While Confluent is a well-known option for data streaming platforms, its complexity can pose significant challenges for businesses. Users often have to grapple with intricate, low-level Kafka elements like topics, brokers, partitions, taking focus away from more strategic tasks. Additionally, Confluent’s limited data integration features, which lack basic functionalities such as schema creation, seamless transitions between initial data sync and ongoing replication, and automatic failure recovery, can further exacerbate these challenges. This complexity not only has technical repercussions but also impacts business operations by leading to unreliable or missing data, which can be both costly and time-consuming to rectify.

If you’re in the market for more user-friendly or more cost effective Confluent Alternatives, the list below is designed with you in mind.

Best Confluent Alternatives

Striim: An end-to-end streaming platform offering connectors, change data capture, high-speed streaming SQL, and support for both historical and real-time data, along with streaming visualizations. 
AWS MSK: An Apache Kafka-compatible managed streaming platform that also allows users to access other AWS services directly. AWS MSK provides significant cost savings compared to Confluent. 
Azure EventHubs: Microsoft’s solution tailored for big data and stream analytics, providing a seamless experience for Azure users. EventHubs provides significant cost savings compared to Confluent and is an ideal solution for Azure customers.
Google Cloud PubSub: Known for its ease in handling massive real-time streams with robust scalability options. PubSub is a great fit for those heavily invested in Google Cloud infrastructure.
Redpanda: An open-source distributed messaging platform that excels in performance and low-latency operations.
Aiven: Offers a fully hosted Apache Kafka service, delivering high performance and strong consistency guarantees.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Apache Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open-source stream-processing software platform. Originally developed by LinkedIn and later donated to the Apache Software Foundation, it’s designed to handle real-time data feeds and is commonly used as a message broker or for building real-time data pipelines.

What is Change Data Capture?

Change Data Capture (CDC) is a method that efficiently identifies and captures changes in a data source. It enables you to track data updates without scanning the entire database, making it easier to replicate, sync, and transfer data between systems and offering near real-time updates. While Confluent has CDC connectors, they are not designed to support reliably emit data.

What’s the difference between Data Streaming and Stream Processing?

Data streaming refers to the continuous transfer of data at high speed, often in real-time, from a source to a destination. Stream processing, on the other hand, involves analyzing and acting on that data in real-time as it’s being transferred. While data streaming can be considered a foundational aspect of real-time data handling, stream processing adds an extra layer by performing computations or transformations on the incoming data stream.

How American Airlines uses Data Streaming to ensure flight operations are optimal

American Airlines is on a mission to care for people on their life journey. Serving over 5,800 flights a day to over 350 plus destinations across 60-plus countries requires massive amounts of data streaming in real-time to support flight operations.

American Airlines streaming architecture

TechOps deployed a real-time data hub consisting of MongoDB, Striim, Azure, and Databricks to ensure a seamless, real-time operation at massive scale. This architecture leverages change data capture from MongoDB to get operational data in real time, process and model the data for downstream usage, and stream it to consumers in real-time. The output is data products for TechOps and business teams to monitor and action operational data to provide a delightful travel experience to customers.

Learn more about how American Airlines ‘Striims’ their data for operational excellence. 

Striim – End-to-end, unified data streaming, analytics and integration

Striim (the two i’s standing for ‘intelligent integration’) is an end-to-end data streaming platform for analytics and operations. It provides a comprehensive solution, allowing developers to build real-time streaming data pipelines quickly and easily. Striim’s cloud-native platform offers a range of features for simplifying data integration, such as automated schema mapping, data transformation and flow control. This makes it easy to get started with streaming in minutes using Striim’s free developer edition.

Unlike Confluent, which only focuses on data streaming, Striim offers over 150+ connectors with real-time data delivery guarantees. It also provides powerful visual tools that allow you to develop complete solutions from collection to delivery of streaming data. Striim has unrivaled flexibility with its REST API. This makes it easier than ever to build complex streaming pipelines and take advantage of the power of real-time analytics and operations without having to be a coding expert.

Striim also provides advanced scalability capabilities that enable it to support up to 1000 nodes per cluster and process huge volumes of data in near real time. This makes it ideal for organizations with large datasets or complex streaming needs who want access to the latest analytics insights while still maintaining tight security controls over their data. Additionally, Striim offers comprehensive customer support services so developers can always get help when they need it most.

Overall, Striim is an innovative solution for anyone looking for an end-to-end streaming platform for both analytics and operations that simplifies building real-time pipelines without sacrificing performance or security controls over their data. Whether you’re looking for an alternative to Confluent or just starting your journey into the world of stream processing, Striim could be the perfect fit for your next project.

You can use Striim Developer for free up to 10 million records per month. Alternatively you can try Striim Cloud Enterprise in our 2-week trial. 

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