# Confluent Reviews **Vendor:** Confluent **Category:** [Event Stream Processing Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/event-stream-processing) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 114 ## About Confluent Cloud-native service for data in motion built by the original creators of Apache Kafka® Today’s consumers have the world at their fingertips and hold an unforgiving expectation for end-to-end real-time brand experiences. Data in motion is the underlying, fundamental ingredient to any truly connected customer experience. It provides a continuous supply of real- time event streams coupled with real-time stream processing to power the data-driven backend operations and rich front-end experiences necessary for any business to succeed within today’s competitive, consumer-driven markets. Set your data in motion while avoiding the headaches of infrastructure management and focus on what matters most: your business. Built by the original creators of Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud is a fully managed, cloud-native service for connecting and processing all of your real-time data, everywhere it’s needed. ## Confluent Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **simplicity and scalability** of Confluent's cloud services, making data integration seamless and efficient. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **simplicity and scalability** of Confluent's cloud services for managing data streams effortlessly. (1 reviews) - Users value the **wide range of connectors** in Confluent, enhancing real-time data integration effortlessly. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **effortless real-time data integration** with Confluent, thanks to its simple UI and wide connectors. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of use** of Confluent, benefiting from its simple UI and managed cloud services. (1 reviews) - Easy Integrations (1 reviews) - Efficiency (1 reviews) - Features (1 reviews) - Integrations (1 reviews) - Real-time Data (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users caution that **cost estimation can become high** as data volume increases and features require an Enterprise edition. (1 reviews) - Users find the **high pricing structure** of Confluent challenging as data volume increases and features are limited. (1 reviews) - Users face **initial difficulties** due to high pricing and a steep learning curve to understand the workflow. (1 reviews) - Users find a **lack of features** in Confluent's basic plan, with many only accessible in the Enterprise edition. (1 reviews) - Users face a **steep learning curve** and escalating costs as their data volume increases with Confluent. (1 reviews) - Learning Difficulty (1 reviews) - Limited Features (1 reviews) - Resource Intensive Learning (1 reviews) - Steep Learning Curve (1 reviews) ## Confluent Reviews ### 1. Effortless Kafka Management with Confluent **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abhishek g. | Devops engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 04, 2026 **What do you like best about Confluent?** 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. **What do you dislike about Confluent?** 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. **What problems is Confluent solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Confluent to manage Kafka without the headache of backend infrastructure. It's easy to provision and monitor from the UI, with features like self-managed clusters and cross-cluster replication, making setup straightforward. ### 2. Easy to Configure with Few Skill Requirements **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Broadcast Media | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2025 **What do you like best about Confluent?** 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. **What do you dislike about Confluent?** Observability could be improved with more effective out-of-the-box tools, such as searching for messages within topics. **What problems is Confluent solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Confluent to enable data streaming without managing a complex infrastructure. It is scalable and does not require specific technical skills. With a few clicks, the system is ready, allowing me to start testing immediately. ### 3. Confluent: Go to platform for Real-Time Data Streaming **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 10, 2025 **What do you like best about Confluent?** 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. **What do you dislike about Confluent?** 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. **What problems is Confluent solving and how is that benefiting you?** Confluent's Steaming Agents is what we are working on. We are building Agentic AI systmes powered by Streaming Data / Event- Driven. Confluents seamless real-time data streaming is a very powerful service which is solving lot of problems for us while working with Agentic AI. ### 4. very fast integration and easy to use. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** ​Arepuri S. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 10, 2023 **What do you like best about Confluent?** 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 wide range of features to enterprise edition so it 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 softwares because of this the usage had increased drastically. **What do you dislike about Confluent?** some of the confluent documets are outdated so it gets difficult to follow so we need to search for those doubts and follow staskoverflow to get those resolved. **What problems is Confluent solving and how is that benefiting you?** Confluent provides a unified platform that simplifies the process of building and running real-time data pipelines. This benefits users by reducing the time and effort required to build and maintain their data pipelines. and Confluent's Apache Kafka platform is designed to scale horizontally, making it easy to add more capacity as needed. and the wide range of security concerns are also solved by confluent which is benefiting us. and large data streaming is also the most liked by all of our developers. ### 5. Experience with Confluent in my undergraduate research **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 20, 2024 **What do you like best about Confluent?** Confluent has great documentation and developer advocacy resources. I learned Kafka and Kafka Streams almost exclusively using Confluent resources. **What do you dislike about Confluent?** I did not use Confluent tooling deeply or long enough to find downsides. **What problems is Confluent solving and how is that benefiting you?** Not a business problem, but helped me implement an event-stream processor using Kafka Streams. The streaming portion of the work was abstracted so I could focus on the algorithmic gist of my project. ### 6. One of the best managed platform for Kafka **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Akash G. | Data Scientist, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 25, 2023 **What do you like best about Confluent?** 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. **What do you dislike about Confluent?** 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. **What problems is Confluent solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use an event-driven microservices architecture in our company, so Confluent solves the problem of managing clusters and provisioning infrastructure for Kafka. ### 7. Event-Driven Architecture - Kafka Vendor of Choice **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ian M. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2023 **What do you like best about Confluent?** 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. **What do you dislike about Confluent?** 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. **What problems is Confluent solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use an event-based architecture, so utilizing a managed Kafka solution was top of mind. Confluent is used to provide infrastructure that will allow our services to communicate with one another in an event-driven manner. ### 8. Confluent Cloud is the easiest and more reliable approach to kafka clusters **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Roberto Francesco L. | Data Architect Specialist, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 08, 2023 **What do you like best about Confluent?** - Reliable kafka clusters - Usage of schema registry for message reliability - Fantastic UX on the web interface - Amazing integrations with APIs - Support for Terraform for IaaC **What do you dislike about Confluent?** - The web interface does not have all the features implemented of the APIs and the shell - Schema exporter is not fully supported in Terraform **What problems is Confluent solving and how is that benefiting you?** Confluent helps us moving, in a reliable and stable way, big amount of data from datasources on prem/on cloud to our data lake, keeping all business and analytics process up and running with the latest data produced. ### 9. "A Game-Changer for Real-Time Data Management" **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Manish J. | PGET, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 15, 2023 **What do you like best about Confluent?** With Kafka topics, it is possible to easily set up a pub/sub pattern and provide producers and consumers with complete end-to-end visibility using Confluent Center. Simple to scale through the addition of brokers and "no downtime" software update/patch deployments. **What do you dislike about Confluent?** Confluent has nothing that I don't like. Instead, they are focusing on improving the data flow from the CDC. **What problems is Confluent solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our architecture is being redefined using event-driven microservices and stream processing pipelines, with Kafka serving as the only source of truth. Since our team's developers still need to go through a specific learning curve and paradigm shift, productivity is still lacking. ### 10. Flexibility of use **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ganesh G. | Senior Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2023 **What do you like best about Confluent?** Confluent made our event processing butter smooth. Millions of events fired and all got processed without breaking any sweat. Installation, configuration & integrations with relational database was cherry on top. As an administrator and developer, the documentation was so easy and relatable that we actually spend less time than we anticipated. **What do you dislike about Confluent?** Lack of third party learning resource and community support **What problems is Confluent solving and how is that benefiting you?** User attributions in performance marketing. ## Confluent Discussions - [What does Confluent software do?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-does-confluent-software-do) - [What is the difference between Confluent and Kafka?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-the-difference-between-confluent-and-kafka) - [Is Confluent SaaS or PaaS?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-confluent-saas-or-paas) - [How do you maintain the performance testing of it](https://www.g2.com/discussions/26477-how-do-you-maintain-the-performance-testing-of-it) - 1 upvote - [How do I write a test automation framework using KAFKA streams? like to assert the actual output to the expected output.](https://www.g2.com/discussions/29752-how-do-i-write-a-test-automation-framework-using-kafka-streams-like-to-assert-the-actual-output-to-the-expected-output) - [View Confluent pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/confluent/reviews/confluent-review-7181205?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-30+11%3A34%3A01+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=34a44fa6-8bef-4f41-97cd-c2156deb65a6&secure%5Btoken%5D=993457bbdb5d5fcb64bca0c2544f746eb34cb66280bb4e1b54a64ab5cb983a3b&format=llm_user) ## Confluent Features **Data** - Data Processing - Data Sources - Integration - Real-Time Processing **Database** - Real-Time Data Collection - Data Distribution - Data Lake **Data Transformation** - Real-Time Analytics - Data Querying **Analytics** - Reporting & Analytics **Integrations** - Hadoop Integration - Spark Integration **Platform** - Machine Scaling - Data Preparation - Spark Integration **Connectivity** - Hadoop Integration - Spark Integration - Multi-Source Analysis - Data Lake **Processing** - Cloud Processing - Workload Processing **Operations** - Data Visualization - Data Workflow - Governed Discovery **Building Reports** - Data Transformation - Data Modeling - WYSIWYG Report Design - Integration APIs **Platform** - Mobile User Support - Customization - User, Role, and Access Management - Internationalization - Sandbox / Test Environments - Performance and Reliability - Breadth of Partner Applications ## Top Confluent Alternatives - [Cloudera Data Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/cloudera-cloudera-data-platform/reviews) - 4.1/5.0 (131 reviews) - [Lenses](https://www.g2.com/products/lenses/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (17 reviews) - [Apache Kafka](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-kafka/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (126 reviews)