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Confluent vs ETL Solutions Transformation Manager 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 (7th)
ETL Solutions Transformatio...
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (53rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Confluent and ETL Solutions Transformation Manager aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Confluent is designed for Streaming Analytics and holds a mindshare of 6.4%, down 8.3% compared to last year.
ETL Solutions Transformation Manager, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.0% mindshare, up 0.4% since last year.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Confluent6.4%
Databricks7.5%
Apache Flink7.5%
Other78.6%
Streaming Analytics
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ETL Solutions Transformation Manager1.0%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)3.8%
SSIS3.7%
Other91.5%
Data Integration
 

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.
Vijayraj Amin - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Growth Strategist at MAIORA
User-friendly and accessible for anyone with computer knowledge and logical thinking
There is room for improvement in the solution's visualization tool. Currently, it provides basic reports and the ability to create graphs and dashboards, but I'm looking forward to more robust analytics. The plan is to enhance this feature in 2024, around Q2 or Q3, which would save us from relying on external tools like Power BI for insights.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"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, and the other advantage is that all portfolios have access to the data that is being shared."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"Having used SharePoint in the past, when I compare with traditional, old document repositories, like SharePoint, I would definitely recommend Confluent."
"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 a reliable solution."
"It is among the best, even if not widely known."
"Transformation Manager is the backbone of every data pipeline these days because the solution has been on the market for 20 to 30 years, and we use it for various industries, including financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, etc."
"Back in the day, we could only get reports and analyze what happened after the fact, but today now we can generate real-time insights. Transformation Manager feeds your data science projects. We generate models and then give them to the clients, so they can come up with real-time predictions and recommendations in addition to reporting."
 

Cons

"Confluent's price needs improvement."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"One area we've identified that could be improved is the governance and access control to the Kafka topics. We've found some limitations, like a threshold of 10,000 rules per cluster, that make it challenging to manage access at scale if we have many different data sources."
"They should build a functional architecture based on queuing."
"We get decent support. It's okay but not great."
"There is room for improvement in the solution's visualization tool."
"Transformation Manager reporting could be better. There are better options for reporting tools these days. We use Microsoft BI sometimes, but Tableau is becoming too expensive. Microsoft BI's visualization features are maturing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"It is an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
12%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Construction Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Performing Arts
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

No data available
Transformation Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Honda, BNP Paribas, RBS, JPMorgan, Volkswagen, Thorn Lighting, OpenSpirit, Rolls-Royce, Ulster Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Microsoft, Apache and others in Streaming Analytics. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.