Google Cloud Pub/Sub vs. IBM Confluent

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Score 8.8 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
IBM Confluent
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
IBM Confluent Platform for Z and LinuxONE is an enterprise event streaming platform designed to run on Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE environments. It enables organizations to create, manage, and process real-time data streams using Apache Kafka-based technologies. The platform provides capabilities for event ingestion, data integration, stream processing, schema management, connectors, and operational management. It supports deployment models including virtual machines, containers, and Kubernetes…
$0
Pricing
Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM Confluent
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Basic
$0
Standard
Starting at ~$385
per month
Enterprise
Starting at ~$1,150
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM Confluent
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsConfluent monthly bills are based upon resource consumption, i.e., you are only charged for the resources you use when you actually use them: Stream: Kafka clusters are billed for eCKUs/CKUs ($/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
Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM Confluent
Considered Both Products
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Chose Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a managed service compared to Apache Kafka.

Simple Queue Service (SQS) is an Amazon managed service that supports similar functionality as compared to Google Cloud Pub/Sub. However, we selected Google Cloud Pub/Sub as all other services in our platform …
Chose Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Kafka looks like and ordered queue, there no deliver backoff, so if a message has a problem, it doesn't advance to the next one. Google Cloud Pub/Sub looks like more a SET of messages, and kafka like a LIST. In kafka a same message will repeat instantaneously while it is being …
Chose Google Cloud Pub/Sub
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 …
Chose Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Google Cloud Pub/Sub as a managed service is significantly more easy to use than a self managed Kafka cluster. As our software was already on GCP it was a no-brainer to use Pub/Sub due to the high level of integration and ease of use with other Google Cloud Platform services.
Chose Google Cloud Pub/Sub
  • Easy to setup Publisher, Subscribers and Message Queue service
  • More Reliable and Easy Scalable with Google Managed services
  • Easily integrated with most of the data sources we typically use for Data Storage and Analysis
Chose Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Amazon SQS has no integration with google play billing whereas Google Cloud Pub/Sub had native integration with google cloud billing, Play billing.
Chose Google Cloud Pub/Sub
We considered several messaging platforms including Kafka and Kinesis but both would have required more developer work and didn't integrate as nicely with our ecosystem. RabbitMQ is another messaging platform I've researched and prototyped on; it also would have required more …
Chose Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Compute Engine is not a direct competitor, but in fact, works well coupled with Pub/Sub.
IBM Confluent
Chose IBM 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 …
Chose IBM 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 …
Best Alternatives
Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM Confluent
Small Businesses
AWS IoT Core
AWS IoT Core
Score 9.9 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.8 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.8 out of 10
Spotfire Streaming
Spotfire Streaming
Score 5.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM Confluent
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.8
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google Cloud Pub/SubIBM Confluent
Likelihood to Recommend
Using Google Cloud Pub/Sub will mainly depend on the cloud platform used. Our client didn't choose GCP for Google Cloud Pub/Sub, if we went with AWS we would be using SNS/SQS (obviously). However, Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a better solution in the GCP services compared to self-managed solutions such as RabbitMQ for instance (it is managed by GCP and integrates with GCP solutions).
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If your company needs to build event-driven applications, like in healthcare industry, you need to enhance interoperability, and you are seeking a reliable service with enterprise-grade support, Confluent is the best on the market you can get. Their product works great and they provide very good customer service.
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Pros
  • A hands-off approach to publishing messages and subscribing to topics.
  • Easy to use APIs.
  • Useful, simple UI on cloud console to send messages for debugging, etc.
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  • Products work great.
  • Training is available.
  • Customer support is good.
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Cons
  • Allow write and read of messages more than 10 MB
  • Support rate at which HTTP endpoints are triggered to reduce scale requirements on downstream services
  • Support replay of messages
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  • Cloud based Azure platform features for Confluent lacks behind AWS And GCP
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Likelihood to Renew
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.
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No answers on this topic
Usability
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.
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No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
I have never faced a single problem in 4 years.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
It's very fast, can be even better if you use protobuf.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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.
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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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Alternatives Considered
  • Easy to setup Publisher, Subscribers and Message Queue service
  • More Reliable and Easy Scalable with Google Managed services
  • Easily integrated with most of the data sources we typically use for Data Storage and Analysis
  • 10k Topics is a good enough number to build and deliver the business use cases
  • Asynchronous and fallback mechanisms are great to ensure parallel delivery of the messages
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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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Scalability
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.
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • Pub/Sub has helped avoid data loss improving our customer value prop.
  • Pub/Sub has reduced development time that would otherwise be needed to build a highly scalable queue.
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  • Confluent replaced Microsoft Event Hubs in our environment and unblocked data platform services rollout globally.
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