Confluent Recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2025

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption has grown over the last several years, it has become increasingly clear to companies and observers that successful AI requires real-time data and context. And it’s not just AI—every critical business function that relies on data inputs needs that data to be as trustworthy and fresh as possible. However, a recent Forrester report shows that 30% of global data and analytics decision-makers cite a lack of trust in source data and 27% of them cite a lack of trust in the analysis of the data as the most common reasons that decision-makers in their organizations don't take action with insights.

Confluent’s data streaming platform (DSP) enables a multitude of businesses to do just that: ensure their data is reusable, trustworthy, contextual, discoverable, and secure. This helps banks detect and prevent fraud in real time, allows retailers like Sainsbury’s to predict and prevent potential supply chain disruptions, and ensures industrial giants like Siemens have timely access to the right materials at the right time for production in factories.

We’re excited to share that the impact we’re driving for our customers—and in turn, their customers—is getting noticed. Confluent’s aim is always to allow customers to unlock the value of their data by liberating it from slow, batch processing and enabling them to stream and process their data in real time. To that end, we’re honored that Forrester has named Confluent a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2025. This evaluative report on streaming data platforms reflects the boom in interest in the category over the past several years and the increased understanding of the importance of real-time data.

Confluent Sets the Standard for Enterprise-Grade Data Streaming

Today, Confluent is leading the charge to help organizations shift data processing and governance closer to where data is created. This approach turns data into a reusable asset across an entire organization rather than locking it in brittle, bespoke, point-to-point connections between operational and analytical systems. With more than 6,000 customers, Confluent enables organizations to quickly create trustworthy data assets from every event across a business, ensuring that every operational and analytical system can access the same data assets in real time.

The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2025 notes that “Confluent’s strategy is to set the standard for what an enterprise-grade streaming data platform should be.”

“[Confluent] has built a streaming data platform that exceeds the core capabilities of open-source Kafka by including enterprise-grade scalability, governance, development tools, and hybrid/cloud-native deployments,” the report states. “It provides consistent innovation, a superior roadmap, and an excellent vision for how real-time data is essential for enterprise AI. Its continued investment in developer tools, cloud-native optimizations, and AI capabilities positions Confluent for sustained success in streaming data.”

The report adds that Confluent customers “appreciate its range of cloud-native deployment options, pace of innovation, and extensive tooling for governance, development, and management of large-scale deployments. Customers note exceptional, responsive customer support.” In terms of customer feedback, the Forrester report indicates that Confluent received above-average customer feedback in the evaluation.

Confluent received the highest score possible from Forrester in 14 out of 18 measured criteria, including messaging, processing, governance, developer experience, and fault tolerance.

Confluent’s Data Streaming Platform Unlocks the Value of Your Data

Confluent’s DSP approach solves organizations’ complex and batch-based data architecture challenges by giving them access to reusable, trustworthy, real-time data for applications, analytics, and AI. With the Confluent DSP, you can:

Connect: Our connector ecosystem enables customers to connect to any data source and sink—wherever they reside—including databases, message queues, cloud services, and more. We support over 120+ pre-built connectors and 70+ fully managed connectors. We’ll also manage your custom connectors to homegrown systems and apps.

Stream: Streaming is at the heart of our platform. We transformed Apache Kafka® with Kora engine, our Kafka engine built for the cloud. Kora abstracts all the operational challenges of self-managing Kafka and delivers a fully managed, cost-effective Kafka service. Kora powers Confluent Cloud to support streaming across 30,000+ clusters around the globe. Kora is elastic, resilient, cost-efficient, and runs at low latencies.

Process: Stream processing combines multiple data streams and shapes them on the fly to drive greater data reuse. Apache Flink® has emerged as the de facto stream processing standard, and Confluent has gone beyond "cloud-hosted" Flink to build a truly cloud-native, serverless stream processing service with Apache Flink® on Confluent Cloud.

Govern: We offer the only fully managed governance suite for data in motion. Stream Governance allows you to catalog streams as data products—so you can apply data quality controls, compliance standards, and maintain visibility into usage while still making streams available for anyone in your organization to discover and consume. Furthermore, Confluent offers built-in security tools, including granular RBAC, cloud audit logs, private networking capabilities, data encryption at rest and in transit, and much more.

And you can go a step further with Tableflow, which lets you completely skip the ETL and make your streaming data available as tables in your data lake. This allows you to easily query your data in native open table formats like Apache Iceberg™ and Delta Lake.

All of this adds up to a platform that streams, connects, processes, and governs all your data and makes it available wherever and however it’s needed—in real time. And in a world awash in AI, unlocking intelligent, context-aware data is the key to building successful AI systems that can actually deliver business value. The Forrester report notes that technology leaders “should look for a platform that natively integrates messaging, stream processing, and analytics to provide AI agents with real- time, contextualized information.” That’s the heart of what Confluent’s data streaming platform does.

Confluent Will Continue Driving Innovation In Data and AI

Forrester’s report says Confluent “enables robust performance for real-time analytics and event-driven enterprise applications as well as the seamless management of large-scale, hybrid, and cloud-native deployments.” And, Forrester adds, “Confluent is an ideal fit for enterprises that wish to expand their streaming data use cases with enterprise-level governance, tooling, and ongoing innovation.”

We’re excited to share this recognition with our customers, our broad partner ecosystem, and the open-source community of developers. Your input and partnership have helped drive the value of Confluent’s data streaming platform, and we look forward to continuing to innovate alongside you. Thank you!

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