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Google Cloud Pub/Sub vs. IBM Confluent vs. IBM Streams (discontinued)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Google Cloud Pub/Sub

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AGoogle offers Cloud Pub/Sub, a managed message oriented middleware supporting many-to-many asynchronous messaging between applications.N/A

    IBM Confluent

    Score9.1 out of 10
    N/AIBM Confluent helps enterprises stream, connect, process, govern and serve real-time data across hybrid environments.

    $385

    per month

    IBM Streams (discontinued)

    Score9 out of 10
    N/AA real-time analytics solution that turns fast-moving volumes and varieties into insights. Streams evaluates a broad range of streaming data — unstructured text, video, audio, geospatial and sensor. The product was sunsetted in 2024.N/A
    Pricing
    Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM ConfluentIBM Streams (discontinued)
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Basic
    $0
    Standard
    Starting at ~$385
    per month
    Enterprise
    Starting at ~$1,150
    per month
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM ConfluentIBM Streams (discontinued)
    Free Trial
    NoNoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—Confluent monthly bills are based upon resource consumption, i.e., you are only charged for the resources you use when you actually use them: Stream: Kafka clusters are billed for eCKUs/CKUs ($/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).—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM ConfluentIBM Streams (discontinued)
    Considered Multiple Products
    Google
    No answer on this topic
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    5 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM ConfluentIBM Streams (discontinued)
    Streaming Analytics
    Comparison of Streaming Analytics features of Google Cloud Pub/Sub and IBM Confluent and IBM Streams (discontinued)
    Feature
    Google Cloud Pub/Sub
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Confluent
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Streams (discontinued)
    8.3
    5 Ratings
    6% above category average
    Real-Time Data Analysis00 Ratings00 Ratings8.05 Ratings
    Visualization Dashboards00 Ratings00 Ratings10.05 Ratings
    Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources00 Ratings00 Ratings9.05 Ratings
    Low Latency00 Ratings00 Ratings7.93 Ratings
    Integrated Development Tools00 Ratings00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
    Data wrangling and preparation00 Ratings00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
    Linear Scale-Out00 Ratings00 Ratings7.72 Ratings
    Machine Learning Automation00 Ratings00 Ratings9.05 Ratings
    Data Enrichment00 Ratings00 Ratings7.04 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM ConfluentIBM Streams (discontinued)
    Small Businesses
    Amazon SNS
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Amazon SNS
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Amazon Kinesis
    Score9.9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Amazon SNS
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Amazon SNS
    Score8.7 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    TIBCO Rendezvous
    Score6 out of 10
    Google Cloud Pub/Sub
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Spotfire Streaming
    Score5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM ConfluentIBM Streams (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (8 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    9.0
    (9 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Availability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.8
    (3 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Configurability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM ConfluentIBM Streams (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Google
    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.
    Read full review
    IBM
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    Like the name says, it is good for streaming data and analyzing. It is great to look at tuples at a fast rate, filtering, calling other sources to enrich data, can call APIs, etc. Could do better for ingest use cases, can do better with guaranteed delivery, etc.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Google
    • 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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • Products work great.
    • Training is available.
    • Customer support is good.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • IBM Streams is well suited for providing wire-speed real-time end-to-end processing with sub-millisecond latency.
    • Streams is amazingly computationally efficient. In other words, you can typically do much more processing with a given amount of hardware than other technologies. In a recent linear-road benchmark Streams based application was able to provide greater capability than the Hadoop-based implementation using 10x less hardware. So even when latency isn't critical, using Streams might still make sense for reducing operational cost.
    • Streams comes out of the box with a large and comprehensive set of tested and optimized toolkits. Leveraging these toolkits not only reduces the development time and cost but also helps reduce project risk by eliminating the need for custom code which likely has not seen as much time in test or production.
    • In addition to the out of the box toolkits, there is an active developer community contributing additional specialized packages.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Google
    • Would be nice if the queue could be extended beyond 7 days.
    • We found it a bit tricky replay unacknowledged messages when needed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • Cloud based Azure platform features for Confluent lacks behind AWS And GCP
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • Documentation could be more extensive, with more examples, although overall this is not too bad compared to some of the alternative solutions.
    • Seems expensive to use in production.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Google
    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.
    Read full review
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Google
    It is easy to create Google Cloud Pub/Sub topics from both Web Console and CLI commands.
    Google Cloud Pub/Sub supports creation of one or more subscriptions.
    By supporting a BigQuery Pub/Sub subscription to automatically write to a BigQuery table it simplifies development by avoiding implementation of a custom micro service for writes to BigQuery.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Reliability and Availability
    Google
    I have never faced a single problem in 4 years.
    Read full review
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Google
    It's very fast, can be even better if you use protobuf.
    Read full review
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Google
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Google
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    There are well explained tutorials to get the user started. If you are looking for business application ideas, the user community offers a diversity of applications. It is very easy to launch applications on the cloud and can integrate with other analytic tools available on Watson Studio. It takes away the burden of the technology so that users can focus on business innovations.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Google
    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.
    Read full review
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Google
    • Increased Efficiency with reliable and Google managed services up all the time wit Disaster Recovery in place as well
    • Definitely Lower costs being a cloud based solution and easier to setup
    • Faster Project delivery and go to market plan for the business use cases basis this technology at the back end
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • It enables us to develop event driven application.
    • It increases our ability to handle streaming data.
    • It reduces latency of communication.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • Ability to do more with less
    • Admins and data analyst can now focus on more thinking tasks
    • No negative impacts yet
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots