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12,051 views|8,582 comparisons
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10,449 views|8,119 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Nov 2, 2022

We performed a comparison between AWS Glue and Confluent based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Most users of both solutions say deployment is straightforward.
  • Features: Users of both products are happy with their stability, scalability, and flexibility.

    AWS Glue users say the solution is easy to integrate with other AWS services and has a good interface. Reviewers mention there is a learning curve and say that it would be helpful if it supported Java.

    Confluent users like the solution’s data replication, dashboards, and integration with Jira. Users mention that the plugin options and the solution’s security need to be improved.
  • Pricing: AWS Glue users share mixed reviews on the solution’s pricing. Confluent has an open source version as well as an enterprise version. The enterprise version receives mixed reviews regarding price.
  • Service and Support: Users of both solutions are satisfied with the support.
  • ROI: Users of AWS Glue do not mention ROI. In contrast, Confluent users report a positive one.

Comparison Results: Of the two solutions, users like the integration capabilities of Confluent. In addition, users appreciate that there is an open source version of Confluent and also mention an ROI. For these reasons, Confluent wins out in this comparison.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Glue vs. Confluent Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The key role for Glue is that it hosts our metadata before rolling out our actual data. This is the major advantage of using this solution and our clients client have been very satisfied with it.""The solution's technical support is good. Whenever we raise a use case where we face an issue in our company, we get a response from the solution's technical team.""I appreciate AWS Glue for its cost-effectiveness.""The most valuable feature of AWS Glue is its ease of use and good documentation. Additionally, we can do all the transformations that we need.""AWS Glue's best features are scalability and cloud-based features.""Our entire use case was very easily handled or solved using this solution.""The solution helps organizations gain flexibility in defining the structure of the data.""The most valuable feature of AWS Glue is that it provides a GUI format with a drag-and-drop feature."

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"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.""Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions.""The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation.""The documentation process is fast with the tool.""Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance.""The most valuable feature that we are using is the data replication between the data centers allowing us to configure a disaster recovery or software. However, is it's not mandatory to use and because most of the features that we use are from Apache Kafka, such as end-to-end encryption. Internally, we can develop our own kind of product or service from Apache Kafka.""The monitoring module is impressive.""The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."

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Cons
"There should be more connectors for different databases.""In terms of performance, if they can further optimize the execution time for serverless jobs, it would be a welcome improvement.""The solution could be cheaper. The price of the solution is an area that needs improvement.""It is not clear how the partition discovery would have been affected by more data coming in.""We face performance issues when using AWS Glue for data transformation and integration.""The product has only a few built-in transformations.""I haven't looked into Glue in terms of seeking out flaws. I've not come across missing features.""AWS Glue would be improved by making it easier to switch from single to multi-cloud."

More AWS Glue Cons →

"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.""Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs.""The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only.""They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues.""The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful.""In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options.""It would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well.""there is room for improvement in the visualization."

More Confluent Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The pricing is a bit higher than other solutions like Athena and EC2. If the pricing becomes more scaled or flexible, it will be good because you have to pay 44 cents just for one DPU for an hour. If you increase DPUs to 5 or 10, the pricing gets multiplied. There are also some time limits like 0 to 10 minutes or 10 to 20 minutes. If the pricing is according to the minutes, it would be better because you have to limit your job to 10 minutes or 20 minutes."
  • "It is not expensive. AWS Glue works on the serverless architecture. We get charged for the time the server is up. For our use case, we have to use it once in a day, and it is not expensive for us."
  • "Its price is good. We pay as we go or based on the usage, which is a good thing for us because it is simple to forecast for the tool. It is good in terms of the financial planning of the company, and it is a good way to estimate the cost. It is also simple for our clients. In my opinion, it is one of the best tools in the market for ETL processes because of the fact that you pay as you use, which separates it from other big tools such as PowerCenter, Pentaho Data Integration, and Talend."
  • "Technical support is a paid service, and which subscription you have is dependent on that. You must pay one of them, and it ranges from $15,000 to $25,000 per year."
  • "This solution is affordable and there is an option to pay for the solution based on your usage."
  • "AWS Glue is quite costly, especially for small organizations."
  • "AWS Glue uses a pay-as-you-go approach which is helpful. The price of the overall solution is low and is a great advantage."
  • "The overall cost of AWS Glue could be better. It cost approximately $1,000 a month. There is paid support available from AWS Glue."
  • More AWS Glue Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
  • "You have to pay additional for one or two features."
  • "The pricing model of Confluent could improve because if you have a classic use case where you're going to use all the features there is no plan to reduce the features. You should be able to pick and choose basic services at a reduced price. The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."
  • "On a scale from one to ten, where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate Confluent's pricing at five. I have not encountered any additional costs."
  • "Confluence's pricing is quite reasonable, with a cost of around $10 per user that decreases as the number of users increases. Additionally, it's worth noting that for teams of up to 10 users, the solution is completely free."
  • "Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
  • "It comes with a high cost."
  • "Confluent is highly priced."
  • More Confluent Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.
    Top Answer:We reviewed AWS Glue before choosing Talend Open Studio. AWS Glue is the managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) from Amazon Web Services. AWS Glue enables AWS users to create and manage jobs in… more »
    Top Answer:AWS Glue's main use case is for allowing users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. The product lets you use this data for analytics, application development, or… more »
    Top Answer:Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance.
    Top Answer:Confluent has a higher price than MSK. However, it delivers better features for tech stack requirements. For instance, its superior integration capabilities have proven essential, particularly in… more »
    Top Answer:Confluent's price needs improvement.
    Ranking
    1st
    Views
    12,051
    Comparisons
    8,582
    Reviews
    30
    Average Words per Review
    398
    Rating
    7.9
    3rd
    out of 38 in Streaming Analytics
    Views
    10,449
    Comparisons
    8,119
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    396
    Rating
    8.5
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    AWS Glue is a serverless cloud data integration tool that facilitates the discovery, preparation, movement, and integration of data from multiple sources for machine learning (ML), analytics, and application development. The solution includes additional productivity and data ops tooling for running jobs, implementing business workflows, and authoring.

    AWS Glue allows users to connect to more than 70 diverse data sources and manage data in a centralized data catalog. The solution facilitates visual creation, running, and monitoring of extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to load data into users' data lakes. This Amazon product seamlessly integrates with other native applications of the brand and allows users to search and query cataloged data using Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

    The solution also utilizes application programming interface (API) operations to transform users' data, create runtime logs, store job logic, and create notifications for monitoring job runs. The console of AWS Glue connects all of these services into a managed application, facilitating the monitoring and operational processes. The solution also performs provisioning and management of the resources required to run users' workloads in order to minimize manual work time for organizations.

    AWS Glue Features

    AWS Glue groups its features into four categories - discover, prepare, integrate, and transform. Within those groups are the following features:

    • Automatic schema discovery: AWS Glue crawlers connect to the organization's source or target data source through a prioritized list of classifiers to determine the schema for users' data. This feature creates metadata in companies' AWS Glue Data Catalog.

    • Schemas for data stream management: The AWS Glue Schema Registry enables users to validate and control the evolution of streaming data through registered Apache Avro schemas for no additional charge.

    • Automatic scaling based on workload: This feature dynamically scales resources up and down based on workload. The feature controls job resources, removing them depending on how much the workload can be split up.

    • FindMatches: This feature is for machine learning-based data deduplication and cleansing, and works by finding records that are imperfect matches of each other to remove useless data copies.

    • Edit, debug, and test ETL code: This feature helps users who have chosen to interactively develop their ETL code by providing development endpoints for editing, debugging, and testing the code it generates for them.

    • AWS Glue DataBrew: An interactive, point-and-click visual interface for specialists to clean and normalize data without the need to write any code.

    • AWS Glue Interactive Sessions: This feature simplifies the development of data integration jobs by enabling data engineers to interactively prepare and explore data.

    • AWS Glue Studio Job Notebooks: This AWS Glue feature provides serverless notebooks with minimal setup, allowing developers to start working in a timely manner.

    • Complex ETL pipeline building: This feature allows the product to be invoked on a schedule, on demand, or based on an event, allowing users to start multiple jobs in parallel or specify dependencies to build complex ETL pipelines.

    • AWS Glue Studio: This AWS Glue feature allows users to visually transform data through a drag-and-drop interface. The product automatically generates the code for ETL processes for users' data.

    AWS Glue Benefits

    AWS Glue offers a wide range of benefits for its users. These benefits include:

    • Users of other AWS products can easily onboard with AWS Glue, as it is integrated across a wide range of the company's services.

    • The solution is serverless, which allows for a lower total cost of ownership.

    • AWS Glue offers more power for users, as it automates much of the effort in building, maintaining, and running ETL jobs.

    • The product allows customers to easily discover and search across all their AWS datasets through AWS Glue Data Catalog.

    • AWS Glue does not require additional payment for managing and enforcing schemas for data streams.

    • The solution facilitates the authority of scalable ETL jobs for beginners and non-coding experts through a drag-and-drop interface.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Mustapha A., a cloud data engineer at Jems Groupe, likes AWS Glue because it is a product that is great for serverless data transformations.

    Liana I., CEO at Quark Technologies SRL, describes AWS Glue as a highly scalable, reliable, and beneficial pay-as-you-go pricing model.

    Confluent is an enterprise-ready, full-scale streaming platform that enhances Apache Kafka. 

    Confluent has integrated cutting-edge features that are designed to enhance these tasks: 

    • Speed up application development and connectivity
    • Enable transformations through stream processing
    • Streamline business operations at scale
    • Adhere to strict architectural standards

    Confluent is a more complete distribution of Kafka in that it enhances the integration possibilities of Kafka by introducing tools for managing and optimizing Kafka clusters while providing methods for making sure the streams are secure. Confluent supports publish-and-subscribe as well as the storing and processing of data within the streams. Kafka is easier to operate and build thanks to Confluent.

    Confluent's software is available in three different varieties: 

    1. A free, open-source streaming platform that makes it simple to start using real-time data streams
    2. An enterprise-grade version of the product with more administrative, ops, and monitoring tools
    3. A premium cloud-based version.

    Confluent Advantage Features

    Confluent has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Multi-language

      • Clients: C++, Python, Go, and .NET
      • REST proxy: Can connect to Kafka from any connected network device
      • Admin REST APIs: RESTful interface for performing administrator operations
    • Pre-built ecosystem

      • Connectors: More than 100 supported connectors, including S3, Elastic, HDFS, JDBC
      • MQTT proxy: Gain access to Kafka from MQTT gateways and devices
      • Schema registry: Centralized database to guarantee data compatibility
    • Streaming database

      • ksqlDB: Materialized views and real-time stream processing
    • GUI management 

      • Control panel: GUI for scalable Kafka management and monitoring
      • Health+: Smart alerts and cloud-based control centers
    • DevOps automation that is flexible

      • Confluent for Kubernetes: Complete API to deploy on Kubernetes
      • Automated Ansible deployment on non-containerized environments
    • Dynamic performance 

      • Self-balancing clusters: Automated partition re-balancing across brokers in the cluster
      • Tiered storage: Older Kafka data offloading to object storage with transparent access
    • Security that is enterprise-grade 

      • Role-based access control: Granular user/group access authorization
      • Audit logs that are structured: Logs of user actions kept in dedicated Kafka topics
      • Secret protection: Sensitive information is encrypted
    • Global resilience

      • Linking clusters: A real-time, highly reliable, and consistent bridge across on-premises and cloud environments
      • Multiple-region clusters: Single Kafka cluster with automated client failover distributed across multiple data centers
      • Replicator: Asynchronous replication that is based on the Kafka Connect framework
    • Support

      • Round the clock enterprise support from Kafka experts

    Reviews from Real Users

    Confluent stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its robust enterprise support and its open source option. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews: 

    Ravi B., a solutions architect at a tech services company, writes of the solution, “KSQL is a valuable feature, as is the Kafka Connect framework for connecting to the various source systems where you need not write the code. We get great support from Confluent because we're using the enterprise version and whenever there's a problem, they support us with fine-tuning and finding the root cause.”

    Amit S., an IT consultant, notes, “The biggest benefit is that it is open source. You have the flexibility of opting or not opting for enterprise support, even though the tool itself is open source.” He adds, “The second benefit is it's very modern and built on Java and Scala. You can extend the features very well, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to do so.”

    Sample Customers
    bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
    ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company47%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Pharma/Biotech Company12%
    Consumer Goods Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Insurance Company7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company31%
    Retailer15%
    Non Tech Company8%
    Government8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Computer Software Company17%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Retailer6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise58%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise73%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise70%
    Buyer's Guide
    AWS Glue vs. Confluent
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Glue vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    AWS Glue is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Integration with 37 reviews while Confluent is ranked 3rd in Streaming Analytics with 18 reviews. AWS Glue is rated 7.8, while Confluent is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of AWS Glue writes "Provides serverless mechanism, easy data transformation and automated infrastructure management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Confluent writes "Has good technical support services and a valuable feature for real-time data streaming ". AWS Glue is most compared with AWS Database Migration Service, Informatica PowerCenter, SSIS, Informatica Cloud Data Integration and IBM InfoSphere DataStage, whereas Confluent is most compared with Amazon MSK, Amazon Kinesis, Databricks, Oracle GoldenGate and Aiven for Apache Kafka. See our AWS Glue vs. Confluent report.

    See our list of best Cloud Data Integration vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Data Integration reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.