In either case, Confluent Platform is ridiculously expensive and approached the costs (licensing alone) for our entire cloud spend. I'd love to see more run-on-k8s alternatives to CFK.
I have been using Pulsar for new projects not because of performance or anything but because all the features you expect to be built-in are. Georeplication, shared-subscription w/selective ACK, schema registry etc.
Also it's wildly more pluggable, the authn/authz plugin infrastruction in particular is great. I was even able to write a custom Pulsar segment compactor to do GDPR deletions without giving up offloaded segment longevity.
The segment offload is actually huge especially because tools like Secor for Kafka are dead now and you are stuck on the Kafka Connect ecosystem which personally I really find distasteful.
I don't even understand why Confluent should price their offering so high. ITs not like Real time is an exclusive service that other platforms don't have.
I've found talking to Confluent about anything is a complete waste of time unless it's a very specific technical issue. They're always pushing their cloud as the solution, and it's very aggressive.
We ended migrating to aiven after finding confluent pricing unreasonable.