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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 (1st), API Management (6th), 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) (2nd), 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

"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"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."
"The most valuable feature that we are using is the data replication between the data centers allowing us to configure a disaster recovery or software. However, is it's not mandatory to use and because most of the features that we use are from Apache Kafka, such as end-to-end encryption. Internally, we can develop our own kind of product or service from Apache Kafka."
"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."
"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"We primarily use Confluent for service desk and task management, and it is also good for knowledge base management."
"We had a bad experience before Informatica Cloud Data Quality, we started a data analytics project that took more than three months of wasted time because we couldn't use the data to create the optimization model."
"The interface is really good."
"The product improves data quality."
"The staging and hierarchical features are the most valuable."
"It's a great solution, and I was happy with it."
"It is quite useful and flexible compared to other vendors in terms of cost of implementation and use case."
"It is a highly scalable solution."
"The ability to clean out data and improve the data quality is the best feature."
 

Cons

"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Currently, in the early stages, I see a gap on the security side. If you are using the SaaS version, we would like to get a fuller, more secure solution that can be adopted right out of the box. Confluence could do a better job sharing best practices or a reusable pattern that others have used, especially for companies that can not afford to hire professional services from Confluent."
"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."
"I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"It could have more themes. They should also have more reporting-oriented plugins as well. It would be great to have free custom reports that can be dispatched directly from Jira."
"Compared to PowerCenter, Data Quality needs some improvement; when we are dealing with large amounts of data for extraction purposes, it doesn't always work out and we often experience some memory issues here and there."
"Performance also needs to be significantly improved, especially when connecting to SFDC for read and write operations."
"Certain applications are not being synced with the ION."
"Mainly, MDM requires improvement when you need to migrate your version to a later one -- because it is very difficult and takes a lot of time to convert the processes you have already developed and implemented on a previous version, and can cause a need to rework the processes."
"I would like to see more API integration to have the capability to build a report using other third party reporting tools allowing things to be streamlined."
"GUI is poor in IDQ"
"We experienced several basic issues with the product that required daily meetings with Informatica product specialists."
"Informatica Cloud Data Quality has significant room for improvement. It is not stable, and there are several issues, especially on the cloud side, unlike the on-premise version which was very stable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"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."
"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 solution is cheaper than other products."
"It comes with a high cost."
"The product is not very pocket-friendly for small and medium-sized businesses, and it is understandable because of the kind of features the tool gives."
"Informatica MDM is a costly solution because it comes as a bundle. They are also globally positioning themselves and are definitely working on very upgraded technologies. If someone wanted to do it on the cloud, they have a lot of flexibility because they upgrade themselves according to the current needs. It definitely comes with a lot of features and that's the reason why it's costly. The licensing cost should be approximately one million dollars. It's about four to five times that of other vendors."
"I rate the licensing cost of Informatica MDM a five out of ten."
"The product is very expensive"
"Informatica is very expensive."
"Informatica Cloud Data Integration is famously known for its high price. The vendor targets large enterprises, and not medium or small companies. These large companies, and organizations, handle large amounts of data. If you go into any large bank, such as American or Canadian banks, these banks use this solution because it is more reliable, secure, and has more functionality."
"The pricing model is something that can be improved."
"The pricing is high compared to other tools on the market."
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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
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
7%
Computer Software 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: June 2026.
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