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Confluent vs Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) 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)
Informatica Intelligent Dat...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
215
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (1st), Data Quality (1st), Business Process Management (BPM) (6th), Business-to-Business Middleware (2nd), API Management (7th), Cloud Data Integration (3rd), Data Governance (3rd), Test Data Management (2nd), Cloud Master Data Management (MDM) (1st), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (2nd), Data Masking (2nd), Metadata Management (2nd), Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) (3rd), Test Data Management Services (3rd), Product Information Management (PIM) (1st), Data Observability (2nd), AI Data Analysis (1st)
 

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.
RC
Contractor at Sanlam
Cloud data catalog has streamlined lineage and quality while leaving more automation to improve
I have not explored IDMC's automation capabilities driven by AI and metadata too much at the moment, but it is on the cards. We are basically creating the foundation, as the whole migration has taken place recently and it is still early days. I think Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) is evolving, and as the vendors move forward, they pick up new concepts from each other. I have seen that products leapfrog each other, and from my experience over the years, the big players tend to copy features or add enhancements based on industry trends. I feel whatever the tool does not have now, there is a feedback loop allowing us to request new features, and we continually ask for different ways to do things as we have a pipeline into the product management team. It is difficult to say what additional features I would prefer to see in the next release of IDMC. I would appreciate more automation on the lineage front, with more AI to seamlessly join independent sources and create seamless lineage between different technologies, such as from file into database A into a different database and landing up in a reporting system such as Cognos, Qlik, Qlik Sense, QlikView, or Power BI.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Confluent is an amazing tool that is highly configurable, integrates very well with Jira, and lets you create nice documentation for various products while also supporting reporting and online content hosting."
"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."
"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."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"We primarily use Confluent for service desk and task management, and it is also good for knowledge base management."
"The monitoring module is impressive."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"It is very useful for testing purposes and designing mappings for small projects. If you go for IDQ in the mapping itself, you can see the data. You can then correct it, and test it so easily. It is working fine. It is also stable, scalable, and easy to deploy."
"The solution scales well."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to extract metadata from various sources- be it an old SaaS application or the latest cloud application."
"I do find Informatica Data Quality is stable. It generally maintains a high level of reliability and stability, making it an asset."
"We use parts and standardization for most of our testing. We purchase the US Postal Service address database, which is updated periodically. Many useful tools, such as Google Maps, can detect and mark new businesses or changes in business locations. Informatica captures and updates this information. Some periodic maintenance is involved, but setting it up is not overly complicated."
"The solution has multiple valuable features for metadata collection"
"The Informatica MDM tool provided a very robust and cost effective solution to implement a single view of physicians."
"This solution is stable, and we haven't had any issues."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"It could have more themes. The themes in the version I'm using are very limited; they offer two to three themes."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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."
"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 could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"Informatica Axon's response times and certain aspects of the admin panel could be enhanced for better usability."
"The cost of Informatica MDM is expensive and has room for improvement."
"I definitely will not recommend Informatica Cloud Data Quality because it's very hard to manage the licensing model and the price is very high."
"By improving customer service integration solutions development implementation style."
"Inserting the GenAI into the master data management will reduce the overall effort of operational activities."
"Informatica's issue is the licensing. Right now, there are a lot of new gen MDMs that are offering a lot in a single licensing model."
"One area where Informatica Cloud Data Integration could improve is in providing more accelerators for certain functionalities."
"Certain applications are not being synced with the ION."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"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 expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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."
"The price of Informatica Cloud Data Integration could be reduced."
"You can purchase licenses for this solution at different intervals. For example, annually or every three years. They recently changed their terms for licensing and now it is more flexible."
"It's a very expensive solution"
"So, there are plans for licensing. There are subscription-based and usage-based licenses. Also, there are licenses for exceptional analytics, etc. In short, there are different models of licensing for every enterprise."
"The price is comparable."
"The licenses attached to the solution are highly priced."
"I rate the product's pricing a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."
"I rate the product's pricing a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price."
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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
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing 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 Business51
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise155
 

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...
How does Azure Data Factory compare with Informatica Cloud Data Integration?
Azure Data Factory is a solid product offering many transformation functions; It has pre-load and post-load transformations, allowing users to apply transformations either in code by using Power Q...
Which Informatica product would you choose - PowerCenter or Cloud Data Integration?
Complex transformations can easily be achieved using PowerCenter, which has all the features and tools to establish a real data governance strategy. Additionally, PowerCenter is able to manage huge...
What are the biggest benefits of using Informatica Cloud Data Integration?
When it comes to cloud data integration, this solution can provide you with multiple benefits, including: Overhead reduction by integrating data on any cloud in various ways Effective integration ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
ActiveVOS, Active Endpoints, Address Verification, Persistent Data Masking
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
The Travel Company, Carbonite
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), Informatica, Palantir and others in Cloud Data Integration. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.