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Confluent vs Palantir Foundry 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 (9th)
Palantir Foundry
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (5th), IT Operations Analytics (5th), Supply Chain Analytics (1st), Cloud Data Integration (4th), Data Migration Appliances (2nd), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (1st), Data and Analytics Service Providers (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.
reviewer2846265 - PeerSpot reviewer
PALANTIR DATA ENGINEER at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Unified healthcare pipelines have improved data trust and accelerated operational decisions
One challenge regarding how Palantir Foundry can be improved is the learning curve. Foundry has a very broad ecosystem with Ontology, Pipeline Builder, Code Repositories, and AI integrations. For new engineers or business users onboarding, it can take time, especially if they are coming from more traditional data platforms. Better documentation, simplified onboarding paths, and more beginner-friendly examples would help accelerate adoption. Another area is debugging complexity. While lineage and monitoring are strong features, troubleshooting deeply interconnected pipelines can still become difficult in a large enterprise environment. Sometimes error logs and pipeline failure messages could be more descriptive or developer-friendly, especially for distributed PySpark jobs. Another pain point is customization limitations in certain UI-driven components. While low-code tools are great for rapid development, highly customized workflows sometimes still require engineering workarounds or deeper technical implementation. The platform is extremely capable, but improvements around usability, debugging experience, DevOps flexibility, and ecosystem openness would make it even more effective for enterprise engineering teams.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."
"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."
"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."
"We primarily use Confluent for service desk and task management, and it is also good for knowledge base management."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"Both time and money were saved since a project that would usually take six months was completed in two to three months."
"It is easy to map out a workflow and run trigger-based scripts without having to deploy to another server."
"In my experience, the best features Palantir Foundry offers include the ontology and the possibility to create a digital twin of your company."
"Palantir Foundry has positively impacted my organization by centralizing the way we build applications and standardizing business metric reporting, creating more alignment across my team and the organization, greater productivity between teams, and quicker cycle times into production."
"The solution offers very good end-to-end capabilities."
"Palantir Foundry has positively impacted my organization by saving time in creating agents and dashboards and definitely enhancing collaboration."
"Palantir Foundry has positively impacted my organization by providing good support from Palantir teams, facilitating the development of many new solutions, building our UI and web applications, and significantly enhancing our productivity."
"The best features Palantir Foundry offers include the semantic layer providing schema-level understanding about the data, low-code and no-code integration for ease without coding in the pipeline builder, AI Assist for assistance, Ontology for digital twin relationships, branching in pipeline level and Foundry branching for better management, zero-copy architecture for querying without massive data, data lineage for troubleshooting, and security changes that can be made in the pipeline builder and Ontology Workshop."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"Difficult to receive data from external sources."
"The frontend capabilities of Palantir Foundry could be improved."
"In my use of Palantir Foundry, many people can go in there and create datasets, save datasets, and share datasets. However, if many people make datasets of low quality or if they are using the same name for datasets, it can get very confusing."
"There are some limitations when dealing with a large-scale project."
"Cost of this solution is quite high."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Palantir Foundry was challenging for us."
"It is a very complicated platform, and you need to understand a lot about how to use it and the underlying thinking behind Foundry."
"With Palantir Foundry, it is a part of the user tools that they provide. Their AI Assist that they use is something I have found that sometimes I get better results for when I do need help and aid."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It comes with a high cost."
"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."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"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."
"It's expensive."
"The solution’s pricing is high."
"Palantir Foundry has different pricing models that can be negotiated."
"Palantir Foundry is an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Retailer
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
University
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 Business11
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise49
 

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 Palantir Foundry?
One challenge regarding how Palantir Foundry can be improved is the learning curve. Foundry has a very broad ecosystem with Ontology, Pipeline Builder, Code Repositories, and AI integrations. For n...
What is your primary use case for Palantir Foundry?
I use Palantir Foundry for my primary use case, which involves building and maintaining end-to-end pipelines and operational data products at UHG for our healthcare analytics team. I work on data i...
What advice do you have for others considering Palantir Foundry?
My advice would be to approach Palantir Foundry as an enterprise operational platform, not just a traditional data tool. The platform delivers the most value when organizations fully leverage its g...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Merck KGaA, Airbus, Ferrari,United States Intelligence Community, United States Department of Defense
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