Data in Motion - Confluent vs Kafka
Author: Cal Limer
Release Date: 20/08/2026
In the world of real-time data streaming and event-driven architecture Open Source Apache Kafka (OSK) is the standard when it comes to building data pipelines. By providing users with the fundamental components to set up the standard brokers, partitioned topics, producers, consumers and even leveraging the Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams APIs. OSK gives you the tools you need to get your data from A to B in real time. OSK has zero licensing fees, making it an attractive option for data streaming, however using OSK to build a complete data pipeline will require some operational overheads and some help from external tools to manage important tasks like data governance and stream processing.
Confluent is an enterprise-grade premium offering built on top of OSK that bundles everything OSK has to offer into a complete data streaming platform and fills in the critical gaps that OSK doesn’t cover. Confluent has a natively integrated Schema Registry which stores data formats in the form of data contracts and checks new data for corruption or compatibility issues so that producers and consumers can share data safely.
Stream processing in OSK is centred around the Kafka Streams library. This requires developers to write custom Java applications to read and write data to and from Kafka, whilst maintaining the underlying infrastructure of the deployment as is mandatory with OSK. Confluent bundles in Apache Flink and ksqlDB to handle stream processing. Apache Flink offers fully managed serverless stream processing to enrich and transform your data streams in real time. With Flink you can query your Kafka data streams or topics directly using a familiar SQL syntax, meaning that there is no need to write custom applications to query your data.
One of the most important parts of data streaming is the connectivity between your applications OSK uses Kafka Connect which requires manually building, testing and maintaining JAR files. Confluent solves this problem by providing over 120 pre-built, fully managed connectors for many platforms, including: AWS S3, PostgreSQL, Salesforce and Snowflake
When looking at the benefits Confluent can provide you over OSK the key points to take home are Confluent can provide you with a faster time to production with less developer focus on infrastructure set up and maintenance. It also features key enterprise features that OSK lacks natively such as, role-based access control and end-to-end date lineage.
If you’re just starting out on your Kafka and Confluent journey, I recommend giving the book “Transform Your Data Pipelines, Transform Your Business: 3 Ways to Get Started” a read. It’s available here and is both a quick read, and informative. When you’re done there – we at Somerford Associates would love to chat with you about getting started with Confluent.
More Resources like this one:
Confluent Explained in 60 Seconds —
Leverage Apache Kafka® to Process Real-Time Data
Confluent with Somerford Powers Data in Motion for Real-Time Decision Making Whitepaper
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