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 7.9, while Amazon MSK is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.4. Amazon Kinesis holds a 9.8% mindshare in SA, compared to Amazon MSK’s 8.9% 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

7,426 Views
5,574 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Amazon MSK

Read 10 Amazon MSK reviews

5,071 Views
3,930 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Amazon Kinesis

Amazon MSK

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Amazon Kinesis and Amazon MSK compete in the data streaming solutions category. Kinesis has the upper hand in pricing and support while MSK offers superior features that many businesses find worth the investment.

Features: Amazon Kinesis provides a scalable architecture, seamless AWS integration, and real-time data processing. Amazon MSK supports Apache Kafka, delivering open-source flexibility, advanced event streaming capabilities, and the extensive Kafka feature set.

Room for Improvement: Amazon Kinesis could improve by enhancing Kafka integration, expanding beyond the AWS ecosystem, and offering more open-source support. Amazon MSK could benefit from simpler deployment options, reduced complexity for AWS integration, and enhanced cost management for high-volume users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon Kinesis features straightforward deployment and strong AWS service integration, easing the process for AWS users. Its customer service is often more accessible and responsive. Amazon MSK, while offering comprehensive Kafka support and automatic provisioning, can be more complex in deployment.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon Kinesis is more cost-effective for AWS-integrated businesses, with competitive pricing and lower initial setup costs, leading to quicker ROI. Amazon MSK may require higher initial costs due to its intricate Kafka support but provides a higher ROI for those needing specialized streaming capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK

January 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Kinesis

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Amazon MSK

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

6th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 9.8%, down from 15.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon MSK is 8.9%, down from 10.0% 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

"I like the ease of use and how we can quickly get the configurations done, making it pretty straightforward and stable."

"One of the best features of Amazon Kinesis is the multi-partition."

"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."

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

"Setting Amazon Kinesis up is quick and easy; it only takes a few minutes to configure the necessary settings and start using it."

"The scalability is pretty good."

"The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things."

"The management and analytics are valuable features."

More Amazon Kinesis pros

"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature."

"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."

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

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

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

"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"

"It is a stable product."

More Amazon MSK pros

Cons

"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."

"For me, especially with video streams, there's sometimes a kind of delay when the data has to be pumped to other services. This delay could be improved in Kinesis, or especially the Kinesis Video Streams, which is being used for different use cases for Amazon Connect. With that improvement, a lot of other use cases of Amazon Connect integrating with third-party analytic tools would be easier."

"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."

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

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

"The tool should focus on having an alert system rather than having to use a third-party solution."

"Snapshot from the the from the the stream of the data analytic I have already on the cloud, do a snapshot to not to make great or to get the data out size of the web service. But to stop the process and restart a few weeks later when I have more data or more available of the client teams."

"I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services."

More Amazon Kinesis cons

"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

More Amazon MSK cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."

"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."

"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."

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

"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."

"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."

More Amazon Kinesis pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

22%

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?

Amazon Kinesis is moderately priced. In comparison with other competitors, it is fairly priced, however, if they reduced the price a little, it could add more value to customers.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Kinesis?

I do not see any scope for improvement as it does what it is supposed to do. No changes are required. Since it's predominantly a back-end service, any end-user isn't going to interact with it direc...

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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 29% of the time

Confluent vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 24% of the time

Apache Flink vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 14% of the time

Apache Spark Streaming vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 5% 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 31% of the time

Confluent vs Amazon MSK

Compared 23% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs Amazon MSK

Compared 11% of the time

Apache Flink vs Amazon MSK

Compared 6% of the time

Aiven Platform vs Amazon MSK

Compared 3% of the time

More Amazon MSK Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis

January 2025

Download Amazon Kinesis product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK

January 2025

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

January 2025

Free Report: Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK

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