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Confluent vs StreamSets 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
6.4
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (3rd)
StreamSets
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
21
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 8.4%, down 9.8% compared to last year.
StreamSets, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.4% mindshare, down 1.5% since last year.
Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Confluent8.4%
Apache Flink14.6%
Databricks13.1%
Other63.9%
Streaming Analytics
Data Integration Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
StreamSets1.4%
Informatica PowerCenter6.3%
SSIS5.9%
Other86.4%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Gustavo-Barbosa Dos Santos - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Ved Prakash Yadav - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is also good for knowledge base management."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I have used Data Collector, Transformer, and Control Hub products from StreamSets. What I really like about these products is that they're very user-friendly. People who are not from a technological or core development background find it easy to get started and build data pipelines and connect to the databases. They would be comfortable like any technical person within a couple of weeks."
"The ability to have a good bifurcation rate and fewer mistakes is valuable."
"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."
"It is really easy to set up and the interface is easy to use."
"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."
"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."
"What I love the most is that StreamSets is very light. It's a containerized application. It's easy to use with Docker. If you are a large organization, it's very easy to use Kubernetes."
"The most valuable features are the option of integration with a variety of protocols, languages, and origins."
 

Cons

"We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."
"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."
"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."
"Confluent has fallen behind in being the tool of the industry. It's taking second place to things such as Word and SharePoint and other office tools that are more dynamic and flexible than Confluent."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"In terms of the product, I don't think there is any room for improvement because it is very good. One small area of improvement that is very much needed is on the knowledge base side. Sometimes, it is not very clear how to set up a certain process or a certain node for a person who's using the platform for the first time."
"They need to improve their customer care services. Sometimes it has taken more than 48 hours to resolve an issue. That should be reduced. They are aware of small or generic issues, but not the more technical or deep issues. For those, they require some time, generally 48 to 72 hours to respond. That should be improved."
"The execution engine could be improved. When I was at their session, they were using some obscure platform to run. There is a controller, which controls what happens on that, but you should be able to easily do this at any of the cloud services, such as Google Cloud. You shouldn't have any issues in terms of how to run it with their online development platform or design platform, basically their execution engine. There are issues with that."
"If you use JDBC Lookup, for example, it generally takes a long time to process data."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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 an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"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."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"It's not so favorable for small companies."
"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 licensing is expensive, and there are other costs involved too. I know from using the software that you have to buy new features whenever there are new updates, which I don't really like. But initially, it was very good."
"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."
"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."
"There are two editions, Professional and Enterprise, and there is a free trial. We're using the Professional edition and it is competitively priced."
"I believe the pricing is not equitable."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise11
 

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?
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...
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...
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...
What is your primary use case for StreamSets?
We are using StreamSets for batch loading.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. StreamSets and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.