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Confluent vs Denodo 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

Confluent
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (5th)
Denodo
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (8th), Data Virtualization (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (3rd), AI Data Analysis (4th)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Douglas Camargo - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Backend Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 51-200 employees
Has simplified multi-database querying and accelerated solution delivery with minimal setup
Denodo offers a great query language, the VQL, which was very easy to understand for someone that only knows SQL. It was easy to work with, and it was easy to integrate various types of databases in general. The usability of the platform is very great. The federated queries were also a feature that I used a lot. The easy usability of Denodo helped my work and made things easier for productivity. We were able to ship code faster than if we needed to use another type of data visualization tool or even an ETL. When we have multiple databases, the standard or common approach is just to have an ETL that matches the data, and we need to write this whole ETL. With Denodo, we can simplify this whole work to a few queries or setups in the databases and just make a few queries. This was actually easier, and it was faster to deliver a solution for a client instead of building a whole ETL pipeline or simply backfilling one database in another. Denodo simplifies your work and helps you ship code or ship solutions in a faster way. I really like the UI that Denodo has on the web app version. It was very simple and actually very beautiful to see. For a complicated program, it was very easy to understand how it works, even for someone who is just approaching the data engineering career or side of the programming language.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"The monitoring module is impressive."
"It is also good for knowledge base management."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"Denodo simplifies your work and helps you ship code or ship solutions in a faster way."
"The performance of our application has increased significantly."
"The most valuable features are data lineage and the concept of a semantic layer."
"The most valuable feature in Denodo is data virtualization."
"The most valuable feature is Data Catalogs."
"Denodo's capabilities offer a strong and intuitive solution for data access."
"Denodo's best features are its performance, easy data transformation, and the job scheduler."
"The logical data warehouse functionality is fantastic. It truly stands out. The ClearOptimizer and Virtual Cache are great features. They work together seamlessly to optimize performance."
 

Cons

"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 be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"It would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"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."
"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."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"Monitoring event logs can be improved. In the older version, there was a monitoring schedule to get event reports and properly audit the reports. In the newer version, it is not there, and we have to manually configure data and audit events."
"The support is not the best and should be improved."
"I would like to see a connectivity option with third-party apps, for example, JDBC, and ODBC drivers. Currently, we need to install it separately from the Denodo side and then connect it."
"I would like it if we could pull the data model or export the data model because Denodo has, based on how you build, something called associations. The data model gets very confusing when you go look at it. It depends on how you define it, but it's really huge. I wish there was a way to export it into Visio. It could be that they already have a way to do it, and I don't know, but it would be much easier for the architects and even for the developers to look at it than scrunching it into the screen and expanding every small portion of it. If there was an easy way to export the Denodo model into another modeling tool and view it, it would be great."
"In cases where there are multiple virtualizations—such as reading from one Denodo view that is virtualized, and from that view there's also virtualization, and another team is reading from that view—if multiple virtualizations happen with no caching in between, it becomes slow."
"The feature that you have to connect on LDAP needs improvement."
"In my opinion, it's very expensive. For small companies, it's not a solution that most small companies can afford."
"The cache configuration is more complicated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"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."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"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."
"Depending on the size of the client you want to work with, it can be prohibitively expensive at times."
"The pricing is pretty good, and I would rate it at four out of five."
"Denodo provides a lightweight 30-day free trial, but when we do courses on top of it, it costs $150 for each person."
"For us, the cost has been okay. Also, there are no additional costs; it's just the standard licensing fee."
"The licensing charges for this solution are payable annually."
"There is an express edition and a licensed enterprise edition."
"Talking with my manager and others, nobody has complained about the pricing so far which is a positive sign."
"The cost for Denodo is in line with other similar products."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise20
 

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 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 ...
Does Denodo provide useful data virtualization education? Is it useful to attend their training?
If you are a Denodo user, it makes sense to undergo their training. Different types of professionals can benefit from it, including administrators, developers, and architects. If you are keen on i...
In experience, what might Denodo be lacking or need improvement on?
I like Denodo a lot. It offers quick and easy web service deployment within minutes. There are not any flaws that I think make the product less good or effective. The only thing I can point out is...
Which industries can benefit from Denodo the most?
Denodo is suitable for pretty much all sectors that deal with: Big data Cloud solutions Data governance Logical data fabric Master data management In my opinion, organizations in different fields...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Autodesk, VHA, AAA, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, Caterpillar, European Chemical Agency, Seagate, Nationwide, Time Warner Cable, Pantex, Inditex, BNSF Railways, Vodafone, CIT Group, Jazztel, Wolters Kluwer, Telefonica, TransAlta
Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. Denodo and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.