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 #5 with an average rating of 7.4. Amazon Kinesis holds a 8.7% mindshare in SA, compared to Amazon MSK’s 7.7% 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

5,675 Views
4,237 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Amazon MSK

Read 11 Amazon MSK reviews

4,132 Views
3,122 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Amazon Kinesis

Amazon MSK

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Amazon Kinesis and Amazon MSK are competing in the real-time data streaming and processing category. Amazon Kinesis is preferred for its broad integration and simplified setup, attracting businesses looking for a straightforward approach. However, Amazon MSK stands out for its advanced features, better serving organizations with demanding data processing needs.

Features: Amazon Kinesis provides seamless scaling, intuitive data ingestion for real-time analytics, and strong AWS service integration. Amazon MSK is a managed Apache Kafka service, ensuring high throughput and low latency for extensive stream processing, which is advantageous for advanced processing requirements.

Room for Improvement: Amazon Kinesis can improve by offering more advanced data processing options, better support for complex data scenarios, and expanding beyond AWS service dependencies. Amazon MSK could enhance user experience by simplifying its setup, reducing configuration time, and offering more intuitive management tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon Kinesis offers a simplified deployment model and streamlined AWS integration, facilitating easier business implementation. Amazon MSK requires more configuration effort but provides flexibility for custom setups. Both benefit from AWS's reliable customer support, ensuring adequate assistance for users.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon Kinesis is known for lower initial costs and faster ROI, appealing to businesses seeking cost-effective solutions. Amazon MSK has higher upfront expenses but promises significant long-term returns due to its robustness, presenting an investment for comprehensive streaming solutions that may yield greater returns over time.

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK

April 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

5th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 8.7%, down from 13.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon MSK is 7.7%, down from 9.7% 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 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."

"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."

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

"Its scalability is very high. There is no maintenance and there is no throughput latency. I think data scalability is high, too. You can ingest gigabytes of data within seconds or milliseconds."

"The management and analytics are valuable features."

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

More Amazon Kinesis pros

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

"It offers good stability."

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

"The scalability and usability are quite remarkable."

"Amazon MSK's scalability is very good."

"It is a stable product."

"It provides installations, scaling, and other functionalities straight out of the box."

"The solution's technical support was helpful."

More Amazon MSK pros

Cons

"Kinesis Data Analytics needs to be improved somewhat. It's SQL based data but it is not as user friendly as MySQL or Athena tools."

"Kinesis is good for Amazon Cloud but not as suitable for other cloud vendors."

"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."

"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."

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

"Amazon Kinesis involved a more complex setup and configuration than Azure Event Hub."

"In general, the pain point for us was that once the data gets into Kinesis there is no way for us to understand what's happening because Kinesis divides everything into shards. So if we wanted to understand what's happening with a particular shard, whether it is published or not, we could not. Even with the logs, if we want to have some kind of logging it is in the shard."

"Amazon Kinesis should improve its limits."

More Amazon Kinesis cons

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

"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."

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

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

"The cost of using Amazon MSK is high, which is a significant disadvantage, as the increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings."

"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."

"The cost of using Amazon MSK is high, which is a significant disadvantage, as the increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings."

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

More Amazon MSK cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"The solution's pricing is fair."

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

"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."

"The tool's pricing is cheap."

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

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

17%

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?

The cost of using Amazon MSK is high, which is a significant disadvantage, as the increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings. There were no other notable issues.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?

We used Amazon MSK to manage high-volume third-party data entering our system. It served as a buffer when our system was unable to consume data at high speeds in real-time. The data initially went ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Confluent vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 31% of the time

Azure Stream Analytics vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 23% of the time

Apache Flink vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 17% of the time

Databricks 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 34% of the time

Confluent vs Amazon MSK

Compared 21% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs Amazon MSK

Compared 10% of the time

Apache Flink vs Amazon MSK

Compared 9% of the time

Aiven Platform vs Amazon MSK

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon MSK Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis

April 2025

Download Amazon Kinesis product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK

April 2025

Download Amazon MSK product report

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka

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 Web Services (AWS)

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.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK

April 2025

Free Report: Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK

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