Event streaming · Confluent, Inc.

Confluent

Fully managed Kafka service from Kafka's original creators, adding schema registry, connectors and stream processing on top.

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Confluent is the commercial company founded by Apache Kafka's creators, offering both Confluent Platform (a self-managed distribution with enterprise features layered on open-source Kafka) and Confluent Cloud, a fully managed, elastically scaled Kafka service. Confluent Cloud adds a schema registry, 120+ managed connectors, ksqlDB/Flink-based stream processing, and tiered cluster types (Basic through Enterprise, plus Freight for high-volume logging/observability) so customers avoid operating Kafka brokers themselves. Billing is metered in Elastic Confluent Units for Kafka (eCKUs) per hour, plus separate charges for data ingress/egress and storage, which scales cost with actual throughput rather than a flat subscription. It competes with Redpanda and self-managed Kafka/Amazon MSK for teams wanting a managed streaming backbone.

At a glance

Vendor Confluent, Inc.
Pricing model Usage-based
Free tier Yes
Deployment Cloud, Self-hosted
Open source No
Best for Teams wanting managed Kafka with enterprise features without operating brokers themselves.

Pricing

Metered by Elastic Confluent Units for Kafka (eCKU) per hour plus data ingress/egress and storage; Basic tier's first eCKU is free.

Plan Price Notes
Basic First eCKU free, then $0.14/eCKU-hour General-purpose entry cluster; roughly $0/month to start
Standard $0.75/eCKU-hour (~$385/month typical) Data ingress/egress $0.035–$0.050/GB
Enterprise $1.75–$2.25/eCKU-hour (~$895/month typical) Data ingress/egress $0.020–$0.050/GB
Freight $2.25/eCKU-hour, 2 eCKU minimum (~$2,300/month typical) For high-scale logging and observability workloads

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features

  • Fully managed, elastically scaled Kafka
  • Schema Registry
  • 120+ managed connectors
  • ksqlDB and Flink-based stream processing
  • Multiple cluster types by throughput/durability need
  • Cross-region and multi-cloud replication

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Head to head

Alternatives

Apache Kafka Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput publish-subscribe messaging and durable event logs. Redpanda Kafka-API-compatible streaming platform built in C++ without ZooKeeper or the JVM, available self-managed or as managed cloud. Amazon Kinesis AWS's managed service for real-time data streaming, ingesting and processing continuous data at scale without managing servers.

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Terms to know

Event tracking Capturing specific user actions, such as clicks or purchases, as discrete, named pieces of data. Data pipeline The automated sequence of steps that moves data from source systems to a destination, transforming it along the way. Apache Kafka An open-source distributed event streaming platform that stores records in ordered, durable, replayable logs called topics. Event streaming Continuously publishing and consuming records of things that happened, in order, through a durable, replayable log. Stream processing Processing data continuously as individual events arrive, rather than waiting to accumulate a batch.

Related guides

How to choose an event streaming platform Kafka's protocol won the ecosystem; the real decision is who operates the cluster and whether you need Kafka compatibility at all.