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Amazon Kinesis vs IBM Streams 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
IBM Streams
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
22nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
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 IBM Streams is 2.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Kinesis4.5%
IBM Streams2.0%
Other93.5%
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.
Ahmed_Emad - PeerSpot reviewer
Territory Sales Leader at Sumerge
A solution for data pipelines but has connector limitations
We have used Kafka for seven years. IBM streams gives you many OOTB features that can boost the time-to-market, especially when it comes to reporting and monitoring for example. Confluent is recognized as one of the leaders in this space and the main reason for this is related to the complete vision of the platform also the large number of connectors. This gives the edge and competitive advatnage.

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 also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"The solution's technical support is flawless."
"I have worked in companies that build tools in-house. They face scaling challenges."
"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."
"Great auto-scaling, auto-sharing, and auto-correction features."
"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."
"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."
"Easy development and deployment, Java implementation features, and the real time analyser and alarm function are the most valuable features for us."
"The OEM Solution (Excel-medical.com) running on top of IBM Streams provides real-time clinical algorithms that can give better insight into the patient's acuity, thus cutting off time to discharge patients and inversely making sure that sick patients don't get discharged until ready."
"As a result, the TELCO company was able to cut down the time it took to respond to customer needs and there were fewer complaints."
"The product has enabled us to create solutions to client problems that would have either been impossible or very expensive/difficult using other technologies."
 

Cons

"Could include features that make it easier to scale."
"The price is not much cheaper. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing."
"I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services."
"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."
"There are some kind of hard limits on Amazon Kinesis, and if you hit that, then you will get the throughput exceed error."
"If there were better documentation on optimal sharding strategies then it would be helpful."
"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."
"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."
"The price and versatility of this product need to improve - it is not inexpensive."
"We had some stability issues where we used embedded Zookeeper in production."
"The development IDE sometimes crashes and freezes."
"I’d like to see a tool kit specifically targeted at incremental machine learning. It’s already great for scoring previously trained models, but dynamically updating models is currently more of a 'grow your own' kind of thing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"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 entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."
"Under $1,000 per 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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
5%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise9
No data available
 

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...
Ask a question
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
IBM InfoSphere Streams
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
Globo TV, All England Lawn Tennis Club, CenterPoint Energy, Consolidated Communications Holdings, Darwin Ecosystem, Emory University Hospital, ICICI Securities, Irish Centre for Fetal and Neonatal Translational Research (INFANT), Living Roads, Mobileum, Optibus, Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP), University of Alberta, University of Montana, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Wimbledon 2015
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kinesis vs. IBM Streams and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
892,678 professionals have used our research since 2012.