Confluent, Inc. (CFLT)

Confluent's 10-K names AWS as its principal cloud competitor, since Amazon MSK, Kinesis and Managed Service for Apache Flink sell the same managed streaming and stream-processing capacity to the same enterprise cloud budgets.

Azure Event Hubs and Azure's Kafka-compatible services are cited by Confluent as direct alternatives, and they reach the same corporate IT buyers already committed to the Azure platform.

Red Hat AMQ Streams and IBM Event Streams, named in Confluent's 10-K, offer enterprise-supported Kafka to the same large on-premises and hybrid customers.

Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Managed Service for Apache Kafka and BigQuery Engine for Apache Flink are listed in Confluent's 10-K as competing offerings for the same real-time data pipelines.

Redpanda sells a Kafka-API-compatible streaming platform, in cloud and self-managed form, to exactly the engineering teams Confluent targets, competing on operational simplicity and cost.

Cloudera DataFlow, listed by Confluent among competing on-premises products, sells streaming and data-in-motion capabilities to the same regulated enterprises running their own data platforms.