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Confluent vs NetApp Cloud Sync 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)
NetApp Cloud Sync
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (22nd)
 

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.
Sanjay Singh Bisht - PeerSpot reviewer
Server Administrator at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees
Hybrid data sync has minimized downtime and supports large cloud migrations efficiently
NetApp Cloud Sync is a very good product. When it comes to improvement, more detailed reporting and analytics can be available with richer dashboards for transfer performance, bandwidth usage, failed files, and historic trends. Smart handling of errors, such as clearer explanations for failed syncs and more actionable troubleshoot guidance, is needed as well. More granular scheduling and policy controls such as advanced filtering, bandwidth throttling by time of day, and finer control over sync behavior are also areas for improvement. Expanding cloud and storage integration would make it easier to connect to additional storage platforms and emerging cloud services. Lower source storage usage for the data broker and improved performance when synchronizing very large file systems containing millions of small files would be beneficial. Lastly, more automation options such as richer API and webhooks for tighter integration with infrastructure as code or DevOps workflows are also needed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."
"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."
"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."
"Having used SharePoint in the past, when I compare with traditional, old document repositories, like SharePoint, I would definitely recommend Confluent."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"The customer support for NetApp Cloud Sync is very good; support is provided immediately, and issues are resolved very quickly."
"NetApp Cloud Sync has impacted my organization positively by significantly reducing downtime."
"Personally, the best features in NetApp Cloud Sync are its simplicity and trustworthiness."
 

Cons

"I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"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."
"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."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"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."
"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."
"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."
"When it comes to improvement, more detailed reporting and analytics can be available with richer dashboards for transfer performance, bandwidth usage, failed files, and historic trends."
"A big drawback on the NetApp side is that because we started encountering remote home workers in our infrastructure, we started to encounter multiple incidents or requests for improvement related to latency."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"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 solution is cheaper than other products."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
No data available
 

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 NetApp Cloud Sync?
I did not come across any drawbacks or downsides in NetApp Cloud Sync technology. This is good technology, but on the NetApp side, because we are working with file services and we are primarily usi...
What is your primary use case for NetApp Cloud Sync?
The company uses NetApp Cloud Sync for synchronizing on-premises file servers with Azure Cloud, hosting NetApp file servers on various storage arrays, either physical or virtual as VMware VMs. This...
What advice do you have for others considering NetApp Cloud Sync?
NetApp Cloud Sync is deployed through Azure Cloud, and this is the only architecture that we have. We do not have any other vendors in the cloud to do this with NetApp. So this is our standardizati...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. NetApp Cloud Sync and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,153 professionals have used our research since 2012.