Redpanda vs. Confluent: A Performance and TCO Benchmark Report

As organizations increasingly rely on real-time data to drive insights and decision-making, the choice of streaming platform becomes crucial. However, the price-performance trade-offs and TCO associated with data streaming can be confusing.

This report by McKnight Consulting Group, commissioned by Redpanda, evaluates and compares the performance and total cost of ownership (TCO) between two leading Kafka-based solutions—Redpanda and Confluent.

Key insights include:

• Industry evolution: Kafka is now a cornerstone technology for building scalable, real-time data pipelines and stream processing applications.
• Redpanda’s cost advantage: Redpanda offers a highly-optimized Kafka-native BYOC solution that achieves significant TCO savings.
• Cost efficiency: Redpanda is up to 60% cheaper for fan-in and up to 58% cheaper for fan-out scenarios, compared to Confluent.
• Operational savings: Additional savings possible through cloud provider discounts and reserved instances.
• Performance parity: Comparable performance and support levels, allowing organizations to run multiple Redpanda clusters for the cost of a single Confluent cluster.

This report provides a data-backed analysis to guide organizations in selecting the most cost-effective and efficient streaming platform for their needs.