Apache Kafka vs Confluent Platform

Likelihood to Recommend

Despite the disadvantages I list, I really believe that Kafka is the right choice whenever you need a queueing or message broker system. Kafka is way too battle-tested and scales too well to ever not consider it. The only exception is if your use case requires many, many small topics. Also, Kafka doesn't support delay queues out of the box and so you will need to "hack" it through special code on the consumer side.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Internet Company, 201-500 employees

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If your company needs to build event-driven applications, like in healthcare industry, you need to enhance interoperability, and you are seeking a reliable service with enterprise-grade support, Confluent is the best on the market you can get. Their product works great and they provide very good customer service.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Insurance Company, 10,001+ employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Apache Kafka

Confluent Platform

Real-Time Data Analysis

Visualization Dashboards

Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources

Low Latency

Integrated Development Tools

Linear Scale-Out

Pros

Apache Kafka is able to handle a large number of I/Os (writes) using 3-4 cheap servers.
It scales very well over large workloads and can handle extreme-scale deployments (eg. Linkedin with 300 billion user events each day).
The same Kafka setup can be used as a messaging bus, storage system or a log aggregator making it easy to maintain as one system feeding multiple applications.

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Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology

Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employees

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Products work great.
Training is available.
Customer support is good.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Insurance Company, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

Still a bit inmature, some clients have required recoding in the last few versions
New feaures coming very fast, several upgrades a year may be required
Not many commercial companies provide support

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Juan Francisco Tavira

Global Technology Centre - Middleware

ProdubanFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees

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Cloud service might need more granular configuration.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Insurance Company, 10,001+ employees

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Likelihood to Renew

Apache Kafka 9.0

Based on 1 answer

Kafka is quickly becoming core product of the organization, indeed it is replacing older messaging systems. No better alternatives found yet

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Juan Francisco Tavira

Global Technology Centre - Middleware

ProdubanFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Support Rating

Apache Kafka 8.8

Based on 6 answers

We are using the Apache open source version of Kafka. The community is a good place to ask questions. and we can get most of our problems resolved there.

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Verified User

Strategist in Information Technology

Package/Freight Delivery Company, 10,001+ employees

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Confluent Platform 10.0

Based on 1 answer

The support from the Confluent platform is great and satisfying. We have been working with Confluent for more than a year now. They sent out resident architects to help us set up Confluent cluster on our cloud and help us troubleshoot problems we have encountered. Overall, it has been a great experience working with the Confluent Platform.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Insurance Company, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

I would only use RabbitMQ over Kafka when you need to have delay queues or tons of small topics/queues around.I don't know too much about Pulsar - currently evaluating it - but it's supposed to have the same or better throughput while allowing for tons of queues. Stay tuned - I might update this review after we finish evaluating Pulsar. It's much less battle-tested though.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Internet Company, 201-500 employees

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We chose to use the Confluent Platform because they provide enterprise-grade customer service support. Whenever we have trouble setting up or using the service, we can create a ticket for them and it will be resolved pretty fast. Kafka is the open-source software that comes without warranty.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Insurance Company, 10,001+ employees

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Return on Investment

Positive impact on ROI since now we can use one large deployment of Apache Kafka that can be used for multiple scenarios ( storage systems, log aggregate, messaging queue ).
It is open-source so there are no licenses or subscription fees reducing the cost of deployment.
Data can now be ingested and analyzed in real-time making it easy to fine-tune the customer experience and decision making for internal IT.

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Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology

Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employees

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It enables us to develop event driven application.
It increases our ability to handle streaming data.
It reduces latency of communication.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Insurance Company, 10,001+ employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Rating Summary

Apache Kafka

Confluent Platform

Apache Kafka

Confluent Platform

Apache Kafka

Confluent Platform

Apache Kafka vs Confluent Platform

Apache Kafka

Confluent Platform

Feature Rating Comparison

Streaming Analytics

Real-Time Data Analysis

Visualization Dashboards

Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources

Low Latency

Integrated Development Tools

Linear Scale-Out

Pros

Cons

Likelihood to Renew

Support Rating

Alternatives Considered

Return on Investment

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Rating Summary

Likelihood to Recommend

Likelihood to Renew

Support Rating

Add comparison