I guess they need funding to better publitize their offering. It's almost one-click activation in Google Cloud (I guess in AWS/Azure would be te same).

IMHO their biggest competitors are the clouders themselves (with pubsub, SQS, etc..), MQTT, ZeroMQ, and the open source Kafka (which is surprisingly easy to setup).

For me, the best idea they had was the Kafka schema registry (https://www.confluent.io/product/confluent-platform/data-com...) : it's too easy to inject bytes into kafka, but for using that stuff you need to know the format (and no, dunping a JSON string is not a good subtitute for a schema). Instead of guessing, and pulling your hair when there are changes, they provide a way to insert the data with the correct types and format.

(disclaimer I don't have shares in confluent, nor interest in buying some)