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BMC AMI DevX vs Confluent comparison

 

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
7.2
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Software Configuration Management (1st), Debugging (8th), Database Development and Management (20th), Mainframe Application Development (1st), Test Data Management (7th), Mainframe Testing Tools (1st), Data Masking (8th)
Confluent
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (3rd)
 

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 6.9%, up 3.9% compared to last year.
Confluent, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 8.5% mindshare, down 9.7% since last year.
Test Data Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
BMC AMI DevX6.9%
Perforce Delphix28.3%
Informatica Test Data Management (TDM)15.3%
Other49.5%
Test Data Management
Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Confluent8.5%
Apache Flink14.8%
Databricks12.5%
Other64.2%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Brian Westerman - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to make mainframe data management process easier and saves manhours
We plan to replace BMC Compuware File-AID due to its price. Two years back, we paid 11,000 dollars. However, the current price is 27,900 dollars. The price has increased to at least eight times its initial cost. We would need to pay around 60,000 dollars to have all three products together. We also encountered issues during version updates.
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

"I think the most valuable features are code management, code deployment, and code generation. The fact that those three features are included makes BMC Compuware ISPW a robust product. If one of those features was missing, it would be less robust and less interesting. But because it has those three features, it is a very good solution for code development and management."
"It does our CICS NEWCOPYs and our Db2 binds for us, whereas before, that was a manual process. It takes a lot of the workload off of the operations folks and off the DBAs."
"The product has made our mainframe data management process easier. It has helped us save manhours. The tool's most valuable feature is the ability to edit tape files. Its ability to clone files is beneficial in application development."
"We had parallel development before, but the way ISPW implements it is better. It has more control and oversight of the process, whereas before, it was like the Wild West. Everybody could have their own package with their own version of the component in it... ISPW is constantly aware of it. It notifies when someone else is using or has a different version of that component."
"I have worked with DB2's great features in the last five years. The IDAA feature transformed the vision of warehousing, business analytics, and big data at my bank. Besides the mainframe, I saw that this solution was evolutionary. It gives real-time information."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Topaz is Xpediter. It's more flexible than Xpediter through MVS."
"Test data management capabilities are good."
"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 tools."
"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."
"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"The biggest benefit of Confluent as a tool is that it is a distributed platform that provides more durability and stability."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"The most valuable feature that we are using is the data replication between the data centers allowing us to configure a disaster recovery or software. However, is it's not mandatory to use and because most of the features that we use are from Apache Kafka, such as end-to-end encryption. Internally, we can develop our own kind of product or service from Apache Kafka."
"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."
 

Cons

"DB2 is a hard tool to grasp. It's hard for users to learn how to use it. It's not easy to see how it works."
"I'm always looking for improvement in things like the documentation, to make things a little bit easier and simpler to understand, a place where people can go to troubleshoot issues."
"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."
"It's a very complicated tool."
"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."
"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."
"Their technical support could be better. There were times where, when we reported bugs, they would fix one bug but add another one. That's probably because of their support model. A lot of organizations are developing software using Agile rather than the Waterfall method, so things are happening all over the place. You get things quicker, but sometimes one fix will break another one or add other bugs."
"I'm waiting to see what 19.2 for Topaz looks like, but I have a problem with the JES Explorer right now. It limits you to a certain prefix for job names and there are some groups that have multiple prefixes that they'd like to see all at once in their job names, because of how they work in a group. And they can't see that in the JES Explorer."
"We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"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 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 product should integrate tools for incorporating diagrams like Lucidchart. It also needs to improve its formatting features. We also faced issues while granting permissions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I like the seat-based licensing much more than MSU-based licensing, and that the cost has been competitive."
"The price point is great."
"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."
"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."
"In general, Compuware tools are very competitive."
"It has saved our developers time and effort when working on documentation, which is now more readable and fluent."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"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."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
36%
Insurance Company
12%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
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 Business6
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Compuware File-AID?
The product has made our mainframe data management process easier. It has helped us save manhours. The tool's most valuable feature is the ability to edit tape files. Its ability to clone files is ...
What needs improvement with Compuware File-AID?
We plan to replace BMC Compuware File-AID due to its price. Two years back, we paid 11,000 dollars. However, the current price is 27,900 dollars. The price has increased to at least eight times its...
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?
People do not appreciate that Confluent is pushing us more towards Teams because they want to use a true Microsoft Word-type format where we can format our sentences better, instead of just saying ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Helvetia, The IMT Group, Hapag-Lloyd, Royal Bank of Canada, Chunghwa Telecom
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC AMI DevX vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,771 professionals have used our research since 2012.