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Amazon Kinesis vs IBM Streams comparison

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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
8th
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
23rd
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 November 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 3.9%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Streams is 2.2%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Kinesis3.9%
IBM Streams2.2%
Other93.9%
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

"Great auto-scaling, auto-sharing, and auto-correction features."
"There is no problem with the tool's stability."
"The solution works well in rather sizable environments."
"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."
"I have worked in companies that build tools in-house. They face scaling challenges."
"Kinesis replaced a whole tier of servers, so we didn't need to have a server to catch the data and then send the data somewhere else, because Kinesis was the input port for very large amounts of data."
"Everything is hosted and simple."
"I find almost all features valuable, especially the timing and fast pace movement."
"The product has enabled us to create solutions to client problems that would have either been impossible or very expensive/difficult using other technologies."
"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."
"Easy development and deployment, Java implementation features, and the real time analyser and alarm function are the most valuable features for us."
"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."
 

Cons

"We are contemplating moving away from Amazon Kinesis primarily because of the cost."
"Amazon Kinesis involved a more complex setup and configuration than Azure Event Hub."
"If there were better documentation on optimal sharding strategies then it would be helpful."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"AI processing or cleaning up data would be nice since I don't think it is a feature in Amazon Kinesis right now."
"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."
"The development IDE sometimes crashes and freezes."
"We had some stability issues where we used embedded Zookeeper in production."
"The price and versatility of this product need to improve - it is not inexpensive."
 

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 tool's pricing is cheap."
"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."
"It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."
"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 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
University
7%
Government
16%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
 

Company Size

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

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.
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 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...
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: September 2026.
920,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.