Estuary
Estuary Flow
vs
Confluent
VS
Confluent logo
FEATURES
ESTUARY
Confluent
Why it matters
Summary
ESTUARY

Self-serve streaming data platform for building real-time ETL from DB, SaaS and filestores. Company behind Gazette and Estuary Flow OSS.

Confluent

Self serve tool for creating a Kafka cluster and using it for real-time ETL from DB's and Filestores.  Company behind Apache Kafka.

WHY IT MATTERS

n/a

Price
ESTUARY

Open-Source, or predictably priced pipelines at $0.50 / GB plus $0.14 / hr (~$100/mo) for any capture or materialization.

Confluent

 Open Core and predictably priced based on several metrics.  Initially you'll need a kafka cluster and then will be billed on connectors that you use, data transferred, and data stored.

WHY IT MATTERS

Estuary's pricing saves 70% or more depending on your data scale.

Latency
ESTUARY

<100ms. Only constraint is frequency of updates from the source, or what the destination can handle.

Confluent

<100ms. Only constraint is frequency of updates from the source, or what the destination can handle.

WHY IT MATTERS

N/A

Connectors
ESTUARY

100+ connectors. Also HTTP file, webhook, and ability to spin up most new connectors within a week.

Confluent

60+ connectors with half built in-house and half open-source. Materialization connectors use at-least once semantics vs exactly once and no capability for data reduction.

WHY IT MATTERS

Extracting data from more of your systems can enhance outcomes.  Exact semantics helps ensure data accuracy.

Private Networking
ESTUARY

Estuary Flow supports private deployments and BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) to handle all private networking environments.

Confluent

Yes

WHY IT MATTERS

Estuary Flow’s Private Deployments require minimal setup from the customer side while self-hosting Confluent requires operational work.

Delivery
ESTUARY

Exactly-Once

Confluent

At-least Once

WHY IT MATTERS

At-least once semantics can create duplicates the destination, creating inaccurate results and excess cost.

Schema Migrations
ESTUARY

Automated Schema Evolution.

Confluent

Users manage the Schema Registry to validate and evolve data and schema.

WHY IT MATTERS

Automation ensures that your destination always matches your source.

Data Lake
ESTUARY

Ingested data stored in a real-time data lake in customers cloud storage.

Confluent

Data is stored in the Kafka Kafka topic at ($0.10/gb/mo).  This leads to significant costs and results in many users pushing data to a batch system.

WHY IT MATTERS

By storing data in a real-time data lake, you can endlessly distribute in real-time off one ingest, saving you egress fees, money, and source system stress.

Transforms
ESTUARY

Streaming SQL and javascript transforms with joins on both real-time and historical data. DBT as a destination.

Confluent

Single-Message Transforms can perform basic transforms of a single message or can use ksql for broader streaming joins.  Soon to be Flink with the Immerock acquisition.

WHY IT MATTERS

Estuary Flow unlocks unlimited lookback joins.

Vector DBs & AI
ESTUARY

Pinecone

Confluent

None

WHY IT MATTERS

Teams quickly demanding support for vector DBs

Requires Windowing
ESTUARY

No

Confluent

Joins are done in ksql and require windowing

WHY IT MATTERS

Unlimited windowing lookback enables use cases like customer 360.

Build a Pipeline
See how Estuary compares to others
About Estuary
Estuary is building the next generation of real-time data integration solutions.

We're creating a new kind of DataOps platform thatempowers data teams to build real-time,data-intensive pipelines and applications, at scale,with minimal friction, in a UI or CLI. We aim to make real-time data accessible to the analyst, while bringing power tooling to the streaming enthusiast. Flow unifies a team's databases, pub/sub systems, and SaaS around their data, without requiring new investments in infrastructure or development.

Estuary develops in the open to produce both the runtime for our managed service and an ecosystem ofopen-source connectors. You can read more about our story here.