Confluent vs. IBM Watson Discovery

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Confluent
Score 9.2 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
IBM Watson Discovery
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
IBM offers Watson Discovery, a natural language processing (NLP) application with options to measure sentiment, detect entities, semantic roles, and other concepts.N/A
Pricing
ConfluentIBM Watson Discovery
Editions & Modules
Basic
$0
Standard
Starting at ~$385
per month
Enterprise
Starting at ~$1,150
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ConfluentIBM Watson Discovery
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsConfluent monthly bills are based upon resource consumption, i.e., you are only charged for the resources you use when you actually use them: Stream: Kafka clusters are billed for eCKUs/CKUs ($/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
ConfluentIBM Watson Discovery
Features
ConfluentIBM Watson Discovery
Streaming Analytics
Comparison of Streaming Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Confluent
9.1
2 Ratings
13% above category average
IBM Watson Discovery
-
Ratings
Real-Time Data Analysis10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Visualization Dashboards8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Low Latency9.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Integrated Development Tools8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Linear Scale-Out9.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Enrichment10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
ConfluentIBM Watson Discovery
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Yext
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Score 7.8 out of 10
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Tealium Customer Data Hub
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Score 8.5 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Spotfire Streaming
Spotfire Streaming
Score 5.1 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
ConfluentIBM Watson Discovery
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(2 ratings)
8.8
(26 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
5.3
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
ConfluentIBM Watson Discovery
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
Overall, IBM Watson Discovery is an amazing technology that we use with our clients to address various business problems, but the biggest challenge has always been about ingesting, analyzing, enriching, and searching huge collections of documents and allowing our end users and SMEs to be able to search for what they need to reduce the time and efforts spent daily on a manual search through various collections of documents. We have successfully managed to reduce manual work by over 80%, and now our SMEs are being used for the skills they have to gather insights rather than do manual work.
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Pros
Confluent
  • Products work great.
  • Training is available.
  • Customer support is good.
Read full review
IBM
  • It is an excellently fast platform with documents and the answers to queries.
  • With automation learning beneficial as it saves time.
  • When searching for a document, everything stays located and easy to find.
  • Acceptance of various documents.
  • It has a quite comfortable Technical support, always available when required.
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Cons
Confluent
  • Cloud based Azure platform features for Confluent lacks behind AWS And GCP
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IBM
  • I believe AI should be more flexible about providing data. However, it's understandable that you need to provide the details you need in a more specific and detailed way.
  • The interface could use more tweaking. Being new to the program, it was kind of hard to navigate.
  • Luckily, there was a customized feature of the dashboard that I could set up, and having something that you know where you are placed always feels familiar and comfortable.
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Usability
Confluent
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM Watson Discovery has the best user capabilities and easily transform business decision-making portfolio. The automation system saves time used in data analysis as opposed to manual research that consumes a lot of time. The visualization across the dashboard enables my team to interpret complex data and use it to make reliable marketing decisions.
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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
Similar to all IBM Watson and Salesforce product solutions, the overall support would be a 10/10. Their provided FAQ's help with frequently experienced issues and if still unable to figure something out, their customer service representatives are always super responsive. With instant chat functions available, it is easy to ask a quick question rather than sitting on hold.
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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
Discovery differs from its competitors due to the better ease of implementation and the high level of natural language recognition, it is equal in integration resources such as API and workflow or process pipeline, but it loses in the price for a high volume of documents and/or research. If you own or plan to use other services from the IBM Watson family, there is no doubt that Watson discovery is your best option. Another important point is if you plan to use a cloud or on-premise service (local server or private cloud).
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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
  • We find its Enterprise plan expensive for a country of LATAM. For US or Europe based businesses, looks great.
  • A Big Data and massive queries based company would find the service expensive. Maybe a flat price plan would be helpful.
  • Have you thought in making a cheaper plan where you take the learning from your customer's data to enrich your AI tool?
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ScreenShots