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 Pub/Sub
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Google offers Cloud Pub/Sub, a managed message oriented middleware supporting many-to-many asynchronous messaging between applications.
N/A
Pricing
Confluent
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Editions & Modules
Basic
$0
Standard
Starting at ~$385
per month
Enterprise
Starting at ~$1,150
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Confluent
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Confluent monthly bills are based upon resource consumption, i.e., you are only charged for the resources you use when you actually use them:
Stream: Kafka clusters are billed for eCKUs/CKUs ($/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).
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Confluent
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Considered Both Products
Confluent
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Confluent
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 …
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.
If you want to stream high volumes of data, be it for ETL streaming or event sourcing, Google Cloud Pub/Sub is your go-to tool. It's easy to learn, easy to observe its metrics and scales with ease without additional configuration so if you have more producers of consumers, all you need to do is to deploy on k8s your solutions so that you can perform autoscaling on your pods to adjust to the data volume. The DLQ is also very transparent and easy to configure. Your code will have no logic whatsoever regarding orchestrating pubsub, you just plug and play. However, if you are not in the Google Cloud Pub/Sub environment, you might have trouble or be most likely unable to use it since I think it's a product of Google Cloud.
With a pub/sub architecture the consumer is decoupled in time from the publisher i.e. if the consumer goes down, it can replay any events that occurred during its downtime.
It also allows consumer to throttle and batch incoming data providing much needed flexibility while working with multiple types of data sources
A simple and easy to use UI on cloud console for setup and debugging
It enables event-driven architectures and asynchronous parallel processing, while improving performance, reliability and scalability
It serves all of our purposes in the most transparent way I can imagine, after seeing other message queueing providers, I can only attest to its quality.
It has many libraries in many languages, google provides either good guides or they're AI generated code libraries that are easy to understand. It has very good observability too.
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.
They have decent documentation, but you need to pay for support. We weren't able to answer all our questions with the documentation and didn't have time to setup support before we needed it so I can't give it a higher rating but I think it tends to be a bit slow unless you're a GCP enterprise support customer.
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.
Having used Amazon Web Services SNS & SQS I can say that even if the latter may offer more features, Google Cloud Pub/Sub is easier to use. On the other hand, usage of SNS & SQS as well as documentation and troubleshooting is easier with the AWS solution. Since we are not using GCP only for Pub/Sub the choice depends on other variables.
You can just plug in consumers at will and it will respond, there's no need for further configuration or introducing new concepts. You have a queue, if it's slow, you plug in more consumers to process more messages: simple as that.