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Amazon Kinesis vs Amazon MSK comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.0
Organizations benefit financially from Amazon Kinesis through improved data processing, cost savings, and seamless AWS service integration.
Sentiment score
4.1
Amazon MSK saves time and money, promotes innovation with flexible pricing, yet some users find costs hard to justify.
With Lambda, there is no need for data transfer charges, which is beneficial for less frequent workloads.
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Amazon Kinesis support varies, with response quality influenced by user-AWS relationships and complexity of the issues faced.
Sentiment score
6.2
Amazon MSK support varies; some praise its effectiveness, while others note average service and seek external assistance.
We receive prompt support from AWS solution architects or TAMs.
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
They can manage most of our queries, and for what they cannot manage, they guide us through the process of finding out.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
Amazon's support is excellent.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon Kinesis offers robust scalability with sharding and auto-scaling, ideal for high data throughput, despite some cost considerations.
Sentiment score
6.0
Amazon MSK is viewed as scalable, manageable, appealing to various environments, but may require manual scaling adjustments.
Amazon Kinesis provides auto-scaling with streams that handle large volumes well.
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the scalability of Amazon Kinesis as a nine.
Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The functionality for scaling comes out of the box and is very effective.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
As a B2B enterprise client, our clientele consists of large ticket clients but low amounts of users.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon Kinesis is reliable with minor issues, praised for consistent performance and effective fault-tolerance features.
Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon MSK is stable with high ratings; minor issues are unrelated to MSK, maintaining success rates of 91% under load.
I would rate the stability of Amazon Kinesis as high, giving it a 10.
Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It doesn't require any maintenance on my end yet, as I haven't had any issues.
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Kinesis users seek enhancements in data aggregation, integration, automation, retention, cost reduction, compatibility, machine learning, and documentation.
Amazon MSK struggles with integration, configuration complexities, high costs, and operational challenges compared to services like Kinesis.
There is no lack of functions in Amazon Kinesis. Functionality-wise, we feel it's complete.
Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes.
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
There are preset configurations and limited configurations that we can set for our unique use case.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
I had to remove and drop all the clusters and recreate them again, which is complicated in a production environment.
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
The increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Kinesis offers competitive pricing, though costs rise with scaling, large data volumes, and Kinesis Analytics can be expensive.
Amazon MSK is competitively priced with variable costs, appealing to enterprise users but potentially expensive for some.
Amazon Kinesis and Lambda pricing is competitive, but we noticed that scaling and large volumes could potentially increase costs significantly.
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
We use Kafka M5 Large instance, and depending on the instances, that is the cost we have, along with storage cost and data transfer costs.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
Once we started using Kafka, our cloud costs rose by 50% to 60%.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Kinesis provides easy, scalable streaming with AWS integration, supporting analytics and monitoring without complex infrastructure management.
Amazon MSK integrates AWS services, offering cost-effective, automated scaling, ease of use, real-time analytics, encryption, and event sourcing.
Lambda's scalability, seamless integration with other AWS services, and support for multiple programming languages are very beneficial.
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Amazon Kinesis integrates easily with the AWS environment.
Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The scalability and usability are quite remarkable.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
The best features of Amazon MSK are the real-time analytics that are excellent.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
It starts checking how the brokers are functioning, and automatically, Amazon MSK tries to resolve all the problems.
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Kinesis
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon MSK
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
6th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 5.6%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon MSK is 5.1%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon Kinesis5.6%
Amazon MSK5.1%
Other89.3%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

CD
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real-time streaming and seamless integration enhance workloads with room for competitive pricing improvements
Amazon Kinesis is easy to get started with, provides good documentation, and has a multilang daemon interface that makes it programming-language agnostic. The throughput is convenient for processing volumes out of the box and does not require complex configurations. It also provides auto-scaling with different partition keys into various shards. Lambda's scalability, seamless integration with other AWS services, and support for multiple programming languages are very beneficial.
SYED SHAAZ - PeerSpot reviewer
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
Improved data streaming and integration challenges prompt search for alternatives
The integration capabilities of Amazon MSK are not very flexible. If you have your own self-managed Kafka, that helps significantly because you can set up configurations. We are considering self-managed Kafka since our product is only one year old. The Kafka integrations are fine, but the configurations are an issue. The only issue with Amazon MSK that we are facing is the configurations. There are preset configurations and limited configurations that we can set for our unique use case. The product could improve by allowing us to set different configurations. I would also like to see Amazon MSK improve in the area of connectors. We are considering Confluent Cloud because they have many more connectors. They have KSQL DB and governance features. It is slightly costlier, but Confluent offers more flexibility with their connectors.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
4%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Retailer
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise4
 

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Kinesis?
Amazon Kinesis and Lambda pricing is competitive, but we noticed that scaling and large volumes could potentially increase costs significantly.
What needs improvement with Amazon Kinesis?
We are contemplating moving away from Amazon Kinesis primarily because of the cost. It is very useful, but if we write our own analytics and data processing pipeline, it would be much cheaper for u...
What do you like most about Amazon MSK?
Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems.
What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?
The integration capabilities of Amazon MSK are not very flexible. If you have your own self-managed Kafka, that helps significantly because you can set up configurations. We are considering self-ma...
What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?
We are recently working with Amazon MSK at Fortis, where we have multiple dashboards in our revenue intelligence platform. We are streaming data from different apps into those dashboards. The data ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,422 professionals have used our research since 2012.