
Confluent provides a data streaming platform for connecting, processing, governing, and sharing real-time enterprise data.
Confluent frames its offering as a data streaming platform that helps organizations turn fragmented enterprise data into real-time, contextual, and trustworthy data products. The platform is positioned around decoupled architecture, event-centric design, in-stream processing, governance, and making shared data available across cloud, on-prem, and edge environments.
The official product surface includes Confluent Cloud, Confluent Platform, stream processing with Flink, Stream Governance, Connectors, Tableflow, Confluent Intelligence, and Streaming Agents. Together these offerings cover managed and self-managed deployment, real-time processing, data movement, governance, and AI-oriented streaming workflows.
Confluent's 2026 data streaming report says 4,625 IT leaders across 14 countries were surveyed, and 72 percent said inadequate real-time data infrastructure is slowing AI expansion. The same report says 66 percent see data infrastructure and data quality holding back agentic AI, and only 32 percent report agentic AI in production, pointing to a large infrastructure gap.
The report also says 80 percent view using enterprise data for AI systems as a top business priority, while 88 percent say data streaming platforms help advance agentic AI through better reliability, context, and findability. Confluent uses these findings to position streaming, governance, and integration capabilities as foundational for scaling enterprise AI adoption.
Confluent says customers pay only for what they use, with monthly bills based on resource consumption. Its pricing pages state that Kafka clusters are billed for eCKUs or CKUs per hour, networking by gigabyte, and storage by gigabyte-hour, which makes the platform a usage-based infrastructure purchase rather than a fixed-seat software product.
The company presents multiple service tiers, including Basic, Standard, Enterprise, and Freight, and also offers cost-estimation tools, scaling discounts, and annual commitment options. Confluent separately directs customers to contact sales for dedicated clusters and larger commercial arrangements, showing a mix of self-serve and enterprise sales motions.