Confluent vs. IBM Streams (discontinued)

IBM Streams (discontinued)

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting 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
IBM Streams (discontinued)	Score 9.0 out of 10	N/A	A real-time analytics solution that turns fast-moving volumes and varieties into insights. Streams evaluates a broad range of streaming data — unstructured text, video, audio, geospatial and sensor. The product was sunsetted in 2024.	N/A

Pricing

Confluent

IBM Streams (discontinued)

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
Confluent	IBM Streams (discontinued)
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

Confluent 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).

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Confluent	IBM Streams (discontinued)
Considered Both Products	Confluent Verified User Anonymous 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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 … Incentivized Helpful?	IBM Streams (discontinued) TC Tsun Chow Adjunct Professor Chose IBM Streams (discontinued) There are well explained tutorials to get the user started. If you are looking for business application ideas, the user community offers a diversity of applications. It is very easy to launch applications on the cloud and can integrate with other analytic tools available on … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IBM Streams (discontinued) We are using Spark streaming as well as Storm for streaming options. Currently streams provides a better way of building applications easier faster and run efficiently. Also like the flexibility it provides with both us and SPL. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IBM Streams (discontinued) Coral8, some open source tools Incentivized Helpful? John Nguyen Data Analyst Chose IBM Streams (discontinued) Well, I recently got hired 3 weeks ago and am still exploring IBM Streaming Analytics. What I heard is that it is much better than its competitors. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IBM Streams (discontinued) I have considered Apache Spark Streaming and Apache Flink. Spark Streaming is still changing too often for my taste and does not seem as easy to connect to IoT data especially for students having limited experience with cloud computing. Interesting signal processing functions … Incentivized Helpful? Zhaoyan Lyu MSc Student Chose IBM Streams (discontinued) Basically, I am building an IoT project. IBM cloud is a great platform for connecting all kinds of functions and make it work. To me, IBM Streams is just one of them. Any IoT project is custom made. So engineers have to think carefully how to use least resources to make the … Incentivized Helpful? JS Jim Sharpe President Chose IBM Streams (discontinued) The selection of a stream processing platform depends heavily on the details of the requirements. There is no one right answer for all situations. However, IBM Streams typically has the advantage when sub-millisecond latency is important, complex analytics need to be … Incentivized Helpful?

Features

Confluent

IBM Streams (discontinued)

Streaming Analytics

Comparison of Streaming Analytics features of Product A and Product B
	Confluent 9.1 Ratings 13% above category average	IBM Streams (discontinued) 8.3 Ratings 3% above category average
Real-Time Data Analysis	10.00 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
Visualization Dashboards	8.00 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources	10.00 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Low Latency	9.00 Ratings	7.90 Ratings
Integrated Development Tools	8.00 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
Linear Scale-Out	9.00 Ratings	7.70 Ratings
Data Enrichment	10.00 Ratings	7.00 Ratings
Data wrangling and preparation	00 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
Machine Learning Automation	00 Ratings	9.00 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Confluent	IBM Streams (discontinued)
Small Businesses	IBM Streams (discontinued) Score 9.0 out of 10	Amazon Kinesis Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Tealium Customer Data Hub Score 8.2 out of 10	Confluent Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises	Spotfire Streaming Score 6.6 out of 10	Spotfire Streaming Score 6.6 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Confluent	IBM Streams (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend	10.0 (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	10.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Confluent	IBM Streams (discontinued)
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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Streams is a good fit for situations requiring low end-to-end latency, have complex real-time analytical processing needs on large fast data, or where the reduction of operational costs is important. However, it is very much a data-in-motion technology and not well suited for situations such as some forms of machine learning where the entire historical data set needs to be operated on. Note that it's fairly common to use Streams to perform online scoring using models that were trained offline using other technologies. Incentivized JS Jim Sharpe President Read full review
Pros	Products work great. Training is available. Customer support is good. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Query analysis of real time streaming data Filter out events based on time windows Scalability for large scale data, production tested Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	Cloud based Azure platform features for Confluent lacks behind AWS And GCP Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Documentation could be more extensive, with more examples, although overall this is not too bad compared to some of the alternative solutions. Seems expensive to use in production. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	No answers on this topic
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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	We are using Spark streaming as well as Storm for streaming options. Currently streams provides a better way of building applications easier faster and run efficiently. Also like the flexibility it provides with both us and SPL. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	Confluent replaced Microsoft Event Hubs in our environment and unblocked data platform services rollout globally. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Ability to do more with less Admins and data analyst can now focus on more thinking tasks No negative impacts yet Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
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