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Confluent vs IBM App Connect 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)
IBM App Connect
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (18th)
 

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.
Nirav Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior QA Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Cloud workflows have accelerated integrations and now demand better debugging and DevOps support
IBM App Connect provides many features, but there are several areas for improvement. Better debugging and observability would help us track any single transaction end-to-end across steps and connectors. Features such as a step-by-step line view and one-click download for flow execution would be beneficial. Improved CI/CD pipeline and GitOps experience would be valuable. The team wants flows as code and predictable promotion across development, test, and production environments. Stronger native Git integration, export-import functionalities, and first-class pipeline templates like Jenkins, GitHub, and Azure DevOps would be beneficial. More cloud-native, lightweight runtime options would be very helpful. Connector reliability and consistency need improvement because some connectors feel more mature than others, and version changes can break mapping. Pricing and licensing clarity is important because the licensing is complex and can slow down adoption and planning. Some improvement areas include handling very complex structures that the platform currently does not support. Improvements on the DevOps side, particularly providing templates, would be beneficial. The platform is somewhat expensive and hard to predict in terms of cost. Debugging features need to be provided. For CI/CD, the flows are not truly accurate and need improvement.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with 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."
"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."
"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"To date, we have seen improvements in performance and scalability, so we recommend this solution."
"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."
"The solution is a good product in the integration space and a leader in the market."
"There is a friendly interface for configuration, and integration is made easy."
"The beauty of IBM App Connect is that it provides end-to-end middleware."
"We are using App Connect because it's a more comprehensive solution that can handle many projects."
"It has an efficient design flow."
"It has different type of interfaces that can integrate with companies."
"IBM App Connect provides a very easy way to integrate many systems with zero manual code."
"The most valuable feature for me is the availability of the adapters, which are already made out of the box."
 

Cons

"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."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"The solution could have an extra plugin or upgrading feature. In addition, it could have more integration with different platforms and be more compatible."
"It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"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."
"It could have more themes. The themes in the version I'm using are very limited; they offer two to three themes."
"The interface could be better."
"The user interface of IBM App Connect can be a little bit more user-friendly, I would say because the first-time developer is onboarded while using IBM App Connect, he or she may get a little intimidated or daunted looking at all the options available or the pipelines, et cetera."
"Updates are constantly delayed and that is something IBM could improve."
"The addition of string functionality would be a benefit, particularly in the ESQL space that IBM already uses internally."
"IBM App Connect should improve security features."
"The platform is somewhat expensive and hard to predict in terms of cost."
"More connectors could be available for the product as some of the third-party software doesn't have default connectors."
"The integration with HR systems could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is highly priced."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"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."
"IBM App Connect's pricing is high compared to other products."
"The licensing cost for IBM App Connect is very high."
"The cost depends upon the consumer."
"App Connect is not cheap."
"Initially, App Connect was quite expensive because the cost was based on the number of processors we used. However, it's now based on containers, which means we can be more specific about our consumption and get a better price."
"The price could be better."
"It is very expensive if we want to scale."
"The solution's pricing isn't cheap, but you can get good discounts based on your competitive deal."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
12%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise21
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM App Connect?
Configuration time varies by implementation. For insurance companies with simple JDBC connections, the process is straightforward. However, companies requiring multiple configurations for ODBC, JDB...
What is your primary use case for IBM App Connect?
IBM App Connect serves as our integration platform, allowing us to connect application systems and data without heavy load or heavy coding. In my current organization, we use the AWS cloud, and IBM...
What advice do you have for others considering IBM App Connect?
We are using the private cloud deployment on AWS. My company purchased IBM App Connect through the AWS Marketplace. IBM App Connect is a very user-friendly tool, and we can very easily integrate wi...
 

Also Known As

No data available
IBM Cast Iron
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
United Way of Allegheny County, Saint-Gobain CPS, Ricoh, SunTrust Banks Inc.
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