Confluent vs. Google Cloud Pub/Sub vs. Spotfire Streaming

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

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.

Taking data from various sources including files, databases, web services, applying some complex rules, transforming, aggregating and producing a result. This is what Spotfire Streaming does best.
- If one needs connectivity to special services as secured databases or web services, building interactive web apps, those are probably tasks that shall be addressed with different tools.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• 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

• Processing events in real-time with real low latency and high throughput.
• 100% visual program language, which can be extended by common languages like Java, Python and .NET.
• Reduced time to prototype, create an application and deployment, which reduces the software lifecycle.
• Real robust engine and server. Barely heard of customers having issues in production.

• Cloud based Azure platform features for Confluent lacks behind AWS And GCP

Incentivized

• Would be nice if the queue could be extended beyond 7 days.
• We found it a bit tricky replay unacknowledged messages when needed.

Incentivized

• Being a niche tool, there's not much community support
• It is on prem, making it slow to boot. not cloud native (It could be that it is our org's issue)
• The dev environment is very tough to understand for large projects due to the wire style UI/UX

Incentivized

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 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

The usability is good in terms that it gets well integrated with the Spotfire suite but the only few issues I have is the tough UI/UX (learning curve, if the project is huge) and unable to find many users and devs to help with the queries. At the end it is solely based on the documentation provided which is never enough

Incentivized

I have never faced a single problem in 4 years.

It's very fast, can be even better if you use protobuf.

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

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

Spotfire Streaming support is prompt and to the point. They help with best practices and learning from existing projects.

Incentivized

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

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

We are using Dataflow (by Google).The development time in Spotfire Streaming is definitely shorter because its GUI based. Dataflow handles late arrivals after the window closes, not sure Spotfire Streaming can do that. Dataflow can run GCP as a managed service which is why we chose that tool for our new product.

Incentivized

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.

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

Incentivized

• 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

• While we haven't specifically integrated Spotfire Streaming into our product development, it has allowed us to see the benefits of real-time streaming data.
• We have much more visibility into how our longer term roadmap will look and what we should focus on.

Incentivized