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Confluent vs IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration comparison

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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 (9th)
IBM webMethods Hybrid Integ...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
95
Ranking in other categories
Business-to-Business Middleware (5th), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (3rd), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (13th), API Management (18th), Cloud Data Integration (12th), Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) (10th)
 

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.
YM
Developer at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Offers strong integration capabilities and reliable features but needs pricing and scaling improvements
Many things are evolving with the AI buzz in the market. What I would like to see improved or enhanced in webMethods.io in the future is that since webMethods.io is already under IBM, I think IBM will introduce and integrate AI into it. Additionally, regarding what webMethods.io can improve is the license cost. Other cloud players are also providing the same kind of functionality, such as AWS and Azure. webMethods.io is being installed on-premises, but AWS is providing it directly in the cloud. When comparing the license cost and request per minute cost, webMethods.io needs to address that. There are many competitors in the market for this.

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."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."
"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"This solution has given us a competitive advantage because we have better automation and insight."
"There are many components that we are currently using and all of them are very important."
"Oracle's self-service capabilities, of which we make extensive use, is the most valuable feature."
"The main assets are its flow language, debugging, and Broker. Flow language is far better and more flexible for debugging."
"The ease of mapping... is the single largest feature. It gives us the ability to craft anything. A lot of single-purpose technologies, like Mirth, are good for healthcare messages, but we use webMethods not only for healthcare messages but for other business-related purposes, like integrations to Salesforce or integrations to Office 365. It's multi-purpose nature is very strong."
"The product is powerful, straightforward, and easy to use."
"This solution has improved our productivity and efficiency in pretty much all of our applications."
"The solution's ease-of-use is its most valuable feature, in which complex issues may be resolved."
 

Cons

"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 no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"It could have more themes. The themes in the version I'm using are very limited; they offer two to three themes."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"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 configuring of the JWT token would be improved as it is a confusing process. We require more information on this part of the solution."
"I think rules engine processes and BPM processes should be improved."
"webMethods Integration Server could improve on the version control. I'm not sure if Web Method has some kind of inbuilt integration with Bitbucket or GitHub or some kind of version control system. However, that's one area where they can improve."
"DevOps could be better."
"The support is good but they could improve by being faster and more knowledgeable."
"The patching of infrastructure is not very smooth and improved authentication should be added in the next feature."
"The products, at the moment, are new and there should perhaps be support for the older version of the protocols."
"Scalability and connectors to different cloud applications is lacking."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"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."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"It comes with a high cost."
"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."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"I do see a lack of capabilities inside of the monetization area for them. They have a cloud infrastructure that is pay per use type of a thing. If you already use 1,000 transactions per se, then you can be charged and billed. I see room for improvement there for their side on that particular capability of the monetization."
"This is an expensive product and we may replace it with something more reasonably priced."
"Always plan five years ahead and don’t jeopardize the quality of your project by dropping items from the bill of materials."
"The product is very expensive."
"Sometimes we don't have a very clear idea what the licensing will entail at first, because it can be very customizable. On one hand, this can be a good thing, because it can be tailored to a specific customer's needs. But on the other hand it can also be an issue when some customer asks, "What's the cost?" and we can't yet give them an accurate answer."
"webMethods Integration Server is expensive, and there's no fixed price on it because it has a point pricing model. You can negotiate, which makes it interesting."
"webMethods Trading Networks is a bit costly compared to others solutions."
"Its cost depends on the use cases."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Retailer
12%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Construction Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
7%
 

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 Business23
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise65
 

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 needs improvement with webMethods Integration Server?
The alignment of on-premise and cloud versions needs improvement.
What needs improvement with webMethods Trading Networks?
webMethods.io does not currently have certain features, and we have to do coding as well. However, they have recently come up with a hybrid application where users will be able to use drag-and-drop...
What is your primary use case for webMethods Trading Networks?
We are primarily focused on IBM webMethods. I am part of the Center of Excellence team, where we involve ourselves in proposals and providing solutions to clients. webMethods.io is a middleware too...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Built.io Flow, webMethods Integration Server, webMethods Trading Networks, webMethods ActiveTransfer, webMethods.io API
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Cisco, Agralogics, Dreamforce, Cables & Sensors, Sacramento Kings
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), Informatica, Palantir and others in Cloud Data Integration. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.