Confluent Reviews

We're currently working on one of our largest implementations with 500 billion-plus records in real-time and 100 billion on a daily basis. The client aggregates the reports. I'm a solution architect and we are customers of Confluent. 

As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support. It's very important for us to have this.

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.

From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization. They're now aggressively pushing the Cloud version which is good, but there are still a lot of features missing there.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

If you take the version prior to the latest one, then it will be stable. We have a team of around 10 people working on the solution. Maintenance needs an operations team and admin availability in the event of performance degradation. It needs to be monitored 24/7.

This solution is highly scalable. 

Customer support is very good - we can raise a ticket through the portal and they get us on a video-sharing app to help solve the problem. 

We previously used the open-source version of Apache which doesn't have automated deployment using Ansible or even through Confluent Operator for Kubernetes. It required a lot of installation maintenance which can be tricky sometimes.

If you go for Confluent Cloud, then the deployment is just a plug-and-play. If it's on-prem and you're looking to deploy on a non-containerized platform, then there are very good Ansible scripts, which can be completely deployed. If you're going with Kubernetes, then they have something called Confluent Operator. Deployment requires an online admin and a minimum of three people for on-prem deployment. Implementation time depends on the cluster size. For eight nodes, deployment takes around 20 minutes but for a larger cluster with around 30 nodes, it can take an hour and a half. 

I think this is a very good solution and if there's no need to specifically take the on-prem version then in terms of maintenance and scalability, the cloud version would be the preferred option. If the organization has a very high volume of data then on-prem is preferable. In terms of performance, I believe Confluent is the market leader in streaming platforms.

I rate the solution seven out of 10. 

Confluent is an amazing tool. It gives you the ability to basically create nice documentation for various products. It is highly configurable and integrates very well with Jira. You can use it for reporting as well. When it comes to hosting online content, it is in competition with SharePoint.

It could have more themes. The themes in the version I'm using are very limited; they offer two to three themes. 

They should have more reporting-oriented plugins as well. It would be great to have free custom reports that can be dispatched directly from Jira.

I have been using Confluent for 15 years. 

Confluent is scalable. 

Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site. Whenever we have a query for them, they got back to us in time and with the information that we needed. 

I think the documentation that Atlassian provides has all the information you need to carry out the installation. The installation is very straightforward; I didn't come up against any challenges. 

I think Confluent's pricing is very competitive compared to other products on the market. This is especially considering its configurability and extensibility.

I would recommend this product. 

We are using Confluent for documentation. We use it to have documentation for the Agile team, as a reference or to share it with the stakeholders. It holds the project data, and what's happening right now. 

At a higher level, the business initiative and all things related to tracking high-level, enterprise-level tasks is something we are not doing it right now. We are doing that part in a very traditional way using Excel sheets, which is very manual work. We haven't automated it yet. 

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

The solution is stable. 

The scalability is good.

The solution offers good dashboards for the team they are easy to navigate and you can install them on your desktop or the local machine.

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. In my earlier organization, people used to struggle in adding the HTML tags to the Confluent. However, if a person is from an IT background, and he or she knows how to add the tags and browse product documentation, for them it is easy. A new user must go through the few training sessions for Confluent.

In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options. I remember in my previous company, I had an issue in adding a query where I could pull down information from Jira. The product, the team productivity, the team timesheets, et cetera. A few of those plugins must be more advanced in Confluent.

The plugin options need to be improved. I don't know whether we have something in Confluent where we can have a plugin for support teams. If not, that would be ideal.

I've been using the solution for about six years or so.

The stability is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The product can scale. However, the person must be used to that tool. It depends on how quickly the user can pick up working on that.

We likely have as many as 300 people using the solution.

I'm not sure if the organization intends to increase usage in the future.

I don't directly deal with technical support. That's all handled by our backend team, and therefore I leave it to them. Without any direct experience, I can't speak to how knowledgeable or responsive they are. 

I've used other project management-related products and document repository kinds of products like SharePoint or Microsoft Project.

Having used SharePoint in the past, when I compare with traditional, old document repositories, like SharePoint, I would definitely recommend Confluent. Confluent have many options compared to SharePoint.

In terms of the installation, for us, we have an Agile admin person that handled the setup. I wasn't a part of the process. I can't directly speak to the experience. I remember creating the project, however, I did not do the deployment part. 

I'm not sure how many people you need to handle the deployment. It might be four or five individuals.

I don't directly handle the licensing. My license is given to me. Therefore, I don't know the terms of the licensing or the exact costs.

We're customers and end-users.

The end products we have are Jira, Confluent, Bitbucket as well as Dynatrace. I'm not sure which plugins we use. Confluent we are using just for the documentation. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's been very handy for me and the team.