Confluent vs Informatica Cloud Data Integration comparison

Confluent is an enterprise-ready, full-scale streaming platform that enhances Apache Kafka. 

Confluent has integrated cutting-edge features that are designed to enhance these tasks: 

• Speed up application development and connectivity
• Enable transformations through stream processing
• Streamline business operations at scale
• Adhere to strict architectural standards

Confluent is a more complete distribution of Kafka in that it enhances the integration possibilities of Kafka by introducing tools for managing and optimizing Kafka clusters while providing methods for making sure the streams are secure. Confluent supports publish-and-subscribe as well as the storing and processing of data within the streams. Kafka is easier to operate and build thanks to Confluent.

Confluent's software is available in three different varieties: 

1. A free, open-source streaming platform that makes it simple to start using real-time data streams
2. An enterprise-grade version of the product with more administrative, ops, and monitoring tools
3. A premium cloud-based version.

Confluent Advantage Features

Confluent has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Multi-language
  
  
  • Clients: C++, Python, Go, and .NET
  • REST proxy: Can connect to Kafka from any connected network device
  • Admin REST APIs: RESTful interface for performing administrator operations

• Pre-built ecosystem
  
  
  • Connectors: More than 100 supported connectors, including S3, Elastic, HDFS, JDBC
  • MQTT proxy: Gain access to Kafka from MQTT gateways and devices
  • Schema registry: Centralized database to guarantee data compatibility

• Streaming database
  
  
  • ksqlDB: Materialized views and real-time stream processing

• GUI management 
  
  
  • Control panel: GUI for scalable Kafka management and monitoring
  • Health+: Smart alerts and cloud-based control centers

• DevOps automation that is flexible
  
  
  • Confluent for Kubernetes: Complete API to deploy on Kubernetes
  • Automated Ansible deployment on non-containerized environments

• Dynamic performance 
  
  
  • Self-balancing clusters: Automated partition re-balancing across brokers in the cluster
  • Tiered storage: Older Kafka data offloading to object storage with transparent access

• Security that is enterprise-grade 
  
  
  • Role-based access control: Granular user/group access authorization
  • Audit logs that are structured: Logs of user actions kept in dedicated Kafka topics
  • Secret protection: Sensitive information is encrypted

• Global resilience
  
  
  • Linking clusters: A real-time, highly reliable, and consistent bridge across on-premises and cloud environments
  • Multiple-region clusters: Single Kafka cluster with automated client failover distributed across multiple data centers
  • Replicator: Asynchronous replication that is based on the Kafka Connect framework

• Support
  
  
  • Round the clock enterprise support from Kafka experts

Reviews from Real Users

Confluent stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its robust enterprise support and its open source option. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews: 

Ravi B., a solutions architect at a tech services company, writes of the solution, “KSQL is a valuable feature, as is the Kafka Connect framework for connecting to the various source systems where you need not write the code. We get great support from Confluent because we're using the enterprise version and whenever there's a problem, they support us with fine-tuning and finding the root cause.”

Amit S., an IT consultant, notes, “The biggest benefit is that it is open source. You have the flexibility of opting or not opting for enterprise support, even though the tool itself is open source.” He adds, “The second benefit is it's very modern and built on Java and Scala. You can extend the features very well, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to do so.”

Informatica Cloud Data Integration is a cloud-native cloud data integration solution that enables users to connect a large number of applications and data sources across on-premises and integrate the data sources at scale on the cloud. The product is built on microservices-driven management and integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and assists organizations to govern costs, increase productivity and collaboration, and simplify their experience. Informatica Cloud Data Integration allows companies to deliver data and analytics to lines of business in a timely manner, build data warehouses on Amazon Redshift, Google Cloud BigQuery, Snowflake, and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, and utilize the required data integration patterns, including elastic processing, extract, load, and transform (ELT), and extract, transform, and load (ETL).

The solution allows users to to build enterprise-scale integration workloads within hours while it improves the productivity of development teams by providing them a codeless, drag-and-drop user interface. Companies can benefit from integration features built for data warehousing and optimized connectors for bulk loads of billions of records. Informatica Cloud Data Integration offers organizations the option of going serverless at scale by allowing them to process data integration jobs from cloud-hosted as well as managed environments. The Spark-based engine allows the solution to handle high-volume data demands and complex data integration tasks.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration Features

Informatica Cloud Data Integration provides its users with various features and tools. Among the key capacities of the product are:

• Advanced Pushdown Optimization: Informatica Cloud Data Integration offers a feature that provides users with the benefits of ELT while maintaining their data flow definitions at a logical or abstract level. This feature allows users to choose a runtime option that complies with the workload as well as send their data processing work to cloud ecosystem pushdown, cloud data warehouse pushdown, Spark serverless processing, or traditional ETL.
  
  
• Connectors for all major data sources: This feature provides out-of-the-box connectivity to a large number of cloud and on-premise systems, data stores, analytics and BI tools, and enterprise and middleware applications.
  
  
• Data transformation capabilities: This feature allows users to process data transformation in real time or batch by using a variety of transformation types, such as cleansing, masking, aggregation, fileting, parsing, and ranking.
  
  
• Spark-based complex data integration: Informatica Cloud Data Integration Elastic allows specialists to use elastic clusters to process their data transformation.
  
  
• Codeless integration: This feature facilitates the creation of simple-to-sophisticated data integration projects with a visual mapping designer that speeds up pre-build transformations for development through a variety of endpoints across cloud and on-premises.
  
  
• Serverless data integration: Users can achieve cloud data integration in a mode called Advanced Serverless, where they can benefit from a fully managed environment with no software, no cloud administration, and no servers or clusters to manage.
  
  
• Taskflow orchestration: This feature allows users to combine batch and real-time integration through a taskflow designer in order to create simple-to-sophisticated orchestrations.
  
  
• Intelligent structure discovery: This feature uses the CLAIRE engine to automatically understand the parsing model for complicated files based on their structure.
  
  
• Change data capture: Utilizing the prebuilt task wizards and Change Data Capture tool, users can automatically pull only the updated or incremental data from source systems to the targets on a frequent basis.
  
  
• Security: The product offers various features which ensure the highest level of data and workload security and comply with various policies.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration Benefits

Informatica Cloud Data Integration brings multiple benefits to its users. These include:

• The product offers optimized connectivity to various systems through custom build-connectors.
  
  
• Users can benefit from improved elasticity and performance by utilizing Spark clusters and auto-tuning.
  
  
• The tool allows developers to focus on business logic by facilitating infrastructure management through serverless deployment features.
  
  
• Informatica Data Cloud Integration provides user flexibility by connecting to any database, cloud data lake, on-premise apps, and data warehouses.
  
  
• Through a zero-coding environment and role-appropriate user experience, the solution is suitable for all types of users.
  
  
• The solution offers consistent experience and unified metadata across all cloud services.
  
  
• Users can leverage enterprise-level performance for integration design with no coding required.
  
  
• Informatica Data Cloud Integration scales as a business grows, providing a high level of adaptability.

Reviews from Real Users

Divya R., a senior consultant at Deloitte, rates Informatica Cloud Data Integration highly because it is a UI-based tool with great scripting.

A data architect at a retailer likes Informatica Cloud Data Integration because of its flexible licensing, good connectors, and timely upgrades and patches.