good for knowledge base management."
"The monitoring module is impressive."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"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."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
 

Cons

"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."
"There is a learning curve to this tool."
"Overall, I consider the technical support to be fine, although the response time could be faster in certain cases."
"I would like to see stable libraries at the moment they are not there."
"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."
"AWS Glue is more costly compared to other tools like Airflow."
"AWS Glue should be more reliable and faster in processing. Enhancing the speed of data processing would be beneficial."
"There is a limitation when it comes to seamlessly importing Microsoft documents into Confluent pages, which can be inconvenient for users who frequently work with Microsoft Office tools and need to transition their content to Confluent."
"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."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"Confluent has fallen behind in being the tool of the industry. It's taking second place to things such as Word and SharePoint and other office tools that are more dynamic and flexible than Confluent."
"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the solution a six or seven on a scale of one to ten, with ten being very expensive. Specifically, I rate its pricing a six out of ten."
"If you are using the solution for an enterprise business, it will be expensive."
"AWS Glue is a paid service that doesn't come under the free trial of AWS."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
 

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 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 ...
 

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: September 2025.
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.