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Aiven Platform vs Confluent comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Aiven Platform
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
15th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Confluent
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Aiven Platform is 2.2%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 6.2%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Confluent6.2%
Aiven Platform2.2%
Other91.6%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Abdulmunafz Mct - PeerSpot reviewer
Full Stack Developer at Sri Krishna Arts and Science
Managed cloud databases have reduced operational effort and now support faster feature delivery
Aiven Platform could be improved by offering more detailed monitoring and analytics, additional customization plan options, enhanced cost operation insights, and more comprehensive data for advanced use cases. On a day-to-day basis, I highlight the need for improving dashboard navigation by providing clear cost visibility. There are navigational complexities that exist. If you can provide clear cost visibility, it will help reduce friction and improve the user experience. Regarding Aiven Platform's AI capabilities, I think it could improve by providing more granular role-based access control, enhancing audit logging, clearer compliance reporting, and more centralized policy management for governance and security.
PavanManepalli - PeerSpot reviewer
AVP - Sr Middleware Messaging Integration Engineer at Wells Fargo
Has supported streaming use cases across data centers and simplifies fraud analytics with SQL-based processing
I recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools. They need to improve in that direction by not only reducing costs but also providing better solutions for the problems customers face to avoid frustrations, whether through future enhancement requests or ensuring product stability. The cost should be worked on, and they should provide better solutions for customers. Solutions should focus on hierarchical topics; if a customer has different types of data and sources, they should be able to send them to the same place for analytics. Currently, Confluent requires everything to send to the same topic, which becomes very large and makes running analytics difficult. The hierarchy of topics should be improved. This part is available in MQ and other products such as Solace, but it is missing in Confluent, leading many in capital markets and trading to switch to Solace. In terms of stability, it is not the stability itself that needs improvement but rather the delivery semantics. Other products offer exactly-once delivery out of the box, whereas Confluent states it will offer this but lacks the knobs or levers for tuning configurations effectively. Confluent has hundreds of configurations that application teams must understand, which creates a gap. Users are often unaware of what values to set for better performance or to achieve exactly-once semantics, making it difficult to navigate through them. Delivery semantics also need to be worked on.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"What I like best about the tool is that the process for the services is faster compared to other methods. It's easier to use because Aiven for Apache Kafka handles the maintenance, so we have less to manage. We only use Kafka to manage its connectivity."
"The performance of Aiven Platform is quite good, as I have not seen any downtime, and it is very reliable, with backups in place, allowing me to fetch data without experiencing any high latency, even as a free tier user."
"Aiven Platform delivers highly accurate and reliable outputs with consistent performance, and its managed services, monitoring, and high availability features help to ensure data integrity and minimize downtime, highlighting the accuracy and reliability of the output."
"Aiven Platform can help the organization accelerate AI adoption while improving governance and security compliance, reduce manual work, improve access to enterprise knowledge, and provide more control for the AI development procedure."
"Aiven Platform's cloud flexibility helps my team substantially through seamless migration from one cloud to another, and it provides 99.99% uptime."
"Based on my experience with Aiven Platform, the best feature it offers is Apache Kafka, which is top-notch and one of the best services I have used."
"One of the most valuable features of Aiven Platform is that it handles the upgrades for us seamlessly, saving us time that would be spent on routine upgrades."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."
"I would rate the scalability of the solution at eight out of ten. We have 20 people who use Confluent in our organization now, and we hope to increase usage in the future."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"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."
"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 monitoring module is impressive."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
 

Cons

"I would really like to see Aiven Platform add a user interface for database backups, as this would eliminate the need for a third-party solution."
"Regarding needed improvements, I find the support and documentation a bit lacking in detail, and sometimes it takes long to get replies when I need support, which can be a challenge."
"One challenge we face is when we want to update the version, for example, from 3.6 to 3.7. It will spawn new nodes, and then there's rebalancing and syncing from other brokers. There's high CPU usage during this process, so the solution can't be used for a while, causing some downtime in our services. To tackle this challenge, we schedule maintenance updates during low-traffic periods when there's less risk and fewer users use the services."
"Aiven Platform would be further improved by expanding integration with enterprise applications, improving AI responses, accuracy, context awareness, providing more detailed analytics, and simplifying configuration and deployment."
"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."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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."
"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."
"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"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."
"Regarding pricing, I think Confluent is a premium product, but it's hard for me to say definitively if it's overly expensive. We're still trying to understand if the features and reduced maintenance complexity justify the cost, especially as we scale our platform use."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"It comes with a high cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
15%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
8%
Wholesaler/Distributor
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Retailer
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Aiven for Apache Kafka?
Aiven Platform would be further improved by expanding integration with enterprise applications, improving AI responses, accuracy, context awareness, providing more detailed analytics, and simplifyi...
What is your primary use case for Aiven for Apache Kafka?
My main use case for Aiven Platform is to help the organization adopt AI securely, build AI-powered solutions, retrieve trusted information using RAG, and manage AI governance and compliance. Aiven...
What advice do you have for others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka?
My advice to others looking into using Aiven Platform is to first check the integration documents, assess the risk compliance issues for their requirements, manage pricing, and then make a decision...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?
They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.
What needs improvement with Confluent?
I recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about ...
What is your primary use case for Confluent?
The main use cases for Confluent are log aggregation and streaming. I'm familiar with Confluent stream processing with KSQL. KSQL helps in terms of data analytics strategies because if we are the d...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about Aiven Platform vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.