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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
6.7
Number of Reviews
23
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

"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."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"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."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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 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 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."
"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."
"The best feature that I really like is the integration."
"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."
 

Cons

"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"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."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"The Schema Registry service could be improved. I would like a bigger knowledge base of other use cases and more technical forums. It would be good to have more flexible monitoring features added to the next release as well."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"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."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"Visualization and monitoring need to be improved and refined."
"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."
"We've seen a couple of cases where it appears to have a memory leak or a similar problem."
"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."
"If you use JDBC Lookup, for example, it generally takes a long time to process data."
"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 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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It comes with a high cost."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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."
"It's not so favorable for small companies."
"We are running the community version right now, which can be used free of charge."
"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."
"There are two editions, Professional and Enterprise, and there is a free trial. We're using the Professional edition and it is competitively priced."
"It has a CPU core-based licensing, which works for us and is quite good."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
14%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
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: July 2025.
866,744 professionals have used our research since 2012.