Confluent Cloud vs Raystack Stencil

Confluent Cloud is a managed data streaming platform built on a serverless Apache Kafka engine. It is designed for real-time streaming, event-driven applications, analytics, and AI/ML workloads. Cluster choices include Basic, Standard, Enterprise, and Freight, as well as Dedicated clusters with pre-provisioned resources. Confluent says its cloud-native engine adjusts cluster infrastructure to workload needs. Cluster Linking replicates, synchronizes, and shares data across regions, public clouds, and organizations. The service includes managed Kafka connectors for databases, data lakes, and warehouses, serverless processing with Apache Flink, and a managed Stream Governance suite. Tableflow can materialize Kafka topics and schemas as Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake tables. Listed security features include RBAC, self-managed encryption keys, client-side field-level encryption, and audit logs. Users can manage clusters and topics through a web UI or CLI; supported client languages include Java, Python, .NET, Go, Node.js, and C/C++. It is available on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud across more than 100 regions. A free plan is available; paid plans start at $385/mo, and new signups receive a 30-day trial.

Raystack Stencil is a schema registry for managing schema definitions and checking data compatibility across applications. It supports Protobuf, Avro, and JSON, and keeps versioned histories of proto descriptor files organized by namespace and name. Uploads receive backward-compatibility checks by default, though some checks can be skipped. The service provides APIs for retrieving the latest version number for a schema name and namespace and downloading the proto descriptors contained in a specified message. Its server offers gRPC and HTTP interfaces, while a CLI can create, view, and search schemas. Listed client libraries cover Java, Go, JavaScript, and Clojure. Clients can download descriptor sets, deserialize Protobuf messages, look up descriptors, and refresh schema definitions with built-in strategies. Stencil can run from a Docker image or be compiled from source, with installation options for macOS, Windows, Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. The server requires PostgreSQL 13. Refreshing a descriptor after encountering unknown fields is supported only by the Java and Go clients. The project is open source under Apache-2.0.