Confluent vs StreamSets comparison

The compared Confluent and IBM solutions aren't in the same category. Confluent is ranked #4 in SA , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 8.2% mindshare in the category. IBM is ranked #22 in DI , with an average rating of 8.8, and holds a 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Confluent users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Confluent

Read 23 Confluent reviews

4,010 Views
2,445 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

StreamSets

Read 21 StreamSets reviews

2,186 Views
1,376 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Confluent

StreamSets

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Confluent and StreamSets 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. StreamSets Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Confluent vs. StreamSets

June 2025

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Helped 859,438 peers since 2012

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

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (4th)

StreamSets

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Integration (22nd)

Mindshare comparison

Confluent and StreamSets aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Confluent is designed for Streaming Analytics and holds a mindshare of 8.2%, down 10.9% compared to last year.
StreamSets, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.6% mindshare, up 1.4% since last year.

Streaming Analytics

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Gustavo-Barbosa Dos Santos

Software Architect at C&A Brasil

Has good technical support services and a valuable feature for real-time data streaming

Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance. It helps us understand the various requirements of multiple customers and validates the information for different versions. We can automate the tasks using Confluent Kafka. Thus, it guarantees us the data quality and maintains the integrity of message contracts.

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Ved Prakash Yadav

Senior Data Platform Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Useful for data transformation and helps with column encryption

We use various tools and alerting systems to notify us of pipeline errors or failures. StreamSets supports data governance and compliance by allowing us to encrypt incoming data based on specified rules. We can easily encrypt columns by providing the column name and hash key. If you're considering using StreamSets for the first time, I would advise first understanding why you want to use it and how it will benefit you. If you're dealing with change tracking or handling large amounts of data, it could be cost-effective compared to services like Amazon. It's easy to schedule and manage tasks with the tool, and you can enhance your skills as an ETL developer. You can easily migrate traditional pipelines built on platforms like Informatica or Talend to StreamSets. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

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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

"With Confluent Cloud we no longer need to handle the infrastructure and the plumbing, which is a concern for Confluent. The other advantage is that all portfolios have access to the data that is being shared."

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

"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."

"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."

"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."

"It is also good for knowledge base management."

"The documentation process is fast with the tool."

"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."

More Confluent pros

"It is really easy to set up and the interface is easy to use."

"The most valuable feature is the pipelines because they enable us to pull in and push out data from different sources and to manipulate and clean things up within them."

"For me, the most valuable features in StreamSets have to be the Data Collector and Control Hub, but especially the Data Collector. That feature is very elegant and seamlessly works with numerous source systems."

"The entire user interface is very simple and the simplicity of creating pipelines is something that I like very much about it. The design experience is very smooth."

"StreamSets is the leader in the market."

"StreamSets’ data drift resilience has reduced the time it takes us to fix data drift breakages. For example, in our previous Hadoop scenario, when we were creating the Sqoop-based processes to move data from source to destinations, we were getting the job done. That took approximately an hour to an hour and a half when we did it with Hadoop. However, with the StreamSets, since it works on a data collector-based mechanism, it completes the same process in 15 minutes of time. Therefore, it has saved us around 45 minutes per data pipeline or table that we migrate. Thus, it reduced the data transfer, including the drift part, by 45 minutes."

"In StreamSets, everything is in one place."

"The most valuable would be the GUI platform that I saw. I first saw it at a special session that StreamSets provided towards the end of the summer. I saw the way you set it up and how you have different processes going on with your data. The design experience seemed to be pretty straightforward to me in terms of how you drag and drop these nodes and connect them with arrows."

More StreamSets pros

Cons

"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."

"there is room for improvement in the visualization."

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

"The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."

"I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."

"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."

"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."

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

More Confluent cons

"The software is very good overall. Areas for improvement are the error logging and the version history. I would like to see better, more detailed error logging information."

"Sometimes, it is not clear at first how to set up nodes. A site with an explanation of how each node works would be very helpful."

"I would like to see it integrate with other kinds of platforms, other than Java. We're going to have a lot of applications using .NET and other languages or frameworks. StreamSets is very helpful for the old Java platform but it's hard to integrate with the other platforms and frameworks."

"StreamSets should provide a mechanism to be able to perform data quality assessment when the data is being moved from one source to the target."

"We've seen a couple of cases where it appears to have a memory leak or a similar problem."

"One thing that I would like to add is the ability to manually enter data. The way the solution currently works is we don't have the option to manually change the data at any point in time. Being able to do that will allow us to do everything that we want to do with our data. Sometimes, we need to manually manipulate the data to make it more accurate in case our prior bifurcation filters are not good. If we have the option to manually enter the data or make the exact iterations on the data set, that would be a good thing."

"StreamSet works great for batch processing but we are looking for something that is more real-time. We need latency in numbers below milliseconds."

"The logging mechanism could be improved. If I am working on a pipeline, then create a job out of it and it is running, it will generate constant logs. So, the logging mechanism could be simplified. Now, it is a bit difficult to understand and filter the logs. It takes some time."

More StreamSets cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."

"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."

"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."

"You have to pay additional for one or two features."

"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 an expensive solution."

"Confluent is highly priced."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

"The overall cost is very flexible so it is not a burden for our organization... However, the cost should be improved. For small and mid-size organizations it might be a challenge."

"The pricing is too fixed. It should be based on how much data you need to process. Some businesses are not so big that they process a lot of data."

"It has a CPU core-based licensing, which works for us and is quite good."

"We use the free version. It's great for a public, free release. Our stance is that the paid support model is too expensive to get into. They should honestly reevaluate that."

"StreamSets Data Collector is open source. One can utilize the StreamSets Data Collector, but the Control Hub is the main repository where all the jobs are present. Everything happens in Control Hub."

"Its pricing is pretty much up to the mark. For smaller enterprises, it could be a big price to pay at the initial stage of operations, but the moment you have the Seed B or Seed C funding and you want to scale up your operations and aren't much worried about the funds, at that point in time, you would need a solution that could be scaled."

"I believe the pricing is not equitable."

"StreamSets is an expensive solution."

More StreamSets pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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?

I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team. The lack of easy access to the Confluent support team is also a...

See all answers

What do you like most about StreamSets?

The best thing about StreamSets is its plugins, which are very useful and work well with almost every data source. It's also easy to use, especially if you're comfortable with SQL. You can customiz...

See all answers

What needs improvement with StreamSets?

One issue I observed with StreamSets is that the memory runs out quickly when processing large volumes of data. Because of this memory issue, we have to upgrade our EC2 boxes in the Amazon AWS infr...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for StreamSets?

We are using StreamSets for batch loading.

See all answers

Comparisons

Amazon Kinesis vs Confluent

Compared 17% of the time

Databricks vs Confluent

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon MSK vs Confluent

Compared 9% of the time

Cribl vs Confluent

Compared 5% of the time

AWS Glue vs Confluent

Compared 5% of the time

More Confluent Competitors

Informatica PowerCenter vs StreamSets

Compared 13% of the time

IBM InfoSphere DataStage vs StreamSets

Compared 12% of the time

webMethods.io vs StreamSets

Compared 10% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs StreamSets

Compared 7% of the time

Boomi iPaaS vs StreamSets

Compared 3% of the time

More StreamSets Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Confluent

April 2025

Download Confluent product report

Buyer's Guide

StreamSets

May 2025

Download StreamSets product report

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

StreamSets is a data integration platform that enables organizations to efficiently move and process data across various systems. It offers a user-friendly interface for designing, deploying, and managing data pipelines, allowing users to easily connect to various data sources and destinations. StreamSets also provides real-time monitoring and alerting capabilities, ensuring that data is flowing smoothly and any issues are quickly addressed.

IBM

Sample Customers

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

Availity, BT Group, Humana, Deluxe, GSK, RingCentral, IBM, Shell, SamTrans, State of Ohio, TalentFulfilled, TechBridge

Buyer's Guide

Confluent vs. StreamSets

June 2025

Free Report: Confluent vs. StreamSets

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