Amazon Kinesis vs Amazon MSK comparison

Amazon Kinesis and Amazon MSK are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Amazon Kinesis is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.8, while Amazon MSK is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.4. Amazon Kinesis holds a 10.6% mindshare in SA, compared to Amazon MSK’s 9.2% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Amazon Kinesis users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Amazon MSK users who would recommend it.

Amazon Kinesis

Read 27 Amazon Kinesis reviews

8,771 Views
6,492 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Amazon MSK

Read 10 Amazon MSK reviews

5,757 Views
4,452 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Amazon Kinesis

Amazon MSK

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

Amazon Kinesis and Amazon MSK are products in the cloud-based real-time streaming data category. Amazon Kinesis has the upper hand in ease of deployment and cost-effectiveness, while Amazon MSK excels in features due to its comprehensive Apache Kafka integration.

Features: Amazon Kinesis offers scalability, simplicity in processing real-time data streams, and rapid workload adaptations. Amazon MSK provides deep integration with Apache Kafka, features like exactly-once semantics, and enhanced data consistency.

Room for Improvement: Amazon Kinesis can improve interface flexibility, data retention policies, and customization options. Amazon MSK could enhance the complexity of initial configuration, documentation clarity, and streamlined setup guides.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon Kinesis provides a straightforward deployment process and prompt customer service. Amazon MSK requires a more intricate deployment due to its Kafka integration but offers a detailed support path for Kafka-specific challenges.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon Kinesis has competitive pricing and favorable ROI assessments, attracting cost-conscious businesses. Amazon MSK's pricing is generally higher but aligns with its feature-rich Kafka compatibility, which justifies the investment.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Amazon Kinesis

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Amazon MSK

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

6th

Average Rating

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 10.6%, down from 15.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon MSK is 9.2%, down from 9.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

Rajni Kumar Jha

Senior Software Engineer at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Used for media streaming and live-streaming data

It is not compulsory to use Amazon Kinesis. If you don't want to use the data streaming, you can use just the Kinesis data firehose. Using the Kinesis data firehose is compulsory because we can't store all chats and recordings in Amazon S3 without it. When a call comes in the Amazon Kinesis instance, it will go to Data Streams if we use it. Otherwise, it will go to the Kinesis data firehose, where we need to define the S3 bucket path, and it will go to Amazon S3. So, without the Kinesis data firehose, we can't store all the chats and recordings in Amazon S3. Using Amazon Kinesis totally depends upon the user's requirements. If you want to use live streaming for the data lake or data analyst team, you need to use Amazon Kinesis. If you don't want to use it, you can directly use the Kinesis data firehose, which will be stored in Amazon S3. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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FNU AKSHANSH

Senior Data Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's automatic

We don't have many use cases involving ingesting large amounts of data and scaling up and down. We have a clear understanding of our data volume, which remains relatively constant throughout the week. While we're aware of other features Amazon MSK offers, we feel confident in our current setup. If our requirements change significantly in the future, we'll reassess our needs and consider adopting Amazon MSK.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The Kinesis VideoStream and DataStream are the most important features."

"What turns out to be most valuable is its integration with Lambda functions because you can process the data as it comes in. As soon as data comes, you'll fire a Lambda function to process a trench of data."

"Kinesis is a fully managed program streaming application. You can manage any infrastructure. It is also scalable. Kinesis can handle any amount of data streaming and process data from hundreds, thousands of processes in every source with very low latency."

"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."

"The scalability is pretty good."

"The feature that I've found most valuable is the replay. That is one of the most valuable in our business. We are business-to-business so replay was an important feature - being able to replay for 24 hours. That's an important feature."

"From my experience, one of the most valuable features is the ability to track silent events on endpoints. Previously, these events might have gone unnoticed, but now we can access them within the product range. For example, if a customer reports that their calls are not reaching the portal files, we can use this feature to troubleshoot and optimize the system."

"The integration capabilities of the product are good."

More Amazon Kinesis pros

"The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."

"Amazon MSK has good integration because our team has been undergoing significant changes. Coupling it with MSK within AWS is helpful. We don't have to set up additionals or monitor external environments. This"

"Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow."

"It is a stable product."

"The solution's technical support was helpful."

"It offers good stability."

"Amazon MSK's separation of concerns and ease of creating and deploying new features are highly valuable. It just requires to assign them to the topic, and then anyone who needs to consume these messages can do so directly from Amazon MSK. This separation of concerns makes it very convenient, especially for new feature development, as developers can easily access the messages they need without having to deal with complex server communications or protocol setups."

"Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems."

More Amazon MSK pros

Cons

"There could be valid data in Kinesis that is not being processed, which affects stability. Although it rarely happens, this issue has been observed in many deployments, making it not completely stable."

"The price is not much cheaper. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing."

"Amazon Kinesis should improve its limits."

"Could include features that make it easier to scale."

"There are some kind of hard limits on Amazon Kinesis, and if you hit that, then you will get the throughput exceed error."

"One thing that would be nice would be a policy for increasing the number of Kinesis streams because that's the one thing that's constant. You can change it in real time, but somebody has to change it, or you have to set some kind of meter. So, auto-scaling of adding and removing streams would be nice."

"In order to do a successful setup, the person handling the implementation needs to know the solution very well. You can't just come into it blind and with little to no experience."

"There are certain shortcomings in the machine learning capacity offered by the product, making it an area where improvements are required."

More Amazon Kinesis cons

"The product's schema support needs enhancement. It will help enhance integration with many kinds of languages of programming languages, especially for environments using languages like .NET."

"Horizontal scale-out is actually not easy, making it an area where improvements are required."

"In my opinion, there are areas in Amazon MSK that could be improved, particularly in terms of configuration. Initially setting it up and getting it connected was quite challenging. The naming conventions for policies were updated by AWS, and some were undocumented, leading to confusion with outdated materials. It took us weeks of trial and error before discovering new methods through hidden tutorials and official documentation."

"It should be more flexible, integration-wise."

"It does not autoscale. Because if you do keep it manually when you add a note to the cluster and then you register it, then it is scalable, but the fact that you have to go and do it, I think, makes it, again, a bit of some operational overhead when managing the cluster."

"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."

"One of the reasons why we prefer Kafka is because the support is a little bit difficult to manage with Amazon MSK."

"The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."

More Amazon MSK cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing depends on the use cases and the level of usage. If you wanted to use Kinesis for different use cases, there's definitely a cheaper base cost involved. However, it's not entirely cheap, as different use cases might require different levels of Kinesis usage."

"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."

"In general, cloud services are very convenient to use, even if we have to pay a bit more, as we know what we are paying for and can focus on other tasks."

"The tool's entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."

"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."

"It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."

"The solution's pricing is fair."

"Amazon Kinesis pricing is sometimes reasonable and sometimes could be better, depending on the planning, so it's a five out of ten for me."

More Amazon Kinesis pricing and cost advice

"When you create a complete enterprise-driven architecture that is deployable on an enterprise scale, I would say that the prices of Amazon MSK and Confluent Platform become comparable."

"The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."

"The platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Kinesis?

Amazon Kinesis's main purpose is to provide near real-time data streaming at a consistent 2Mbps rate, which is really impressive.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Kinesis?

I think for us, with Amazon Kinesis, if we have to set up our own Kafka or cluster, it will be very time-consuming. If one considers the aforementioned aspect, Amazon Kinesis is a cheap tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Kinesis?

There are some kind of hard limits on Amazon Kinesis, and if you hit that, then you will get the throughput exceed error. We have to deal with and reduce how many consumers are hitting Amazon Kines...

See all answers

What do you like most about Amazon MSK?

Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?

From AWS, I would consider more MSK schema validation is needed. It is easy to integrate if you have an application, but on-topic integration is more complex. You can do it with EvenBridge very eas...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?

I have used Confluent Cloud and Amazon MSK in my company. We are not using it for analytics and it is more for CDC processes, so we change the capture processes. It is used to extract data from a d...

See all answers

Comparisons

Azure Stream Analytics vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 31% of the time

Confluent vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 23% of the time

Apache Flink vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 12% of the time

Apache Spark Streaming vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 6% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon Kinesis Competitors

Azure Stream Analytics vs Amazon MSK

Compared 29% of the time

Confluent vs Amazon MSK

Compared 24% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs Amazon MSK

Compared 13% of the time

Apache Flink vs Amazon MSK

Compared 5% of the time

Aiven Platform vs Amazon MSK

Compared 3% of the time

More Amazon MSK Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis

November 2024

Download Amazon Kinesis product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK

November 2024

Download Amazon MSK product report

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka

Learn More

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Overview

Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost-effectively process streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit the requirements of your application. With Amazon Kinesis, you can ingest real-time data such as video, audio, application logs, website clickstreams, and IoT telemetry data for machine learning, analytics, and other applications. Amazon Kinesis enables you to process and analyze data as it arrives and respond instantly instead of having to wait until all your data is collected before the processing can begin.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is a fully managed service that enables you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. Amazon MSK provides the control-plane operations, such as those for creating, updating, and deleting clusters.

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK

October 2024

Free Report: Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK

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