We compared Confluent and Amazon Kinesis based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
Based on user reviews, Confluent is praised for its efficient handling of vast amounts of data, seamless integration with various systems, and strong customer support. In contrast, Amazon Kinesis is commended for its real-time data processing capabilities, flexibility in integration with other AWS services, and user-friendly pricing and licensing. Confluent users highlight the need for improved UI and setup simplification, while Amazon Kinesis users suggest better documentation, UI enhancements, and scalability improvements. Ultimately, both platforms have received positive ROI feedback, with users experiencing returns on their investments.
Features: Confluent's valuable features include efficient handling of vast amounts of data, seamless integration with external systems, and comprehensive monitoring and management capabilities. Amazon Kinesis, on the other hand, offers efficient real-time processing of high data volumes, flexible data streaming and processing options, easy integration with AWS services, and availability of various tools and APIs.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Confluent's product has mixed sentiments from users, with some finding it manageable but others finding it complex. In contrast, users have positive feedback about the minimal and straightforward setup cost of Amazon Kinesis product., Confluent's product has received positive feedback for its strong return on investment. On the other hand, Amazon Kinesis offers significant ROI through cost savings, improved data processing efficiency, real-time analytics capabilities, scalability, and elasticity.
Room for Improvement: Confluent can improve its user interface and setup process, as well as provide better documentation. On the other hand, Amazon Kinesis needs enhancements in documentation, user interface, scalability, integrations, error handling, pricing, and customer support.
Deployment and customer support: User feedback on Confluent's tech solution indicates varying durations for deployment, setup, and implementation phases. In contrast, user feedback on Amazon Kinesis shows different timeframes for deployment and setup, emphasizing the need to consider them together or separately., Confluent's customer service is highly regarded for prompt and efficient support, while Amazon Kinesis is praised for outstanding assistance and representatives going above and beyond to address issues.
The summary above is based on 18 interviews we conducted recently with Confluent and Amazon Kinesis users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Kinesis is a fully managed program streaming application. You can manage any infrastructure. It is also scalable. Kinesis can handle any amount of data streaming and process data from hundreds, thousands of processes in every source with very low latency."
"I have worked in companies that build tools in-house. They face scaling challenges."
"Everything is hosted and simple."
"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."
"From my experience, one of the most valuable features is the ability to track silent events on endpoints. Previously, these events might have gone unnoticed, but now we can access them within the product range. For example, if a customer reports that their calls are not reaching the portal files, we can use this feature to troubleshoot and optimize the system."
"What I like about Amazon Kinesis is that it's very effective for small businesses. It's a well-managed solution with excellent reporting. Amazon Kinesis is also easy to use, and even a novice developer can work with it, versus Apache Kafka, which requires expertise."
"The feature that I've found most valuable is the replay. That is one of the most valuable in our business. We are business-to-business so replay was an important feature - being able to replay for 24 hours. That's an important feature."
"The solution's technical support is flawless."
"With Confluent Cloud we no longer need to handle the infrastructure and the plumbing, which is a concern for Confluent. The other advantage is that all portfolios have access to the data that is being shared."
"The benefit is escaping email communication. Sometimes people ignore emails or put them into spam, but with Confluence, everyone sees the same text at the same time."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"I find Confluent's Kafka Connectors and Kafka Streams invaluable for my use cases because they simplify real-time data processing and ETL tasks by providing reliable, pre-packaged connectors and tools."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"The solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."
"Amazon Kinesis involved a more complex setup and configuration than Azure Event Hub."
"Kinesis Data Analytics needs to be improved somewhat. It's SQL based data but it is not as user friendly as MySQL or Athena tools."
"Lacks first in, first out queuing."
"One thing that would be nice would be a policy for increasing the number of Kinesis streams because that's the one thing that's constant. You can change it in real time, but somebody has to change it, or you have to set some kind of meter. So, auto-scaling of adding and removing streams would be nice."
"Something else to mention is that we use Kinesis with Lambda a lot and the fact that you can only connect one Stream to one Lambda, I find is a limiting factor. I would definitely recommend to remove that constraint."
"Kinesis is good for Amazon Cloud but not as suitable for other cloud vendors."
"One area for improvement in the solution is the file size limitation of 10 Mb. My company works with files with a larger file size. The batch size and throughput also need improvement in Amazon Kinesis."
"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"The product should integrate tools for incorporating diagrams like Lucidchart. It also needs to improve its formatting features. We also faced issues while granting permissions."
"The Schema Registry service could be improved. I would like a bigger knowledge base of other use cases and more technical forums. It would be good to have more flexible monitoring features added to the next release as well."
"Confluent's price needs improvement."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"Currently, in the early stages, I see a gap on the security side. If you are using the SaaS version, we would like to get a fuller, more secure solution that can be adopted right out of the box. Confluence could do a better job sharing best practices or a reusable pattern that others have used, especially for companies that can not afford to hire professional services from Confluent."
"There is a limitation when it comes to seamlessly importing Microsoft documents into Confluent pages, which can be inconvenient for users who frequently work with Microsoft Office tools and need to transition their content to Confluent."
"there is room for improvement in the visualization."
Amazon Kinesis is ranked 1st in Streaming Analytics with 24 reviews while Confluent is ranked 4th in Streaming Analytics with 21 reviews. Amazon Kinesis is rated 8.0, while Confluent is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Amazon Kinesis writes "Used for media streaming and live-streaming data". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Confluent writes "Has good technical support services and a valuable feature for real-time data streaming ". Amazon Kinesis is most compared with Azure Stream Analytics, Amazon MSK, Apache Flink, Google Cloud Dataflow and Apache Spark Streaming, whereas Confluent is most compared with Amazon MSK, Databricks, AWS Glue, Oracle GoldenGate and Fivetran. See our Amazon Kinesis vs. Confluent report.
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