Apache Kafka vs. Five9

Apache Kafka is well-suited for most data-streaming use cases. Amazon Kinesis and Azure EventHubs, unless you have a specific use case where using those cloud PaAS for your data lakes, once set up well, Apache Kafka will take care of everything else in the background. Azure EventHubs, is good for cross-cloud use cases, and Amazon Kinesis - I have no real-world experience. But I believe it is the same.

very well suited for large number of enrollments, registrations by insurance companies. Also we recently implemented it for automating a order placement. Maybe not very well suited for live agent chat experience as there are limitations on texting, laggy performance in this area. I think its also hard to incorporate a payment system within the five9- Salesforce automation.

Incentivized

• Really easy to configure. I've used other message brokers such as RabbitMQ and compared to them, Kafka's configurations are very easy to understand and tweak.
• Very scalable: easily configured to run on multiple nodes allowing for ease of parallelism (assuming your queues/topics don't have to be consumed in the exact same order the messages were delivered)
• Not exactly a feature, but I trust Kafka will be around for at least another decade because active development has continued to be strong and there's a lot of financial backing from Confluent and LinkedIn, and probably many other companies who are using it (which, anecdotally, is many).

Incentivized

• Inbound and outbound calls it process is so well.
• The service is so good and they give very efficient support in customer need.
• The calls we can do in Five9 include incoming, outgoing, voicemails and we can also send a note to a specific person. It's a very reliable mode of communication.

• Sometimes it becomes difficult to monitor our Kafka deployments. We've been able to overcome it largely using AWS MSK, a managed service for Apache Kafka, but a separate monitoring dashboard would have been great.
• Simplify the process for local deployment of Kafka and provide a user interface to get visibility into the different topics and the messages being processed.
• Learning curve around creation of broker and topics could be simplified

• Text. Texting is incredibly difficult on Five9. We've had issues with only some texts logging to Salesforce, issues with threading of text conversations, and issues with having Salesforce contact information appear on the text widget (knowing who you are texting, not just their phone number).
• The interface to "pause" is challenging. There are not good reminders to our reps to remember to pause or log out of Five9. If you forget to log out, this can affect stats about who worked the longest hours that day - and it's hard to know who actually was active on the phones.
• Inbound voicemails are too-easily hidden. It's challenging for a lot of our reps to remember to check their inbound voicemails because it is hard to access them in the Five9 widget.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Robust product, great reliability and support.

Incentivized

Apache Kafka is highly recommended to develop loosely coupled, real-time processing applications. Also, Apache Kafka provides property based configuration. Producer, Consumer and broker contain their own separate property file

Incentivized

The Five9 solution is very easy to use and for a very dynamic Contact Center environment, the scalability and flexiblity is untouched. Can we brought into a environment and be up and running in not time as with the power of cloud technologies. Minimal training is needed to onboard new agent.

Incentivized

We have had minimal downtime due to system outages since it was implemented.

Incentivized

The system's performance is great. Page loads quickly. Reports are generated quickly and sent to our email or FTP. The integration did not impact the performance of our other applications. We have not seen any drop in the performance of either applications since we performed the integration.

Incentivized

Support for Apache Kafka (if willing to pay) is available from Confluent that includes the same time that created Kafka at Linkedin so they know this software in and out. Moreover, Apache Kafka is well known and best practices documents and deployment scenarios are easily available for download. For example, from eBay, Linkedin, Uber, and NYTimes.

Incentivized

Five9's Customer Support team is also based in Manila Philippines, thus turnaround email response times for our reported issues are great for our requirements. Their CS agents also facilitate mobile calls to followup on outstanding issues and operate on a 24/7 schedule. We've also had experience working with the senior tech agents to investigate recurring issues to completion.

Incentivized

I took the certification course for administrator and also received some tips while working with the developer during implementation. The UI was very intuitive, so I was able to figure out how things worked when I configured the users, skills, campaigns, IVR scripts. I worked with the Five9 AI team to beta test Agent Assist.

Incentivized

The implementation team that was assigned to us was great. The project manager was very helpful and managed the timeline very efficiently. The developer was very helpful and provided insights while helping us configure the system.

Incentivized

I used other messaging/queue solutions that are a lot more basic than Confluent Kafka, as well as another solution that is no longer in the market called Xively, which was bought and "buried" by Google. In comparison, these solutions offer way fewer functionalities and respond to other needs.

Incentivized

Initially selected Five9 but have since switched to RingCentral which has given us what we needed. Better CRM integration, simpler and in my opinion more robust reporting capabilities and the same omnichannel solution at a fraction of the cost

Incentivized

We do annual renewals and it's concurrent licensing which is great.

Incentivized

It was very easy to add additional licenses. Once we placed the order, it was activated the following day. Since it's web-based, it's very quick to deploy across multiple sites.

Incentivized

Five9 Professional Services team is very knowledgeable and efficient. I worked with them during implementation and during beta testing for Five9 Agent Assist and Ai Insights.

Incentivized

• Positive: Get a quick and reliable pub/sub model implemented - data across components flows easily.
• Positive: it's scalable so we can develop small and scale for real-world scenarios
• Negative: it's easy to get into a confusing situation if you are not experienced yet or something strange has happened (rare, but it does). Troubleshooting such situations can take time and effort.

Incentivized

• Cost savings: Five9 replaced a premise-based outbound dialer and a different virtual call center solution for inbound.
• Cost savings: Five9's voice over IP is less expensive than the land lines we were using.
• Cost savings: Five9 requires significantly less management than our previous solutions.

Incentivized