Users in a Reddit thread discuss the perceived failure of Confluent's ksqlDB, citing that it is slow, expensive, and has a poor implementation that performs full topic scans, while noting that...

{
  "signal_id": "2114995c-40b4-5d7a-ac3c-392691c93266",
  "signal_type": "reddit-company",
  "signal_subtype": "customerFeedback",
  "detected_at": "2026-08-31T10:19:53+00:00",
  "company": {
    "name": "Confluent",
    "domain": "confluent.io"
  },
  "data": {
    "nsfw": false,
    "stage": "none",
    "awards": 0,
    "timing": "ongoing_state",
    "topics": [
      "stream processing",
      "data engineering",
      "performance",
      "cost",
      "product adoption"
    ],
    "post_id": "1w39mjc",
    "summary": "Users in a Reddit thread discuss the perceived failure of Confluent's ksqlDB, citing that it is slow, expensive, and has a poor implementation that performs full topic scans, while noting that alternatives like RisingWave, Feldera, and Materialize are better suited for stream processing workloads.",
    "category": "features",
    "comments": [
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/apachekafka/comments/1w39mjc/comment/p6ymp9p/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 10,
        "author": "elkazz",
        "excerpt": "It was slow and expensive",
        "posted_at": "2026-08-31T11:32:08.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/elkazz/"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/apachekafka/comments/1w39mjc/comment/p6zto5q/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 9,
        "author": "kabooozie",
        "excerpt": "RisingWave, Feldera, Materialize are better suited to these workloads than ksqlDB.\n\n Both Differential Dataflow (which powers Materialize) and DBSP (which powers Feldera) are extremely efficient incremental compute engines that mathematically guarantee output state matches input state at any given snapshot. Moreover, they both guarantee all operations are expressible in standard SQL (not SQL-like,",
        "posted_at": "2026-08-31T15:15:28.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/kabooozie/"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/apachekafka/comments/1w39mjc/comment/p6z7pwf/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 5,
        "author": "oweiler",
        "excerpt": "Kafka Streams was so much better IMHO. Easy to write, easy to test. How would you test ksqldb queries?",
        "posted_at": "2026-08-31T13:31:23.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/oweiler/"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/apachekafka/comments/1w39mjc/comment/p6z8r7r/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 4,
        "author": "Galuvian",
        "excerpt": "It’s been a while, but this was just a facade on top of Kafka. Due to the nature of our data and queries it has to do full topic scans on big topics, which made it really slow. Kafka topics don’t have indexes, so finding a needle in a haystack means a full scan.\n\n I guess if your use cases only needed recent data and can live with the inconsistency of not having any history of previously written d",
        "posted_at": "2026-08-31T13:36:38.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/Galuvian/"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/apachekafka/comments/1w39mjc/comment/p70cy3k/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 4,
        "author": "ut0mt8",
        "excerpt": "The idea was appealing but the implementation was clearly poor",
        "posted_at": "2026-08-31T16:41:20.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/ut0mt8/"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/apachekafka/comments/1w39mjc/comment/p6yr1w6/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 3,
        "author": "whsoul",
        "excerpt": "KsqlDB.. too many internal topics were created in our setup...\n\n I was operating a service where Kafka topics were split by processing step and data type, but were logically connected. We needed counts grouped by a specific identifier across those steps and data types. We were periodically taking snapshots of the topics and storing the counts in a database.\n\n I tried ksqlDB, built a stream/table p",
        "posted_at": "2026-08-31T11:59:53.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/whsoul/"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/apachekafka/comments/1w39mjc/comment/p7bow66/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 2,
        "author": "HughEvansDev",
        "excerpt": "Kafka streams was just way easier for transformations, some cool stuff happening now with projects like Kafi to making stream processing easier.",
        "posted_at": "2026-09-02T05:51:54.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/HughEvansDev/"
      }
    ],
    "evidence": [
      "[post] Why didn’t ksqlDB turn out to be successful?",
      "[comment u/elkazz] It was slow and expensive",
      "[comment u/kabooozie] RisingWave, Feldera, Materialize are better suited to these workloads than ksqlDB.",
      "[comment u/Galuvian] Due to the nature of our data and queries it has to do full topic scans on big topics, which made it really slow. Kafka topics don’t have indexes, so finding a needle in a haystack means a full scan."
    ],
    "link_url": "https://i.redd.it/38cajut7somh1.jpeg",
    "virality": "somewhat_high",
    "image_url": "https://i.redd.it/38cajut7somh1.jpeg",
    "post_date": "2026-08-31T10:19:53.000Z",
    "post_kind": "image",
    "sentiment": "negative",
    "subreddit": "apachekafka",
    "post_flair": [
      "Question"
    ],
    "post_title": "Why didn’t ksqlDB turn out to be successful?",
    "prominence": "core",
    "source_url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/apachekafka/comments/1w39mjc/why_didnt_ksqldb_turn_out_to_be_successful/",
    "entity_role": "vendor",
    "post_author": "Low_Brilliant_2597",
    "upvote_ratio": 0.8888888888888888,
    "mention_count": 2,
    "mention_surge": false,
    "subreddit_url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/apachekafka/",
    "total_upvotes": 21,
    "comments_total": 16,
    "total_comments": 16,
    "other_companies": [
      {
        "name": "RisingWave",
        "role": "alternative",
        "domain": "risingwave.com"
      },
      {
        "name": "Feldera",
        "role": "alternative",
        "domain": "feldera.com"
      },
      {
        "name": "Materialize",
        "role": "alternative",
        "domain": "materialize.com"
      }
    ],
    "post_author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/Low_Brilliant_2597/",
    "signal_category": "feedback",
    "comments_included": 7,
    "products_mentioned": [
      "ksqlDB",
      "Kafka Streams"
    ]
  }
}

curl https://signals.autobound.ai/v1/signals/2114995c-40b4-5d7a-ac3c-392691c93266 \
  -H "X-API-KEY: $AUTOBOUND_API_KEY"

curl -X POST https://signals.autobound.ai/v1/companies/enrich \
  -H "X-API-KEY: $AUTOBOUND_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"domain":"confluent.io","limit":20}'