Redpanda vs. Confluent

Simpler operations, lower costs, and responsive support. Learn why companies are choosing Redpanda over Confluent to power mission-critical data streams with confidence.

McKnight Data Streaming Performance Benchmark Report
Customers that made the switch
HealthEdge
Moov
Aquatic
Vodafone
Seventh Sense
Zafin

Why Redpanda?

Redpanda makes real-time data processing easy. Streamlined architecture, great performance, and developer-friendly tools—all without external dependencies. Build more, spend less, and be agile with the unified platform that simplifies building real-time applications.

Single Binary Architecture
Redpanda’s streamlined, single-binary architecture eliminates the need for multiple specialized components, seamlessly providing native Kafka functionality without the usual complexity.
Exceptional Latency & Scale
With Redpanda, experience 10x lower average latencies and a reduced hardware footprint, delivering the power to scale effortlessly to GB/s throughput.
Cost-Effective Solution
Redpanda provides 3-6x greater cost efficiency compared to traditional Kafka infrastructure, lowering both infrastructure and operational costs for your team.
24x7 Expert Support
Enjoy round-the-clock support from dedicated account managers, a direct Slack channel, helpdesk access, and solutions experts always ready to assist.

Key feature breakdown

Redpanda logo
Architecture
Single Binary
Brokers, schema registry, HTTP proxy, Raft consensus all built in
External dependencies on ZooKeeper/KRaft, JVM, schema registry, and HTTP proxy
Unified Platform
One cluster supports diverse workloads. Optimize per topic for availability, consistency, latency, safety, networking costs, etc.
Requires multiple clusters to support different workload types in different deployment scenarios: Kora, WarpStream, Freight, Confluent Platform
Cloud Storage Options
Tiered storage support. Cloud Topics roadmap (early 2025) for direct-to-object-storage persistence
Tiered storage support. Object storage options for Freight clusters (early access) and WarpStream (not enterprise-ready)
Enterprise BYOC
Production-proven BYOC. Control plane & data plane are both fully managed and resilient to failure
Immature BYOC offering. WarpStream control plane (Confluent-managed) & data plane (customer-managed) are split and less resistant to failure
Performance
Designed for modern hardware; supports high throughput & low latency on less infrastructure and flexible engine configurations
Fewer options to optimize performance; struggles with demanding throughput and latency
Ecosystem
Data Connectors
Redpanda Connect: 280+ data & AI connectors, simple & composable, config-based & stateless
Kafka Connect: 200+ integrations, no AI, distributed systems complexity, inefficient compute
Apache Kafka API
Redpanda natively supports the Kafka API
Confluent natively supports the Kafka API, with some exceptions for WarpStream
UI
Redpanda Console is free, lightweight and designed to work across the Kafka ecosystem
More restrictive licensing for Confluent Control Center, with certain features designed only for Confluent Platform customers
Apache Flink Integration
Flink compatible, but Flink infrastructure & support are not managed by Redpanda Cloud
Fully managed Flink service available as part of Confluent Cloud
Simplified Stream Processing
Simplified stream processing for stateless data transformations, light aggregations, and more
Kafka Connect or Flink adds costs/complexity that is overkill for the majority of streaming ETL use cases
Support
Access Experts 24/7
Industry-leading support comes included. 24/7/365 coverage for production outages, with access to the experts who write the code
Support sold separately. Tiered support model adds delays that can hinder root cause analysis
Cloud Provider Availability
AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, including private connectivity across all 3 (PrivateLink, Private Service Connect, Private Link)
AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, including private connectivity across all 3 (PrivateLink, Private Service Connect, Private Link)
Security
Enterprise-grade features like SSO, RBAC, audit-logging & more
Enterprise-grade features like SSO, RBAC, audit-logging & more
SLAs
99.99% for Redpanda Cloud only (does not include Redpanda Connect)
99.99% for Confluent Cloud, covers a wider mix of the ecosystem, including Flink & Kafka Connect
TCO
Up to 60% cost reduction for fan-in architectures and up to 58% cost reduction for fan-out, according to McKnight benchmark report
Cloud CKU pricing model translates to higher costs; "Component" licenses for Platform drive up cost on top of base enterprise license
TAKE A DEEP DIVE

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Customer success stories

Finance
Zafin

How Zafin swapped in Redpanda and instantly simplified operations to accelerate business agility for its customers.

Real-time analytics
Software Development
Poolside

How poolside freed its team to train LLMs faster and create better AI models thanks to Redpanda Cloud.

AI/ML
Finance
StoneX

Why StoneX moved its trading and risk systems from Apache Kafka® to Redpanda for better performance and lower costs.

AI/ML
Observability
WHAT OUR CUSTOMERS SAY

Best-in-class experiences from startups to the enterprise

800M
events per day
Finance

"Redpanda just works. We didn’t need to change our code, and suddenly, our day two operations were dead simple. Redpanda also has a fantastic team that is exemplary of how to provide support."

View Zafin success story
5-6x
more efficient
4+TB
logs per day
Finance

"Redpanda was able to handle the same load on far less resources than Kafka required. It was 5 to 6 times more efficient, greatly reducing our hardware costs as well as support and licensing costs."

View StoneX success story
$1B+
trading per day
100x
faster processing
Finance

"Redpanda helped us grow from the hundreds of millions of dollars in trading per day to billions of dollars."

View Alpaca success story
14.5GB
per second
Cybersecurity

"We have operational agility with Redpanda, meeting stringent SLOs while keeping developers focused on high-value work. Redpanda's tiered storage saves up to 30% on storage costs, easily handling 14.5GB/second."

View Lacework success story
100
million users
100GB/min
throughput
Gaming

"Redpanda rose to the top of our list because we knew its obsessed over performance and reliability at scale. We tested the data platform for up to 100M users with zero performance blips at 100GB/min throughput and peaks of 100K transactions/second."

View Fortis Games success story

What's new at Redpanda?

Day 2 Operations with Redpanda

Day 2 Operations with Redpanda

Master the art of managing and maintaining Redpanda clusters in this interactive 2-hour session. Learn cluster health checks, Grafana and Prometheus alerting, broker management, and more with expert guidance from Redpanda Solutions Architects.

Streamfest

Streamfest

Join Streamfest, the premier virtual event for data engineers and architects to enhance their streaming data skills for real-time apps, analytics, and AI.

AWS re:Invent

AWS re:Invent

Stop by our booth at re:Invent in Vegas this December. We look forward to seeing you there!

Free Digital Download

Benchmarking the Best: Redpanda’s Cost Advantage Over Confluent

Download this free report to learn:

  • How Redpanda delivers high-performance streaming at lower costs compared to Confluent, empowering data-driven decisions and AI/ML capabilities
  • Key benchmarks on cost and latency that reveal significant savings and scalability benefits for high-throughput applications
  • Three use cases for real-time streaming, including observability, fraud detection, and AI-driven data processing
McKnight Data Streaming Performance Benchmark Report
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McKnight Data Streaming Performance Benchmark Report
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