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Confluent vs SharePlex 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 (3rd)
SharePlex
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (47th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Confluent and SharePlex aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Confluent is designed for Streaming Analytics and holds a mindshare of 8.5%, down 9.7% compared to last year.
SharePlex, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 0.8% mindshare, up 0.7% since last year.
Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Confluent8.5%
Apache Flink14.8%
Databricks12.5%
Other64.2%
Streaming Analytics
Data Integration Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SharePlex0.8%
Informatica PowerCenter6.0%
SSIS5.7%
Other87.5%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

PavanManepalli - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
KW
It reduces the downtime and migration time exponentially
I would rate SharePlex's high availability, and disaster recovery features highly. It works as advertised in terms of rapid fill-over and switch-over opportunities. It reduces the migration time for a multi-terabyte database to an hour or less because it performs real-time replication. SharePlex reduces downtime and migration time exponentially. Something that could take 12 to 24 hours is cut down to one to two hours. By the time you start to migrate, the only remaining replication is a slight difference in data from the point when SharePlex has shut down, and the application has to also switch over to the new database. It allowed the company to replicate data more transparently. Some of the business executives probably don't even know it's there. It works 100 percent of the time, with little downtime or problems. It provides what is needed. There's little concern about whether or not it functions. It's allowed the company to achieve its objectives with its clients, reducing and minimizing downtime for substantial migrations and upgrades. It can reduce hardware and storage costs, but my company doesn't utilize it with high-availability architecture.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"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 client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"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."
"There are some capabilities within SharePlex where you can see how the data is migrating and if it still maintains good data integrity. For example, if there are some tables that get out of sync, there are ways to find them and fix the problem on the spot. Since these are very common issues, we can easily fix these types of problems using utilities, like compare and repair. So, if you find something is out of sync, then you can just repair that table. It basically syncs that table from source to target to see if there are any differences. It will then replicate those differences to the target."
"I like SharePlex's Compare and Repair tool."
"The core features of the solution we like are the reliability of the data transfer and the accuracy of data read and write. The stability of the solution is also excellent."
"Because of the volume of the transactions, we heavily use a feature that allows SharePlex to replicate thousands of transactions. It's called PEP, Post Enhancement Performance, and that has helped us scale tremendously."
"The core replication and its performance. Performance is crucial, and SharePlex is by far the fastest. The way it handles replication to multiple targets along with basic filtering, as well as from multiple sources to a single target, is very efficient."
 

Cons

"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."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"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."
"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 no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."
"The reporting features need improvement. It would be very good for users to have a clear understanding of the status of replication."
"I don't know how easy it would be to change the architecture in an already implemented replication. For example, if we have a certain way of architecting for a particular database migration and want to change that during a period of time, is that an easy or difficult change? There was a need for us to change the architecture in-between the migration, but we didn't do it. We thought, "This is possibly complicated. Let's not change it in the middle because we were approaching our cutover date." That was one thing that we should have checked with support about for training."
"I would like the solution to have some kind of machine learning and AI capabilities. Often, if we want to improve the performance of posting, we have to bump up a parameter. That means we need to stop the process, come up with a figure that we want to bump the parameter up to, and then start SharePlex. Machine learning and AI capabilities for these kinds of improvement would tremendously help boost productivity for us."
"For its function in relation to replication (i.e. filtering), I'd give it a six or seven out of 10. GoldenGate has much more functionality by comparison."
"I would like more ability to automate installation and configuration in line with some of the DevOps processes that are more mature in the market. That would be a considerable improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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."
"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 expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"It is not as expensive as Oracle GoldenGate and has worked really well within our budgets."
"It's really good value for the money. There are some things they could improve on, but in terms of the pricing, features, and support, as a holistic package, we are not thinking of anything else at this point in time."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
No data available
 

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...
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?
People do not appreciate that Confluent is pushing us more towards Teams because they want to use a true Microsoft Word-type format where we can format our sentences better, instead of just saying ...
Ask a question
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Dell SharePlex, SharePlex
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Bodybuilding.com, Priceline.com, Ameco Beijing, Viasat, SK Broadband
Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. SharePlex and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
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