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BMC AMI DevX vs Confluent comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

BMC AMI DevX
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Software Configuration Management (1st), Debugging (2nd), Database Development and Management (11th), Mainframe Application Development (1st), Test Data Management (4th), Mainframe Testing Tools (1st), Data Masking (3rd), AI Software Development (30th)
Confluent
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

BMC AMI DevX and Confluent aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. BMC AMI DevX is designed for Test Data Management and holds a mindshare of 12.3%, up 6.8% compared to last year.
Confluent, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 6.2% mindshare, down 8.5% since last year.
Test Data Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BMC AMI DevX12.3%
Perforce Delphix16.0%
Broadcom Test Data Manager13.6%
Other58.1%
Test Data Management
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Confluent6.2%
Databricks7.4%
Apache Flink6.9%
Other79.5%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

AkshayChaudhari - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Specialist at TCS
Modern workflow has improved COBOL debugging and simplifies understanding complex legacy code
The most valuable feature is the integrated COBOL debugging and code analysis capability. Being able to step through programs, set breakpoints, and monitor variable values to understand how the program flow operates makes troubleshooting much easier and more structured. I also appreciate the modern development environment for editing COBOL, browsing datasets, and submitting JCL jobs without constantly switching between different tools. The code navigation and AI-assisted code understanding capabilities are also useful for working with unfamiliar legacy applications. The code understanding features have been useful when I need to work with unfamiliar COBOL applications. They help me explain existing code, identify the relationships and dependencies between programs and copybooks, and make it easier to understand the overall program flow. Instead of manually tracking every section of a large legacy application, I can use the AI assistance to get a quicker understanding of what the code is doing and where a change may have an impact. This reduces the time to get familiar with older code and makes maintenance and troubleshooting more straightforward and efficient.
PavanManepalli - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like the ability to flow through the source and see what happens to the data as the statements are executed. If there is a fault, it will track the event, and we can then look back to see why it may have caused the fault. You can also reverse engineer your test. You can set it so that you can go backward as well as forward in your test. This is something that I haven't done here at my company. Compuware Xpediter is one of the best debugging tools for mainframe software development. We have currently licensed only the COBOL language for Xpediter, but I know they have other languages, including Assembler, PL/I."
"My guess is this would have taken twice as long, or we would have had many more issues without using Xpediter."
"Our intention is to use Topaz for the next generation of mainframe developers to maintain mainframe applications."
"Test data management capabilities are good."
"ISPW is an excellent product; it does everything the developers need it to do, we were able to build it and customize it very simply as we became more familiar with how the system works during installation, and it doesn't need a lot of care and feeding once it's up and running."
"I like that Compuware File-AID can actually map out control sections within load modules, or, as they're now known, program objects."
"The visual ability to see potential downstream impacts to changes being made assists our developers in understanding the impact associated with their change."
"The clearest measurable impact is faster troubleshooting and faster debugging, with debugging time reduced by 20 to 30% because I can step through COBOL programs, check variable values, and identify failing statements more efficiently."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"The monitoring module is impressive."
"Confluent is an amazing tool that is highly configurable, integrates very well with Jira, and lets you create nice documentation for various products while also supporting reporting and online content hosting."
"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
 

Cons

"There are some features that are not well documented, so documentation could use a little help, on things like setting up deployment and which structures in the database correspond to which tables."
"The solution could be improved by being better integrated with the open world. In the next release, I would like to have the ability to work in an open environment whilst remaining integrated with the legacy environment."
"It's a very complicated tool."
"It would be nice to have an audit trail to see what mainframe developers are using what."
"Better discussions to identify inventory prior to the start of any migration would be helpful for potential clients that have applications with code that is not modified often."
"Their technical support could be better."
"While I am aware of the possibility to integrate Git with BMC AMI DevX zAdviser, this integration does not fit within our solution landscape."
"One thing I would really like to see some improvement on is the promotion diagnostic messages. It invokes utilities "under the covers" to copy components, and it does not echo back any of the error messages from those utilities."
"It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"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."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"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."
"The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."
"It could have more integration with different platforms."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In general, Compuware tools are very competitive."
"I like the seat-based licensing much more than MSU-based licensing, and that the cost has been competitive."
"It has saved our developers time and effort when working on documentation, which is now more readable and fluent."
"The only thing I would mention related to the licensing and/or the pricing, is that they have some visualization features in there that are licensed by concurrent users. We're starting to trip up on that. We're looking to probably increase the number of concurrent licenses that we have. But those types of licensing strategies, where they license by concurrent users or the number of seats is confusing for some people. They don't understand why it works sometimes and doesn't work other times."
"The price point is great."
"In terms of pricing, there isn't an extra charge for the parts of it we use. It comes with the licenses we purchased for other products, so no complaints there. The licensing is built in with the other products that you purchase from Compuware."
"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."
"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."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"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."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Retailer
12%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Compuware Topaz Enterprise Data?
My understanding is that BMC AMI DevX is an enterprise product with custom licensing, so pricing is typically negotiated based on factors such as the modules purchased, organization size, and usage...
What needs improvement with BMC AMI DevX?
BMC AMI DevX is a strong platform, but there are a few areas where it could improve, such as simplifying the initial installation and configuration, especially for first-time users. It could also i...
What is your primary use case for BMC AMI DevX?
My main use case for BMC AMI DevX is to work with COBOL and JCL development on IBM. I mainly use it for editing, browsing data sets, submitting jobs, and debugging applications. I appreciate the Ec...
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 ...
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...
 

Also Known As

File-AID, Data for Db2, Code Debug, Data Studio, Workbench for Eclipse, Code Pipeline
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NRB, Iberdrola, Consorzio Servizi Bancari 
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about Perforce, Informatica, Broadcom and others in Test Data Management. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.