Confluent vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

The compared Confluent and Hitachi Vantara solutions aren't in the same category. Confluent is ranked #5 in SA , with an average rating of 7.8, and holds a 6.8% mindshare in the category. Hitachi Vantara is ranked #11 in DI , with an average rating of 7.6, and holds a 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Confluent users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

Confluent

Read 25 Confluent reviews

4,579 Views
2,335 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Read 59 Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics reviews

3,113 Views
2,428 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Confluent

Pentaho Data Integration an...

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Confluent and Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Streaming Analytics solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Confluent vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Confluent vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

December 2025

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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

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (5th)

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Integration (11th)

Mindshare comparison

Confluent and Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Confluent is designed for Streaming Analytics and holds a mindshare of 6.8%, down 8.7% compared to last year.
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.5% mindshare, up 1.3% since last year.

Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Confluent	6.8%
Apache Flink	12.3%
Databricks	10.0%
Other	70.9%

Streaming Analytics

Data Integration Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics	1.5%
SSIS	4.0%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)	3.7%
Other	90.8%

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

PavanManepalli

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.

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Michelle Lawson

Principal Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Streamlines complex data workflows and has supported automated customer payment notifications

I haven't used Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics in a couple of years, so I don't know how it can be improved. I was pretty pleased with it and was self-taught on it, working a lot with their team at various times, but they were surprised that I was able to learn it all by myself. The documentation is not bad, and documentation is the main thing that any product can do to make themselves better because the easier it is to find examples of what you're trying to do improves the learning curve. I think it took me the longest to learn how to do the asynchronous processing and have things wait for other things to finish processing before continuing on in the workflow. I choose 8 out of 10 because the one reason that it's been rejected at T-Mobile is that everything has to go through a provisioning process and has to get approved, meaning the actual code base has to be investigated by T-Mobile before they'll allow us to use tools of that nature. For whatever reason, we just haven't been able to get that approval; I don't know if it's on Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics' side or if it's on our side. The more you can make it easier for companies to feel comfortable that your product is secure, robustly tested and bug-free, and free of any other kind of negative hacks, the more quickly it will get accepted.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 client APIs are the most valuable feature."

"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."

"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."

"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."

"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."

"Some of the best features are that it's very quick to set up, very easy to have a centralized area that gives us a history of changes, and the ability to give feedback on any information placed onto the pages."

"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."

More Confluent pros

"It is easy to use, install, and start working with."

"Data transformation within Pentaho is a nice feature that they have and that I value."

"Provides a good open source option."

"It makes it pretty simple to do some fairly complicated things. Both I and some of our other BI developers have made stabs at using, for example, SQL Server Integration Services, and we found them a little bit frustrating compared to Data Integration. So, its ease of use is right up there."

"One of the valuable features is the ability to use PL/SQL statements inside the data transformations and jobs."

"I absolutely love Hitachi. I'm one of the forefront supporters of Hitachi for my firm. It's so easy to integrate within our environments. In terms of being able to quickly build ETL jobs, transform, and then automate them, it's really easy to integrate throughout for data analytics."

"The solution has a free to use community version."

"The fact that it's a low-code solution is valuable. It's good for more junior people who may not be as experienced with programming."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pros

Cons

"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."

"It would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."

"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."

"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."

"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."

"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."

"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."

"We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."

More Confluent cons

"It could be better integrated with programming languages, like Python and R. Right now, if I want to run a Python code on one of my ETLs, it is a bit difficult to do. It would be great if we have some modules where we could code directly in a Python language. We don't really have a way to run Python code natively."

"In terms of improvements, while creating on a remote service, we face challenges related to limited memory, which calls for optimization."

"Some of the scheduling features about Lumada drive me buggy. The one issue that always drives me up the wall is when Daylight Savings Time changes. It doesn't take that into account elegantly. Every time it changes, I have to do something. It's not a big deal, but it's annoying."

"One thing I wish was better about Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is its performance, as it sometimes gets intensive on the CPU standpoint, taking a lot of memory in some cases, especially when dealing with big data sets."

"As far as I remember, not all connectors worked very well. They can add more connectors and more drivers to the process to integrate with more flows."

"Should provide additional control for the data warehouse"

"I experience difficulties when handling millions of rows, as the data movement from one source to another becomes challenging."

"I would like to see improvements made for real-time data processing."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is an expensive solution."

"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."

"It comes with a high cost."

"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."

"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 highly priced."

"The solution is cheaper than other products."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

"I primarily work on the Community Version, which is available to use free of charge."

"The solution reduced our ETL development time by a lot because a whole project used to take about a month to get done previously. After having Lumada, it took just a week. For a big company in Brazil, it saves a team at least $10,000 a month."

"I use it because it is free. I download from their page for free. I don't have to pay for a license. With other tools, I have to pay for the licenses. That is why I use Pentaho."

"When we first started with it, it was much cheaper. It has gone up drastically, especially since Hitachi bought out Pentaho."

"There was a cost analysis done and Pentaho did favorably in terms of cost."

"You need to go through the paid version to have Hitachi Lumada specialized support. However, if you are using the free version, then you will have only the community support. You will depend on the releases from Hitachi to solve some problem or questions that you have, such as bug fixes. You will need to wait for the newest versions or releases to solve these types of problems."

"The cost of these types of solutions are expensive. So, we really appreciate what we get for our money. Though, we don't think of the solution as a top-of-the-line solution or anything like that."

"We are using the Community Edition. We have been trying to use and sell the Enterprise version, but that hasn't been possible due to the budget required for it."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	16

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	18
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	29

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Confluent?

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 to...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?

They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Confluent?

See all answers

Which ETL tool would you recommend to populate data from OLTP to OLAP?

Hi Rajneesh, yes here is the feature comparison between the community and enterprise edition : https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/pdf/brochure/leverage-open-source-benefits-with-assurance-of-hita...

See all answers

What do you think can be improved with Hitachi Lumada Data Integrations?

In my opinion, the reporting side of this tool needs serious improvements. In my previous company, we worked with Hitachi Lumada Data Integration and while it does a good job for what it’s worth, ...

See all answers

What do you use Hitachi Lumada Data Integrations for most frequently?

My company has used this product to transform data from databases, CSV files, and flat files. It really does a good job. We were most satisfied with the results in terms of how many people could us...

See all answers

Comparisons

Palantir Foundry vs Confluent

Compared 14% of the time

Apache Flink vs Confluent

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon Kinesis vs Confluent

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Confluent

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon MSK vs Confluent

Compared 5% of the time

More Confluent Competitors

Airbyte Cloud vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 11% of the time

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 8% of the time

Informatica PowerCenter vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 8% of the time

SnapLogic vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 7% of the time

SSIS vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 6% of the time

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Confluent

January 2026

Download Confluent product report

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

January 2026

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics report

Download Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics product report

Also Known As

No data available

Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration

Overview

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:

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

Confluent

Pentaho Data Integration stands as a versatile platform designed to cater to the data integration and analytics needs of organizations, regardless of their size. This powerful solution is the go-to choice for businesses seeking to seamlessly integrate data from diverse sources, including databases, files, and applications. Pentaho Data Integration facilitates the essential tasks of cleaning and transforming data, ensuring it's primed for meaningful analysis. With a wide array of tools for data mining, machine learning, and statistical analysis, Pentaho Data Integration empowers organizations to glean valuable insights from their data. What sets Pentaho Data Integration apart is its maturity and a vibrant community of users and developers, making it a reliable and cost-effective option. Pentaho Data Integration offers a range of features, including a comprehensive ETL toolkit, data cleaning and transformation capabilities, robust data analysis tools, and seamless deployment options for data integration and analytics solutions, making it a go-to solution for organizations seeking to harness the power of their data.

Hitachi Vantara

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost

66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute

Buyer's Guide

Confluent vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

December 2025

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