Confluent Cloud vs ksqlDB

Side-by-side comparison of Confluent Cloud and ksqlDB to help you choose the right tool.

Feature	Confluent Cloud	ksqlDB
Pricing	Free / Usage-based	Free / Included with Confluent
Rating	⭐ 4.5/5	⭐ 4.3/5
Categories	streaming	streaming
Managed Kafka	✅	❌
ksqlDB	✅	❌
Schema Registry	✅	❌
Connectors	✅	✅
Stream Governance	✅	❌
Cluster Linking	✅	❌
SQL on Kafka	❌	✅
Materialized views	❌	✅
Pull & push queries	❌	✅
Windowing	❌	✅
User-defined functions	❌	✅

Fully managed Kafka and streaming

Event streaming database for Kafka

Try ksqlDB →