Confluent vs StreamSets comparison

The compared Confluent and IBM solutions aren't in the same category. Confluent is ranked #5 in SA , with an average rating of 7.6, and holds a 6.5% mindshare in the category. IBM is ranked #25 in DI , with an average rating of 9.0, and holds a 1.1% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Confluent users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Confluent

Read 25 Confluent reviews

4,827 Views
2,607 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

StreamSets

Read 21 StreamSets reviews

3,183 Views
2,355 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Confluent

StreamSets

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Confluent vs. StreamSets

April 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 886,510 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

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (5th)

StreamSets

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Integration (25th)

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 6.5%, down 8.6% compared to last year.
StreamSets, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.1% mindshare, down 1.6% since last year.

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Confluent	6.5%
Apache Flink	9.8%
Databricks	8.2%
Other	75.5%

Streaming Analytics

Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
StreamSets	1.1%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)	3.5%
SSIS	3.5%
Other	91.9%

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

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 most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."

"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."

"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."

"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."

"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."

"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."

More Confluent pros

"StreamSets is the leader in the market."

"The ETL capabilities are very useful for us. We extract and transform data from multiple data sources, into a single, consistent data store, and then we put it in our systems. We typically use it to connect our Apache Kafka with data lakes. That process is smooth and saves us a lot of time in our production systems."

"This product was a lot easier to use than the one we had before it, and it took us half an hour and we were set up and running it the first time."

"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."

"It has helped us in moving into the data analytics world at a faster pace than any other tool would have done."

"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."

"StreamSets data drift feature gives us an alert upfront so we know that the data can be ingested. Whatever the schema or data type changes, it lands automatically into the data lake without any intervention from us, but then that information is crucial to fix for downstream pipelines, which process the data into models, like Tableau and Power BI models. This is actually very useful for us. We are already seeing benefits. Our pipelines used to break when there were data drift changes, then we needed to spend about a week fixing it. Right now, we are saving one to two weeks. Though, it depends on the complexity of the pipeline, we are definitely seeing a lot of time being saved."

"StreamSets' reusable assets have helped to reduce workload by 32% to 40%."

More StreamSets pros

Cons

"The beginner who doesn't know how to work on HTML will struggle as when you create spaces in the Confluent, if you want to have some meeting notes or anything else, you need to know HTML and which HTML tags to include."

"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."

"there is room for improvement in the visualization."

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

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

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

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

"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."

More Confluent cons

"We create pipelines or jobs in StreamSets Control Hub. It is a great feature, but if there is a way to have a folder structure or organize the pipelines and jobs in Control Hub, it would be great. I submitted a ticket for this some time back."

"If the data processing in StreamSets takes a long time as compared to the previous solution, then we will reconsider why we use StreamSets."

"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."

"The documentation is inadequate and has room for improvement because the technical support does not regularly update their documentation or the knowledge base."

"We often faced problems, especially with SAP ERP. We struggled because many columns weren't integers or primary keys, which StreamSets couldn't handle. We had to restructure our data tables, which was painful. Also, pipeline failures were common, and data drifting wasn't addressed, which made things worse. Licensing was another issue we encountered."

"The monitoring visualization is not that user-friendly. It should include other features to visualize things, like how many records were streamed from a source to a destination on a particular date."

"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."

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

More StreamSets cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"Confluent is highly priced."

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

"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."

"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is affordable for any business."

"We are running the community version right now, which can be used free of charge."

"There are different versions of the product. One is the corporate license version, and the other one is the open-source or free version. I have been using the corporate license version, but they have recently launched a new open-source version so that anybody can create an account and use it. The licensing cost varies from customer to customer. I don't have a lot of input on that. It is taken care of by PMO, and they seem fine with its pricing model. It is being used enterprise-wide. They seem to have got a good deal for StreamSets."

"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."

"I believe the pricing is not equitable."

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

"There are two editions, Professional and Enterprise, and there is a free trial. We're using the Professional edition and it is competitively priced."

"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."

More StreamSets pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Streaming Analytics solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

886,510 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Retailer

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software 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	9
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

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

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...

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

Palantir Foundry vs Confluent

Compared 13% of the time

Apache Flink vs Confluent

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon Kinesis vs Confluent

Compared 7% of the time

Databricks vs Confluent

Compared 7% of the time

Apache Spark Streaming vs Confluent

Compared 3% of the time

More Confluent Competitors

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs StreamSets

Compared 6% of the time

Informatica PowerCenter vs StreamSets

Compared 5% of the time

SSIS vs StreamSets

Compared 5% of the time

Matillion Data Productivity Cloud vs StreamSets

Compared 5% of the time

Oracle GoldenGate vs StreamSets

Compared 5% of the time

More StreamSets Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Confluent

April 2026

Download Confluent product report

Buyer's Guide

StreamSets

March 2026

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

April 2026

Free Report: Confluent vs. StreamSets

Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. StreamSets and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

886,510 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Confluent vs. StreamSets report.

We monitor all Streaming Analytics reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.