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Confluent vs Databricks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

Confluent
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Databricks
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (8th), Data Science Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Confluent is 8.3%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Databricks is 13.5%, up from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

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.
ShubhamSharma7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow
Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The monitoring module is impressive."
"It is also good for knowledge base management."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"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."
"The processing capacity is tremendous in the database."
"It's very simple to use Databricks Apache Spark."
"We like that this solution can handle a wide variety and velocity of data engineering, either in batch mode or real-time."
"Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed."
"The solution is very simple and stable."
"Ability to work collaboratively without having to worry about the infrastructure."
"Databricks serves as a single platform for conducting the entire end-to-end lifecycle of machine learning models or AI ops."
"Databricks is a unified solution that we can use for streaming. It is supporting open source languages, which are cloud-agnostic. When I do database coding if any other tool has a similar language pack to Excel or SQL, I can use the same knowledge, limiting the need to learn new things. It supports a lot of Python libraries where I can use some very easily."
 

Cons

"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"there is room for improvement in the visualization."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"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."
"Currently, in the early stages, I see a gap on the security side. If you are using the SaaS version, we would like to get a fuller, more secure solution that can be adopted right out of the box. Confluence could do a better job sharing best practices or a reusable pattern that others have used, especially for companies that can not afford to hire professional services from Confluent."
"Databricks has a lack of debuggers, and it would be good to see more components."
"Implementation of Databricks is still very code heavy."
"The pricing of Databricks could be cheaper."
"The API deployment and model deployment are not easy on the Databricks side."
"As a data engineer, I see cluster failure in our Databricks user databases as a major issue."
"The product should provide more advanced features in future releases."
"I believe that this product could be improved by becoming more user-friendly."
"I have had some issues with some of the Spark clusters running on Databricks, where the Spark runtime and clusters go up and down, which is an area for improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"I would rate the tool’s pricing an eight out of ten."
"I'm not involved in the financing, but I can say that the solution seemed reasonably priced compared to the competitors. Similar products are usually in the same price range. With five being affordable and one being expensive, I would rate Databricks a four out of five."
"The licensing costs of Databricks depend on how many licenses we need, depending on which Databricks provides a lot of discounts."
"The solution is based on a licensing model."
"We pay as we go, so there isn't a fixed price. It's charged by the unit. I don't have any details detail about how they measure this, but it should be a mix between processing and quantity of data handled. We run a simulation based on our use cases, which gives us an estimate. We've been monitoring this, and the costs have met our expectations."
"The solution requires a subscription."
"I rate the price of Databricks as eight out of ten."
"The solution is affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. Databricks and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,140 professionals have used our research since 2012.