Confluent's price needs improvement.

Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud.

Having more control over the page layout in Confluence would be helpful, as it currently feels somewhat limited in terms of style. Additionally, we have experienced some issues with the solution's functionality, particularly with regard to document management and version control. Preferably having access to more pre-set business processes and style functions, rather than having to create everything from scratch each time we deploy. It's important to keep in mind that Confluence is not a traditional document management system but rather a wiki-style platform. As such, it can be too open for certain business processes and requires careful attention to prevent files and content from becoming disorganized.

One of the challenges lies in Access Management, particularly when you need to share documents with an external audience, such as customers. Currently, it is more suited for in-house usage, and it doesn't readily support collaborative document sharing with external parties. As a workaround, many resort to using other platforms like Slack to create user IDs and facilitate interactions with external stakeholders, even integrating tools like Canvas for this purpose. Its integration with Microsoft documentation is not as robust as desired. 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.

The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful.

The professional services team must be improved. There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia. Whenever we require some implementation, we use the professional service. We used it in only one project, but the service wasn’t good. The team doesn’t have a local presence, and they do not understand our culture. It's not a technology issue. It's a service issue. The solution is not compatible with IBM Power. It caused an issue for us.

More instructions should be included. It should guide the people to build the site in an easy way because when you ramp up conference spaces, people start making an effort with, domain providers. Easy project management tools could be added.

This solution is different from other products we have used. It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages. When we moved to this solution, we noticed that failed messages do not automatically go into Dead Letter Queue (DLQ), which we had when we used Azure. We want something similar to be included in Confluent Kafka.

The Azure Service Bus background should be improved where the message processing and messages fail and automatically go into a DLQ. In Confluent Kafka, there is no concept of DLQ, so if any messages fail, you have to handle it on your end and push it to another topic. But in Azure Service Bus, it happens automatically if any message delivery fails. It puts it in a DLQ. We didn't bother about anything on the code front, but with Confluent Kafka, there is no concept of DLQ, and you have to manage when a message fails to deliver. We have to push it to another topic manually. This should have been on the Confluent Kafka, and if anything fails, it should automatically move the message to another topic that has been created. Still, we have to do this using our code explicitly.

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.

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.

It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well. If Confluent would publish the knowledge base, best practices, proper documentation; that would be helpful for folks who do not have support lines or are just assessing whether they can fit Confluent into their use case.

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.

Another area of improvement is on the metric side. The metrics are integrated within the documentation of the metrics and implementation of that metric. This ties back to the requirement of best practices. How to use metrics in the best possible way out of the box.

If you are using Confluent on-prem or cloud-based where you are packaging it within your own cloud infrastructure, there is a lot of documentation for that making it easier. However, if you are using only the SaaS platform, there is less support from Confluent Cloud.

We are still understanding the additional features but we have seen a gap in the features of the fully managed connector. They are lesser fully managed connectors that are relevant to our business requirements so we have requested those fully managed connectors be developed and released within the Confluent Hub portfolio of connectors.

Confluence requires documentation regarding how to manage connectors that are not fully managed, including what parameters are required for each processing connector. The documentation that is provided is not easy to understand.

The solution could have an extra plugin or upgrading feature. In addition, it could have more integration with different platforms and be more compatible.

They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues.

Confluent is expensive, and we face certain limitations while using the tool. Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable. We can only use the existing dashboards. On the other hand, we can utilize maximum customization while using Grafana with Prometheus. Confluent also supports JMX metrics, but using Grafana with Prometheus is very effective.

Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs, as well as enhancing the offset management tool for easier management of offset topics, reprocessing, and message filtering based on predicates.

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.

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.

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.