# Confluent Cloud

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/streaming/confluent-cloud/

Managed Kafka from its original authors, billed on three meters at once — compute units by the hour, data moved by the gigabyte and data kept by the gigabyte-month.

## Who it suits

The reference implementation, and the one that shows its working. Three meters are each published with a rate, and the page states they are pre-replication — a disclosure the others skip entirely. Standard at about $385 a month is the cheapest 99.99% SLA in this category.

Consider something else if Your traffic is write-heavy and you are counting cents. Three meters compound: eCKU-hours accrue whether or not you publish, data in and out is $0.05 a gigabyte on Basic, and storage is $0.08 per gigabyte-month on every tier below Freight.

## iScore

67 / 100 (80% interval 56–79), rank 2 of 4 in streaming — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every streaming peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/streaming/confluent-cloud/alternatives/

- Price: 63 (45–81), weight 36%, 3 of 6 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: free_card_required, free_offer_type, free_tier
- Capacity and limits: 47 (17–78), weight 29%, 0 of 1 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: partition_limit
- Trust and compliance: 85 (65–100), weight 21%, 2 of 4 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: rbac, sso_saml
- Evidence: 91 (91–91), weight 14%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Entry paid plan: Basic gives the first eCKU free and charges $0.14 per eCKU-hour after it, so a small cluster starts near zero. Standard, the first tier with a 99.99% SLA, starts at about $385 a month. ([source](https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/pricing/), read 2026-09-16)
- Pricing model: Three meters running together. Compute is billed per eCKU-hour — an elastic Confluent Kafka Unit that autoscales — data in and out is billed per GB, and data at rest per GB-month. The rates are published pre-replication, so a replicated topic costs a multiple of the figure shown. ([source](https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/pricing/), read 2026-09-16)
- Egress over allowance: $0.05 per GB in or out on Basic, falling to $0.014–$0.030 on Freight. Ingress and egress are charged at the same rate rather than separately. ([source](https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/pricing/), read 2026-09-16)

### Infrastructure

- Uptime SLA: 99.99% on Standard and above. Basic carries no uptime commitment. ([source](https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/pricing/), read 2026-09-16)

### Storage

- Storage price: $0.08 per GB-month on Basic, Standard and Enterprise alike; $0.03 on Freight, which writes direct to object storage. ([source](https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/pricing/), read 2026-09-16)

### Auth

- Audit logs: Audit logs arrive on Standard, the first paid tier above Basic. ([source](https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/pricing/), read 2026-09-16)

### Streaming

- Partition limit: No figure is published. Enterprise advertises "enhanced partition limits" over Standard without saying what either limit is, so the ceiling cannot be compared with a vendor that states one. ([source](https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/pricing/), read 2026-09-16)

## Compared with

- [Confluent Cloud vs Amazon MSK](https://inetgeek.com/compare/confluent-cloud-vs-aws-msk/)
- [Confluent Cloud vs WarpStream](https://inetgeek.com/compare/confluent-cloud-vs-warpstream/)
- [Confluent Cloud vs Redpanda](https://inetgeek.com/compare/confluent-cloud-vs-redpanda/)