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Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Spark Streaming comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Apache Spark Streaming
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 4.5%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Spark Streaming is 4.4%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Kinesis4.5%
Apache Spark Streaming4.4%
Other91.1%
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.
Himansu Jena - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Project Manager at Raj Subhatech
Efficient real-time data management and analysis with advanced features
There are various ways we can improve Apache Spark Streaming through best practices. The initial part requires attention to batch interval tuning, which helps small intervals in micro batches based on latency requirements and helps prevent back pressure. We can use data formats such as Parquet or ORC for storage that needs faster reads and leveraging feature predicate push-down optimizations. We can implement serialization which helps with any Kyro in terms of .NET or Java. We have boxing and unboxing serialization for XML and JSON for converting key-pair values stored in browser. We can also implement caching mechanisms for storing and recomputing multiple operations. We can use specified joins which help with smaller databases, and distributed joins can minimize users. We can implement project optimization memory for CPU efficiency, known as Tungsten. Additionally, load balancing, checkpointing, and schema evaluation are areas to consider based on performance and bottlenecks. We can use Bugzilla tools for tracking and Splunk to monitor the performance of process systems, utilization, and performance based on data frames or data sets.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution works well in rather sizable environments."
"Kinesis has the best of Amazon: data streaming, building processes, data analytics, data in real-time are very good."
"The integration capabilities of the product are good."
"Kinesis is a fully managed program streaming application. You can manage any infrastructure. It is also scalable. Kinesis can handle any amount of data streaming and process data from hundreds, thousands of processes in every source with very low latency."
"We have been able to drop our costs for ingesting data by about 60 to 70%."
"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."
"The scalability is pretty good, as one can have any number of nodes spawned or replicated on the primary so that any load can be handled, perhaps a few terabytes with ease in around 15 seconds."
"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"The main benefits of Apache Spark Streaming include cost savings, time savings, and efficiency improvements about data storage."
"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."
"The main benefits of Apache Spark Streaming include cost savings, time savings, and efficiency improvements about data storage."
"Apache Spark Streaming is versatile. You can use it for competitive intelligence, gathering data from competitors, or for internal tasks like monitoring workflows."
"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."
"I appreciate Apache Spark Streaming's micro-batching capabilities; the watermarking functionality and related features are quite good."
"Apache Spark's capabilities for machine learning are quite extensive and can be used in a low-code way."
"Apache Spark Streaming was straightforward in terms of maintenance. It was actively developed, and migrating from an older to a newer version was quite simple."
 

Cons

"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."
"There are certain shortcomings in the machine learning capacity offered by the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"There are some kind of hard limits on Amazon Kinesis, and if you hit that, then you will get the throughput exceed error."
"I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services."
"One area for improvement in the solution is the file size limitation of 10 Mb. My company works with files with a larger file size. The batch size and throughput also need improvement in Amazon Kinesis."
"In order to do a successful setup, the person handling the implementation needs to know the solution very well."
"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."
"The problem is we need to use it in a certain manner. After that, we need to apply another pipeline for the machine learning processes, and that's what we work on."
"One improvement I would expect is real-time processing instead of micro-batch or near real-time."
"We don't have enough experience to be judgmental about its flaws."
"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."
"The solution itself could be easier to use."
"The debugging aspect could use some improvement."
"In terms of improvement, the UI could be better."
"The initial setup is quite complex."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is fair."
"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Spark is an affordable solution, especially considering its open-source nature."
"People pay for Apache Spark Streaming as a service."
"I was using the open-source community version, which was self-hosted."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

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 Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
 

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 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...
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 ...
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...
 

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
Spark Streaming
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, eBay Inc.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kinesis vs. Apache Spark Streaming and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
892,943 professionals have used our research since 2012.