Confluent vs. Google Cloud Dataflow

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Confluent
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Confluent Cloud is a cloud-native service for Apache Kafka used to connect and process data in real time with a fully managed data streaming platform. Confluent Platform is the self-managed version.
$385
per month
Google Cloud Dataflow
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Google offers Cloud Dataflow, a managed streaming analytics platform for real-time data insights, fraud detection, and other purposes.N/A
Pricing
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Dataflow
Editions & Modules
Basic
$0
Standard
Starting at ~$385
per month
Enterprise
Starting at ~$1,150
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Dataflow
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsConfluent monthly bills are based upon resource consumption, i.e., you are only charged for the resources you use when you actually use them: Stream: Kafka clusters are billed for eCKUs/CKUs ($/hour), networking ($/GB), and storage ($/GB-hour). Connect: Use of connectors is billed based on throughput ($/GB) and a task base price ($/task/hour). Process: Use of stream processing with Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink is calculated based on CFUs ($/minute). Govern: Use of Stream Governance is billed based on environment ($/hour). Confluent storage and throughput is calculated in binary gigabytes (GB), where 1 GB is 2^30 bytes. This unit of measurement is also known as a gibibyte (GiB). Please also note that all prices are stated in United States Dollars unless specifically stated otherwise. All billing computations are conducted in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Dataflow
Features
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Dataflow
Streaming Analytics
Comparison of Streaming Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Confluent
9.1
2 Ratings
13% above category average
Google Cloud Dataflow
7.3
2 Ratings
9% below category average
Real-Time Data Analysis10.02 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Visualization Dashboards8.02 Ratings5.01 Ratings
Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources10.02 Ratings9.02 Ratings
Low Latency9.02 Ratings9.02 Ratings
Integrated Development Tools8.02 Ratings6.01 Ratings
Linear Scale-Out9.02 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Data Enrichment10.01 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Data wrangling and preparation00 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Machine Learning Automation00 Ratings6.02 Ratings
Best Alternatives
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Dataflow
Small Businesses
IBM Streams (discontinued)
IBM Streams (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
IBM Streams (discontinued)
IBM Streams (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Tealium Customer Data Hub
Tealium Customer Data Hub
Score 8.4 out of 10
Confluent
Confluent
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Spotfire Streaming
Spotfire Streaming
Score 5.2 out of 10
Spotfire Streaming
Spotfire Streaming
Score 5.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Dataflow
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(2 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Dataflow
Likelihood to Recommend
Confluent
If you have a need to stream data, real time or segmented structured data then Confluent is a great platform to do so with. You won't run into packet transfer size limitations that other platforms have. Flexibility in on-prem, cloud, and managed cloud offerings makes it very flexible no matter how you choose to implement.
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Google
It is best in cases where you have batch as well as streaming data. Also in some cases where you have batch data right now and in future you will get streaming data. In those cases Dataflow is very good. Also in cases where most of your infra is on GCP. It might not be good when you already are on AWS or Azure. And also you want in-depth control over security and management. Then you can directly use Apache beam over Dataflow.
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Pros
Confluent
  • Products work great.
  • Training is available.
  • Customer support is good.
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Google
  • Streaming, Real time work load
  • Batch processing
  • Auto scaling
  • flexible pricing
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Cons
Confluent
  • Cloud based Azure platform features for Confluent lacks behind AWS And GCP
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Google
  • More templates for Bigquery and App Engine. There is only limited options for templates so the things we use can limit.
  • I would like native connectors for Excel (XLSX) to reduce the need for custom wrappers in financial pipelines.
  • Debugging Google Cloud Dataflow using only logs in Cloud Logging can be overwhelming sometimes, and it’s not always obvious which specific element in the flow caused a failure. IT uses a lot of time.
Read full review
Usability
Confluent
No answers on this topic
Google
It really saved a lot of time and it's flexibility really can give you infra which is future-proof for most of the use cases may it be streaming or batch data. And with this you can avoid use of resource-heavy big data offerings.
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Support Rating
Confluent
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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Google
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Confluent
For our use case it was very important that the technology we were working with fit into our Azure architecture, and met our data processing size requirements to stream data within certain SLAs. Confluent more than met our performance requirements and compared to the others scale options and cost to run it was more than financially viable as a platform solution to our global operations.
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Google
Google Cloud Dataproc Cloud Datafusion
Read full review
Return on Investment
Confluent
  • 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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Google
  • cost saving from managing our own data center for ETL servers
  • consumption based pricing
  • with auto scaling feature, we were able to expand components to support work load
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ScreenShots