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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

"We primarily use Confluent for service desk and task management, and it is also good for knowledge base management."
"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."
"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."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"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."
"I would rate the scalability of the solution at eight out of ten. We have 20 people who use Confluent in our organization now, and we hope to increase usage in the future."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"We are using App Connect because it's a more comprehensive solution that can handle many projects."
"I recommend IBM App Connect Enterprise to everyone."
"This latest version is very scalable, flexible and user-friendly."
"Because it has a graphical developer interface, we can quickly develop solutions that are connecting to anything on the cloud, without having to build those connectors ourselves."
"It's a powerful application for collaboration. It has many features for customization and integration."
"The most valuable feature for me is the availability of the adapters, which are already made out of the box."
"The most valuable feature is the user-friendliness of the application."
"Provides good security features."
 

Cons

"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."
"The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."
"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."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"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."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"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."
"One more important point is that if IBM improves its CI/CD capabilities, it will make a big difference. Right now, I have to create my own CI/CD setup from scratch for every client, which is inefficient."
"The interface could be better."
"The audit logging, transaction logging and other such similar features, such as the IBM App Connect cloud instance, need to be improved."
"IBM needs to enhance and have a stronger offering for the event streaming part because this is the future needed for the containerization and the new integration requirement."
"Because we have the Hypervisor Edition, we have run into scalability issues."
"The installation of containers could be simplified, as it currently requires a senior-level installer."
"In the next release, I would like to get some quality connectors."
 

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."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"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."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"The licensing cost for IBM App Connect is very high."
"It is very expensive if we want to scale."
"The price could be better."
"The cost depends upon the consumer."
"IBM App Connect's pricing is high compared to other products."
"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."
"App Connect is not cheap."
"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
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
6%
 

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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