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 8.3, and holds a 9.8% mindshare in the category. IBM is ranked #9 in DI , with an average rating of 8.4, and holds a 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Confluent users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Confluent

Read 22 Confluent reviews

7,673 Views
5,835 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

StreamSets

Read 24 StreamSets reviews

3,261 Views
2,029 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: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Confluent vs. StreamSets

October 2024

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Helped 813,418 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Confluent

Average Rating

8.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (4th)

StreamSets

Average Rating

8.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Integration (9th)

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 9.8%, down 12.4% compared to last year.
StreamSets, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.7% mindshare, up 1.3% since last year.

Streaming Analytics

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Gustavo-Barbosa Dos Santos

Software Architect at C&A Brasil

Jan 8, 2024

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

We use the product to store and govern the data 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…

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Reyansh Kumar

Technical Specialist at Accenture

Mar 10, 2023

We no longer need to hire highly skilled data engineers to create and monitor data pipelines

The things I like about StreamSets are its * overall user interface * efficiency * product features, which are all good. Also, the scheduling within the data engineering pipeline is very much appreciated, and it has a wide range of connectors for connecting to any data sources like SQL Server, AWS, Azure, etc. We have used it with Kafka, Hadoop, and Azure Data Factory Datasets. Connecting to these systems with StreamSets is very easy. You just need to configure the data sources, the paths and their configurations, and you are ready to go. It is very efficient and very easy to use for ETL pipelines. It is a GUI-based interface in which you can easily create or design your own data pipelines with just a few clicks. As for moving data into modern analytics systems, we are using it with Microsoft Power BI, AWS, and some on-premises solutions, and it is very easy to get data from StreamSets into them. No hardcore coding or special technical expertise is required. It is also a no-code platform in which you can configure your data sources and data output for easy configuration of your data pipeline. This is a very important aspect because if a tool requires code development, we need to hire software developers to get the task done. By using StreamSets, it can be done with a few clicks.

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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."

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

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

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

"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."

"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."

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

"The benefit is escaping email communication. Sometimes people ignore emails or put them into spam, but with Confluence, everyone sees the same text at the same time."

More Confluent pros

"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."

"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 customize it to do what you need. Many other tools have started to use features similar to those introduced by StreamSets, like automated workflows that are easy to set up."

"The Ease of configuration for pipes is amazing. It has a lot of connectors. Mainly, we can do everything with the data in the pipe. I really like the graphical interface too"

"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."

"The most valuable features are the option of integration with a variety of protocols, languages, and origins."

"StreamSets Transformer is a good feature because it helps you when you are developing applications and when you don't want to write a lot of code. That is the best feature overall."

"I really appreciate the numerous ready connectors available on both the source and target sides, the support for various media file formats, and the ease of configuring and managing pipelines centrally."

"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

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

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

"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."

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

"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."

"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."

"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."

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

More Confluent cons

"The data collector in StreamSets has to be designed properly. For example, a simple database configuration with MySQL DB requires the MySQL Connector to be installed."

"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."

"Sometimes, when we have large amounts of data that is very efficiently stored in Hadoop or Kafka, it is not very efficient to run it through StreamSets, due to the lack of efficiency or the resources that StreamSets is using."

"The design experience is the bane of our existence because their documentation is not the best. Even when they update their software, they don't publish the best information on how to update and change your pipeline configuration to make it conform to current best practices. We don't pay for the added support. We use the "freeware version." The user community, as well as the documentation they provide for the standard user, are difficult, at best."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More StreamSets cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Confluent is highly priced."

"The solution is cheaper than other products."

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

"Confluent is an expensive solution."

"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."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

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

"StreamSets is an expensive solution."

"It's not so favorable for small companies."

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

"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."

"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."

More StreamSets pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

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?

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 maintenanc...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Confluent?

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 c...

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?

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 ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for StreamSets?

StreamSets is used for data transformation rather than ETL processes. It focuses on transforming data directly from sources without handling the extraction part of the process. The transformed data...

See all answers

Comparisons

Amazon Kinesis vs Confluent

Compared 14% of the time

Amazon MSK vs Confluent

Compared 14% of the time

Databricks vs Confluent

Compared 7% of the time

AWS Glue vs Confluent

Compared 5% of the time

Oracle GoldenGate vs Confluent

Compared 4% of the time

More Confluent Competitors

Informatica PowerCenter vs StreamSets

Compared 12% of the time

IBM InfoSphere DataStage vs StreamSets

Compared 11% of the time

Fivetran vs StreamSets

Compared 10% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs StreamSets

Compared 9% of the time

Matillion ETL vs StreamSets

Compared 3% of the time

More StreamSets Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Confluent

October 2024

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Buyer's Guide

StreamSets

September 2024

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Confluent

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IBM

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.”

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.

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

October 2024

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