We compared Amazon Kinesis and Amazon MSK based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
Amazon Kinesis is praised for its efficient data handling and integration with AWS services, exceptional customer service, positive ROI, and suggestions for improvement in documentation, UI, scalability, and integrations. On the other hand, Amazon MSK offers ease of use, scalability, reliability, good customer service, positive user outcomes, and suggestions for enhancements in scalability, ease of use, and cost management.
Features: Amazon Kinesis stands out with its ability to handle high volumes of data in real-time. Its flexibility in data streaming and processing, along with seamless integration with other AWS services, are valuable features. On the other hand, users appreciate Amazon MSK for its ease of use, scalability, and reliability.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Amazon Kinesis is minimal and straightforward, allowing users to quickly start using the service. On the other hand, Amazon MSK offers an easy setup process without any additional costs. Both products offer competitive pricing and flexible licensing options., Amazon Kinesis has shown a highly positive ROI with significant cost savings, improved data processing efficiency, and enhanced real-time analytics capabilities. On the other hand, Amazon MSK users have reported positive outcomes and benefits indicating a valuable and effective platform.
Room for Improvement: Amazon Kinesis could improve by enhancing documentation, providing a better user interface, increasing flexibility in data handling, addressing scalability and performance issues, expanding integrations, enhancing error handling, streamlining pricing, and improving customer support. On the other hand, Amazon MSK could benefit from enhancements in scalability, ease of use, and cost management by providing better scalability options, a more intuitive interface, and transparent pricing models.
Deployment and customer support: The duration required to establish a new tech solution like Amazon Kinesis varies, ranging from three months for deployment and an additional week for setup to one week for both deployment and setup. User feedback on Amazon MSK's duration is not available., Amazon Kinesis is praised for its outstanding assistance and promptness, with representatives going above and beyond. On the other hand, Amazon MSK receives positive comments for its excellent customer service and support.
The summary above is based on 12 interviews we conducted recently with Amazon Kinesis and Amazon MSK users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The integration capabilities of the product are 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 solution's technical support is flawless."
"The management and analytics are valuable features."
"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon Kinesis is real-time data streaming."
"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."
"Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow."
"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 offers good stability."
"Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems."
"It is a stable product."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."
"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature."
"The services which are described in the documentation could use some visual presentation because for someone who is new to the solution the documentation is not easy to follow or beginner friendly and can leave a person feeling helpless."
"Amazon Kinesis should improve its limits."
"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."
"If there were better documentation on optimal sharding strategies then it would be helpful."
"Could include features that make it easier to scale."
"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."
"Amazon Kinesis involved a more complex setup and configuration than Azure Event Hub."
"I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services."
"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 would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."
"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."
"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."
"The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."
Amazon Kinesis is ranked 1st in Streaming Analytics with 24 reviews while Amazon MSK is ranked 6th in Streaming Analytics with 7 reviews. Amazon Kinesis is rated 8.0, while Amazon MSK is rated 7.2. The top reviewer of Amazon Kinesis writes "Used for media streaming and live-streaming data". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Amazon MSK writes "Streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's automatic". Amazon Kinesis is most compared with Azure Stream Analytics, Confluent, Apache Flink, Google Cloud Dataflow and Apache Spark Streaming, whereas Amazon MSK is most compared with Confluent, Azure Stream Analytics, Google Cloud Dataflow, Apache Flink and Aiven for Apache Kafka. See our Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK report.
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