Confluent vs. Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Confluent
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Confluent Cloud is a cloud-native service for Apache Kafka used to connect and process data in real time with a fully managed data streaming platform. Confluent Platform is the self-managed version.
$0
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Score 9.0 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
Pricing
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Pub/Sub
Editions & Modules
Basic
$0
Standard
Starting at ~$385
per month
Enterprise
Starting at ~$1,150
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Pub/Sub
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsConfluent monthly bills are based upon resource consumption, i.e., you are only charged for the resources you use when you actually use them: Stream: Kafka clusters are billed for eCKUs/CKUs ($/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
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Pub/Sub
Considered Both Products
Confluent
Chose 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 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 …
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
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.
Features
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Pub/Sub
Streaming Analytics
Comparison of Streaming Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Confluent
9.1
Ratings
13% above category average
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
-
Ratings
Real-Time Data Analysis10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Visualization Dashboards8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Low Latency9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Integrated Development Tools8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Linear Scale-Out9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Enrichment10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Pub/Sub
Small Businesses
IBM Streams (discontinued)
IBM Streams (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
AWS IoT Core
AWS IoT Core
Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Tealium Customer Data Hub
Tealium Customer Data Hub
Score 8.2 out of 10
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 7.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Spotfire Streaming
Spotfire Streaming
Score 6.6 out of 10
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 7.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Pub/Sub
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.8
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
ConfluentGoogle Cloud Pub/Sub
Likelihood to Recommend
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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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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Pros
  • Products work great.
  • Training is available.
  • Customer support is good.
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  • 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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Cons
  • Cloud based Azure platform features for Confluent lacks behind AWS And GCP
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  • It is limited to work with the same platform but with different datasets at the same time, you must request a prior security authentication.
  • It can sometimes lead to unexpected charges, as Pub/Sub will automatically keep on retrying messages continuously, even if failures are due to permanent code-level issues.
  • Message re-deliveries don't apply for ingested services like with Python based client. Push messages tried to be delivered immediately and if your service is busy dealing with some other task, it won't be done OR goes into a queue
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
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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Usability
No answers on this topic
It has many libraries in many languages, google provides either good guides or they're AI generated code libraries that are easy to understand. It has very good observability too.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
I have never faced a single problem in 4 years.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
It's very fast, can be even better if you use protobuf.
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Support Rating
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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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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Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
  • 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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Scalability
No answers on this topic
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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Return on Investment
  • Confluent replaced Microsoft Event Hubs in our environment and unblocked data platform services rollout globally.
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  • 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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ScreenShots