Confluent vs. IBM Streams

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Confluent
Score 7.4 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.N/A
IBM Streams
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
A 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 — helping organizations spot opportunities and risks as they happen. Its Eclipse-based, visual IDE lets solution architects visually build applications or use familiar programming languages like Java™, Scala or Python. Data engineers can connect with virtually any data source — whether…N/A
Pricing
ConfluentIBM Streams
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ConfluentIBM Streams
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
ConfluentIBM Streams
Streaming Analytics
Comparison of Streaming Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Confluent
9.1
2 Ratings
12% above category average
IBM Streams
8.3
5 Ratings
3% above category average
Real-Time Data Analysis10.02 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Visualization Dashboards8.02 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources10.02 Ratings9.05 Ratings
Low Latency9.02 Ratings7.93 Ratings
Integrated Development Tools8.02 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Linear Scale-Out9.02 Ratings7.72 Ratings
Data Enrichment10.01 Ratings7.04 Ratings
Data wrangling and preparation00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Machine Learning Automation00 Ratings9.05 Ratings
Best Alternatives
ConfluentIBM Streams
Small Businesses
IBM Streams
IBM Streams
Score 9.0 out of 10
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis
Score 8.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Tealium Customer Data Hub
Tealium Customer Data Hub
Score 8.7 out of 10
Confluent
Confluent
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Spotfire Streaming
Spotfire Streaming
Score 8.1 out of 10
Spotfire Streaming
Spotfire Streaming
Score 8.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
ConfluentIBM Streams
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(2 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
ConfluentIBM Streams
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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IBM
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.
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Pros
Confluent
  • Products work great.
  • Training is available.
  • Customer support is good.
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IBM
  • 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.
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Cons
Confluent
  • Cloud based Azure platform features for Confluent lacks behind AWS And GCP
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IBM
  • 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.
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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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IBM
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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IBM
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.
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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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IBM
  • Ability to do more with less
  • Admins and data analyst can now focus on more thinking tasks
  • No negative impacts yet
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ScreenShots