Confluent provides a fully managed Kafka Service, allowing us as developers to focus on building applications rather than managing the underlying infrastructure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When using a fully managed Kafka service, you create a dependency on the provider with some limitations and, of course, a cost. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Smooth integration, and resilence aThe best part is that it removes the operational burden of running Kafka ourselves. We use Kafka as the backbone for subscription lifecycle events — membership state transitions, billing events, feature-specific event streams — and with Confluent we get elastic, fully managed clusters without dedicating engineering time to broker management, partition rebalancing, or upgrade cycles. For a lean distributed team, not having a Kafka ops rotation is a genuine capacity win.nd stability. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Debugging tooling in the console is limited. Inspecting messages on a topic, tracing a specific event through the system, or answering "did this event actually get produced, and who consumed it" still means reaching for CLI tools or custom consumers. For a platform this mature, message browsing and search in the UI feel underpowered. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like how with Confluent, the entire setup can be done from the user interface or API calls, avoiding the headache of managing a self-managed cluster. It's really convenient because you just need to provision the Kafka topic, partition, and consumer groups, and it's ready to use. I appreciate the self-managed clusters, as I don't need to manage the backend infrastructure like other message queue services. The cross-cluster replication is a good feature, which is useful for disaster recovery and other activities. Additionally, estimating the volume of data and provisioning nodes accordingly is straightforward. You can spin it up in 1-2 days, and it's ready for all producers and consumers. Monitoring metrics from the UI and setting up alerts based on specific criteria is also a nice touch. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For authentication, you cannot use Keytab-based authentication, which is commonly used. Instead, you have to use service account-based authentication, which is generally available. If you want to use Keytab-based authentication, you need to use Confluent Mesh, which is again a paid software. I think Confluent Mesh should be part of the Confluent package itself instead of buying that package separately. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Confluent is fully managed event streaming platform. Maintenance of Kafka clusters, partitions, connectors is a very tedious task. Confluent makes it very easy in overall maintenance and deployment of the real-time analytics platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The overall learning curve of the platform is very high. As an individual, I had to know about the basics of a lot of topics: Kafka, connectors, security. Their documentation is not up to the mark, especially on deployment, and is not beginner-friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I extremely like the ease with which I can enable Confluent in my company with just a few clicks, making its setup a truly amazing and hassle-free process. It is not necessary to have particular technical skills or advanced infrastructure skills to start using the platform, which makes it accessible to a wide range of users. This ease of use is further amplified by the ability to do data streaming without the need to manage a complex Kafka infrastructure, which is particularly advantageous and represents a huge saving of time and resources. I also appreciate how Confluent offers a scalable and reliable solution for data streaming in my company, which allows me to integrate it smoothly with other platforms within my IT ecosystem, improving the overall efficiency of operations. Finally, I am satisfied with the ability to have my environment configured and ready for initial tests extremely quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Observability could be improved with more effective out-of-the-box tools, such as searching for messages within topics. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really liked how Confluent simplified working with Kafka and Flink through managed cloud services like Azure. The simple UI and wide range of connectors make real-time data integration effortless to me. Another highlight is the scalability and reliability while working on massive data streams. The schema registry and also KSQLDB make stream processing and governance much better and fluent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The pricing will shoot up as your data volume grows up. Some features are only available in Enterprise edition. Also one must spend lot of time to understand the whole workflow. Quite a bit steep learning curve. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It saves a lot of developer time and helps in productivity. It provides a unified platform for building and running real-time data pipelines, applications, and microservices and also it provides a wide range of features to enterprise edition so it is a good choice for companies that need a reliable and scalable platform for managing their real-time data. It is very easy to integrate with all the software because of this the usage has increased drastically. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some of the Confluent documents are outdated so it gets difficult to follow, so we need to search for those doubts and follow Stack Overflow to get those resolved. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Confluent has great documentation and developer advocacy resources. I learned Kafka and Kafka Streams almost exclusively using Confluent resources. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I did not use Confluent tooling deeply or long enough to find downsides. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Confluent has enhanced Kafka infrastructure management features in the last year.

2. The platform serves as a unified solution for real-time data pipelines, applications, and microservices. Offers a wide range of features in the enterprise edition for reliable and scalable real-time data management.

3. Easy integration with various software solutions, contributing to a significant increase in usage. Schema Registry exports, Prometheus monitoring tools are Valuable. Impressive API integrations and support for Infrastructure as Code (IaaC) through Terraform.

4. Confluent's support has proven to be time-saving and enhances developer productivity.

Key highlights: reliable Kafka clusters, schema registry for message reliability, user-friendly web interface. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. The web interface lacks some features present in APIs and the shell.

2. Schema exporter is not fully supported in Terraform.

3. Some Confluent documents are outdated, requiring external searches and Stack Overflow for issue resolution. Documentation, especially on deployment, is not up to par and is not beginner-friendly.

4. The overall learning curve is high, requiring knowledge of Kafka, connectors, and security. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Confluent has, in the last year, released a lot of additional features that make it simpler to manage the Confluent Kafka infrastructure. My organization manages its infrastructure through Terraform, so having a Terraform provider is a big requirement for us. In addition, Confluent also provides a lot of tooling that is consistently useful (Schema Registry exports, Prometheus monitoring tools, etc). In addition to this, their support has been useful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are some minor growing pains related to building out the managed Kafka infrastructure at Confluent. As a result, we've had to spend a considerable amount of effort rectifying initial account design decisions that we later found out were incorrect. To be fair, if we had started using Confluent today, we wouldn't have run into these issues. It's clear that Confluent has made significant leaps since we first started using them 2 years ago. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.