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Confluent vs webMethods.io 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
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (7th)
webMethods.io
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
95
Ranking in other categories
Business-to-Business Middleware (6th), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (4th), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (14th), API Management (17th), Cloud Data Integration (12th), Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

PavanManepalli - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
YM
Developer at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Offers strong integration capabilities and reliable features but needs pricing and scaling improvements
Many things are evolving with the AI buzz in the market. What I would like to see improved or enhanced in webMethods.io in the future is that since webMethods.io is already under IBM, I think IBM will introduce and integrate AI into it. Additionally, regarding what webMethods.io can improve is the license cost. Other cloud players are also providing the same kind of functionality, such as AWS and Azure. webMethods.io is being installed on-premises, but AWS is providing it directly in the cloud. When comparing the license cost and request per minute cost, webMethods.io needs to address that. There are many competitors in the market for this.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"Confluent is an amazing tool that is highly configurable, integrates very well with Jira, and lets you create nice documentation for various products while also supporting reporting and online content hosting."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"This is a middleware tool from Software AG, so when there is a need for EAI/ESB, or B2B; the use cases and implementations are plenty and can vary according to business and enterprise architecture."
"The core product can be used not only for automatic file transfers between applications, but also as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)."
"WM is an enterprise bus which is used for all integrations, bringing all message transfers into one application, and making monitoring and integration of applications easy."
"The tool supports gRPC."
"The time to market is relatively less, it's simple to learn for Java users, its administration is easier, and it has an extensive toolset with out-of-the-box libraries support."
"Segregation of deployment for the environments is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"This solution is flexible and can be used across a number of projects."
"One [of the most valuable features] is the webMethods Designer. That helps our developers develop on their own. It's very intuitive for design. It helps our developers to speed the development of services for the integrations."
 

Cons

"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"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."
"I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"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."
"The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."
"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 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."
"Other products have been using AI and cloud enhancements, but webMethods Integration Server is still lagging in that key area."
"The learning curve is a little steep at first."
"The Software AG Designer could be more memory-efficient or CPU-efficient so that we can use it with middle-spec hardware."
"I'd like to see the admin portal for managing the integration server go up a level, to have more capabilities and to be given a more modern web interface."
"It could be more user-friendly."
"I would like to have a dashboard where I can see all of the communication between components and the configuration."
"DevOps could be better."
"Upgrades are complex. They typically take about five months from start to finish. There are many packages that plug into webMethods Integration Server, which is the central point for a vast majority of the transactions at my organization. Anytime we are upgrading that, there are complexities within each component that we must understand. That makes any upgrade very cumbersome and complicated. That has been my experience at this company. Because there are many different business units that we are touching, there are so many different components that we are touching. The amount of READMEs that you have to go through takes some time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"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."
"It comes with a high cost."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"webMethods.io Integration's pricing is high and has yearly subscription costs."
"It is a cost-effective solution."
"Pricing is the number-one downfall. It's too expensive. They could make more money by dropping the price in half and getting more customers. It's the best product there is, but it's too expensive."
"Sometimes we don't have a very clear idea what the licensing will entail at first, because it can be very customizable. On one hand, this can be a good thing, because it can be tailored to a specific customer's needs. But on the other hand it can also be an issue when some customer asks, "What's the cost?" and we can't yet give them an accurate answer."
"It is an expensive tool. I rate the product price a nine out of ten, where ten means it is very expensive."
"webMethods Integration Server is expensive, and there's no fixed price on it because it has a point pricing model. You can negotiate, which makes it interesting."
"It is worth the cost."
"The product is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise65
 

Questions from the Community

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 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 ...
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...
What needs improvement with webMethods Integration Server?
The alignment of on-premise and cloud versions needs improvement.
What needs improvement with webMethods Trading Networks?
webMethods.io does not currently have certain features, and we have to do coding as well. However, they have recently come up with a hybrid application where users will be able to use drag-and-drop...
What is your primary use case for webMethods Trading Networks?
We are primarily focused on IBM webMethods. I am part of the Center of Excellence team, where we involve ourselves in proposals and providing solutions to clients. webMethods.io is a middleware too...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Built.io Flow, webMethods Integration Server, webMethods Trading Networks, webMethods ActiveTransfer, webMethods.io API
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Cisco, Agralogics, Dreamforce, Cables & Sensors, Sacramento Kings
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