Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Spark Streaming comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Apache are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.0, while Apache is ranked #7 with an average rating of 7.9. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 3.8% mindshare in SA, compared to Apache’s 4.6% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Apache users who would recommend it.

Amazon Kinesis

Read 29 Amazon Kinesis reviews

3,589 Views
3,589 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Apache Spark Streaming

Read 17 Apache Spark Streaming reviews

3,138 Views
3,138 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Amazon Kinesis

Apache Spark Streaming

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Apache Spark Streaming and Amazon Kinesis are both prominent contenders in the real-time data processing market. Despite the competitive pricing of Apache Spark Streaming, Amazon Kinesis is preferred due to its superior set of features.

Features: Apache Spark Streaming provides seamless integration with Hadoop ecosystems, fault tolerance, and scalability for complex analytics tasks. On the other hand, Amazon Kinesis offers extensive real-time analytics capabilities, customizable processing, and strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, making it highly adaptable for different use cases.

Room for Improvement: Apache Spark Streaming could enhance user-friendliness for those without extensive expertise, offer improved managed services, and simplify deployment to become more accessible. Amazon Kinesis might benefit from expanded documentation to assist beginners, enhanced integration with non-AWS services, and a reduction in potential costs associated with high data volumes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon Kinesis simplifies deployment with a managed service model and provides robust customer support. In contrast, Apache Spark Streaming requires more manual configuration and expertise but offers extensive configuration flexibility.

Pricing and ROI: Apache Spark Streaming is cost-effective at the start due to its open-source nature but may incur higher operational costs over time with infrastructure management. Amazon Kinesis involves predictable monthly expenses that can lead to a higher ROI due to its ease of scaling and resource management.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Kinesis vs. Apache Spark Streaming Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Apache Spark Streaming

September 2026

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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

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Apache Spark Streaming

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

7th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 3.8%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Spark Streaming is 4.6%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Apache Spark Streaming	4.6%
Amazon Kinesis	3.8%
Other	91.6%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

reviewer1480695

Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Has enabled real-time processing of critical event streams with seamless cloud integration

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 us. The cost is a primary hindrance. That's why we are not using it widely. For our critical pipeline we are using it, but after that we are putting it in an S3 bucket. Other pipelines directly put the events in an S3 bucket and then process from there. There is no lack of functions in Amazon Kinesis. Functionality-wise, we feel it's complete. The cost aspect is what we are really concerned about.

Read full review

Khoa Dang Le

Principal AI Engineer at IMT Solutions

Have faced challenges with complex data handling and seek smoother integration for machine learning workflows

I find the fault tolerance feature beneficial because I use it for serving data from a landing area. I understand all of the structures we have for Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, and MLlib. The ability of Apache Spark Streaming to handle out-of-order data using watermarking and windowing is something we use in our pipeline. Nearly 50% of our usage is based on that because we use it for landing data, and we appreciate that we can work with it. The main benefits of Apache Spark Streaming include cost savings, time savings, and efficiency improvements about data storage. The fast storage capability is crucial because Apache Spark replaces Hadoop's MapReduce, allowing us to manage our data more efficiently.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."

"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."

"There is no problem with the tool's stability."

"The solution has the capacity to store the data anywhere from one day to a week and provides limitless storage for us."

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

"The integration capabilities of the product are good."

"Great auto-scaling, auto-sharing, and auto-correction features."

"The scalability is pretty good."

More Amazon Kinesis pros

"Apache Spark's capabilities for machine learning are quite extensive and can be used in a low-code way."

"For Apache Spark Streaming, the feature I appreciated most is that it provides live data delivery; additionally, it provides the capability to send a larger amount of data in parallel."

"It is the most scalable tool that I have seen before."

"The solution is better than average and some of the valuable features include efficiency and stability."

"With Apache Spark Streaming, you can have multiple kinds of windows; depending on your use case, you can select either a tumbling window, a sliding window, or a static window to determine how much data you want to process at a single point of time."

"The platform’s most valuable feature for processing real-time data is its ability to handle continuous data streams."

"Spark Streaming is critical, quite stable, full-featured, and scalable."

"The main benefits of Apache Spark Streaming include cost savings, time savings, and efficiency improvements about data storage."

More Apache Spark Streaming pros

Cons

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

"Something else to mention is that we use Kinesis with Lambda a lot and the fact that you can only connect one Stream to one Lambda, I find is a limiting factor. I would definitely recommend to remove that constraint."

"When we had some of those slow downs, we used AWS support and I can't say that we had a great experience and they resolved the issues, but they looked into some of the flow downs and ultimately we just decided there was nothing we could do."

"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 default limit that they have, which at the moment is 5,000 records per second seems too low."

"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."

"The solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."

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

More Amazon Kinesis cons

"There could be an improvement in the area of the user configuration section, it should be less developer-focused and more business user-focused."

"The cost and load-related optimizations are areas where the tool lacks and needs improvement."

"It was resource-intensive, even for small-scale applications."

"Monitoring is an area where they could definitely improve Apache Spark Streaming. When you have a streaming application, it generates numerous logs. After some time, the logs become meaningless because they're quite large and impossible to open."

"When dealing with various data types including COBOL, Excel, JSON, video, audio, and MPG files, challenges can arise with incomplete or missing values."

"The downside is when you have this the other way around in the columns, it becomes really hard to use."

"While it is reliable, there are some issues with Apache Spark Streaming as it is not 100% reliable."

"Integrating event-level streaming capabilities could be beneficial."

More Apache Spark Streaming 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."

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

"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."

"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."

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

"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."

"Under $1,000 per month."

More Amazon Kinesis pricing and cost advice

"People pay for Apache Spark Streaming as a service."

"Spark is an affordable solution, especially considering its open-source nature."

"I was using the open-source community version, which was self-hosted."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive, or not cost-effective, and ten is cheap, I rate the price a seven."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

Outsourcing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

15%

Outsourcing Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Marketing Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

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.

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What needs improvement with Amazon Kinesis?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon Kinesis?

We use Amazon Kinesis for stream processing. We get events from on-premise devices to the cloud. We get many device events and we have to process these events that are coming from the devices. To p...

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What needs improvement with Apache Spark Streaming?

One of the improvements we need is in Spark SQL and the machine learning library. I don't think there is too much to work on, but the issue is when we want to use machine learning, we always need t...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Apache Spark Streaming?

We work with Apache Spark Streaming for our project because we use that as one of the landing data sources, and we work with it to ensure we can get all of the data before it goes through our data ...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Apache Spark Streaming?

One thing I would share with other organizations considering Apache Spark Streaming is the necessity of having effective data storage. We want to ensure we acquire and manage our data storage effec...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 14% of the time

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Compared 12% of the time

Amazon MSK vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 9% of the time

Axiros AXTRACT vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 12% of the time

Confluent vs Apache Spark Streaming

Compared 11% of the time

Databricks vs Apache Spark Streaming

Compared 10% of the time

Apache Pulsar vs Apache Spark Streaming

Compared 7% of the time

Apache Flink vs Apache Spark Streaming

Compared 6% of the time

More Apache Spark Streaming Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis

October 2026

Download Amazon Kinesis product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Spark Streaming

October 2026

Download Apache Spark Streaming product report

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis

Spark Streaming

Overview

Amazon Kinesis provides real-time data streaming with seamless AWS integration, ideal for analytics, data transformation, and external customer feeds. It offers cost-effective data management with high throughput and low latency, supporting multiple programming languages.

Amazon Kinesis enables organizations to manage real-time data streams efficiently. Its integration with AWS ensures seamless setup and operation, while features like auto-scaling and fault tolerance make it reliable for diverse data sources such as IoT devices and server logs. The platform's ability to handle large-scale event-driven systems and dynamic workloads makes it suitable for complex streaming architectures. Despite some challenges with costs and setup complexity, Kinesis remains a popular choice for its efficient data management and processing capabilities.

What are the key features of Amazon Kinesis?

Real-time Data Streaming: Enables live data processing and analytics.
Seamless AWS Integration: Ensures smooth operation with AWS services.
High Throughput: Consistent 2Mbps rate supports large volumes of data.
Auto-scaling: Automatically adjusts to data load.
Fault Tolerance: Maintains system reliability and data integrity.
Lambda Function Processing: Processes data efficiently using Lambda.

What benefits or ROI should users expect?

Scalable Data Management: Handles data influx effortlessly.
Efficiency: Streamlines data flows without impacting performance.
Cost-effectiveness: Delivers value for budget-conscious users.
Low Latency: Provides real-time insights and reactions.
Multi-language Support: Accommodates various development needs.

In industries such as IoT, finance, and entertainment, Amazon Kinesis facilitates the real-time ingestion and processing of data streams. It connects seamlessly to data lakes and warehouses, enabling businesses to harness data-driven insights without performance loss. This capability is essential for managing dynamic workloads and large-scale event systems. By supporting tools like KDS, Firehose, and Video Streams, Kinesis empowers organizations to respond quickly to changing data environments, enhancing operational effectiveness across different sectors.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Apache Spark Streaming efficiently processes real-time data with features like micro-batching and native Python support. It's scalable and integrates with many services, ideal for reducing data latency and enabling real-time analytics across industries.

Apache Spark Streaming is a powerful tool for real-time data processing and analytics, offering support for multiple languages and robust integration capabilities. Its open-source nature, combined with features like checkpointing and watermarking, makes it a reliable choice for managing data streams with low latency. However, it faces challenges with Kubernetes deployments and requires improvements in memory management and latency. The installation process and handling of structured and unstructured data also present complexities. Despite these challenges, it's heavily utilized in building data pipelines and leveraging machine learning algorithms.

What are Apache Spark Streaming's key features?

Native Python Support: Efficient processing with Python language integration.
Micro-Batching: Handles streams in small batches for real-time processing.
Real-Time Analytics: Enables instant data insights.
Scalability: Adapts to varying data loads.
Low Latency: Processes data with minimal delays.

What benefits or ROI should users expect?

Efficiency: Streamlined real-time data processing.
Reliability: Consistent performance across tasks.
Integration: Seamless connection with other services.
Cost Optimization: Reduces processing expenses over time.

In industries like healthcare, telecommunications, and logistics, Apache Spark Streaming is implemented for real-time data processing and machine learning. It aids in predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and fraud detection by reducing data latency with comprehensive analytics. Organizations frequently use it alongside Kafka and cloud storage solutions to enhance GIS, predictive analytics, and Customer 360 profiling.

Apache

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos

UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, eBay Inc.

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Apache Spark Streaming

September 2026

Free Report: Amazon Kinesis vs. Apache Spark Streaming

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