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Confluent vs Zapier comparison

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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 (9th)
Zapier
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (23rd), Cloud Data Integration (13th), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (20th), AI Software Development (21st)
 

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.
Amrit Dash - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation Engineer at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
Modular automations have streamlined onboarding and now orchestrate delayed multi-day workflows
Zapier offers the best features through the capability to make our own webhooks and the delay functionalities, which stand out in Zapier.The delay functionality and custom webhooks are valuable for our organization because of how we deal with things at our organization by creating things in a very modular way. We will have different modules talking to each other for a specific complex workflow. A webhook is what helps solve most of it because we can create all the different modules as a separate workflow in Zapier with their own custom webhook URL and then call them or chain them together to create a complex workflow solving a bigger use case problem. Secondly, the delays, with having a bigger delay in number of days, gives the automation a bigger window to run in, which is not the case with make.com or any other platform that we use for automation. The delays on other platforms are mostly within the range of one to five minutes because the scenario needs to run on that particular go. With Zapier, the scenario can span over multiple days and it does not take up running memory. Rather than that, it goes to sleep and runs back again after the designated time. With Zapier, I am able to handle workflows much faster. I have been able to reduce the effort the manual onboarding team and the operations team had to do in terms of employee onboarding. We have reduced the workflow time and made things more efficient and smoother and avoided any repetitive tasks in the day-to-day workflow of a team member. There is a significant reduction in manual work and team members save time by eliminating multiple workflows which are repetitive in nature that the automation team builds for them using Zapier.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The monitoring module is impressive."
"We primarily use Confluent for service desk and task management, and it is also good for knowledge base management."
"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."
"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it is very intuitive and has a very flat learning curve."
"Zapier's ability to connect disparate systems is incredibly valuable."
"Technical support is very good, I got the proper answer immediately via webchat."
"The ability to link Google Sheets to Salesforce is the most valuable feature."
"I like the ability to connect one system to another, whereas that wasn’t previously possible without a custom integration."
"There are a few valuable features, like the stability that it comes with and also the number of features that it offers. I've used other services like Pabbly, but they don't offer similar numbers of applications that Zapier has or allows to integrate with – it's maximum."
"Webhooks are the most valuable feature of Zapier."
"This product has made our daily reporting task simpler, by automating and integrating different apps."
 

Cons

"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"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 formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."
"The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"The solution could have an extra plugin or upgrading feature. In addition, it could have more integration with different platforms and be more compatible."
"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 is not worth the money if you have a little bit of a technical mind...Zapier is not able to set up different modules. When automation doesn't work, it's not that easy to find why it didn't work."
"The pricing of the solution is quite expensive."
"In our case, very limited actions and limited objects are supported."
"With Zapier, improvements are required in the areas of concerns like bugs, ease of use, and documentation."
"The solution does not work properly when we apply filters and we get errors."
"Zapier is good for small businesses, but it’s not reliable enough for large enterprise businesses where you need to automate business critical services."
"The cost of the solution is high. It's a bit costly as compared to Tableau or other solutions that are available in the market."
"The error reporting UI and organizing Zaps could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is highly priced."
"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 has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Zapier is a paid service. Its license renews monthly, and Zapier will downgrade your subscription to the free version when your credit card doesn't have funds. That significantly impacts your service because everything halts completely. Zapier doesn't have any hidden costs."
"Per task, there is a monthly plan involving 15 euros...Also, in different forms, they just give you the ability to use different features. They charge 18.58 euros for the first standard plan, which includes 750 tasks. So, it is about 25 cents per task."
"Zapier's price is good."
"It's very affordable."
"The least expensive plan is $24 a month, and you can go all the way to $800 a month if you're a huge company using many tasks."
"It's very straightforward licensing. There's only one cost you have to pay, and if you want a relevant pricing plan, I think you have two or three different models or packages which include the number of notifications or Zaps, as they call it, that you can program."
"Think your Zaps through to make sure you don't use more Zaps than you need."
"The product is reasonably priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Retailer
12%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Construction Company
6%
Construction Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

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 Business32
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise7
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zapier?
The pricing is in accordance with market standards and even lower in some cases. The license setup cost is reasonable.
What needs improvement with Zapier?
Zapier can be improved by having more complex running scenarios, such as running code and more custom modules, and maybe multi-router cases which will make the workflows even tighter and more compl...
What is your primary use case for Zapier?
My main use case for Zapier is that it acts as a no-code automation platform which helps us in automating business platforms and business process automation. It is a tool that we were using prior t...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
BuzzFeed, Groupon, Spotify, Columbia University, FOX
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