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Amazon Kinesis vs Redpanda 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
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Redpanda
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
15th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Rajni Kumar Jha - PeerSpot reviewer
Used for media streaming and live-streaming data
It is not compulsory to use Amazon Kinesis. If you don't want to use the data streaming, you can use just the Kinesis data firehose. Using the Kinesis data firehose is compulsory because we can't store all chats and recordings in Amazon S3 without it. When a call comes in the Amazon Kinesis instance, it will go to Data Streams if we use it. Otherwise, it will go to the Kinesis data firehose, where we need to define the S3 bucket path, and it will go to Amazon S3. So, without the Kinesis data firehose, we can't store all the chats and recordings in Amazon S3. Using Amazon Kinesis totally depends upon the user's requirements. If you want to use live streaming for the data lake or data analyst team, you need to use Amazon Kinesis. If you don't want to use it, you can directly use the Kinesis data firehose, which will be stored in Amazon S3. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Vishal M Godi - PeerSpot reviewer
High-performance message brokering with excellent documentation and an easy setup
The industry standard for this kind of platform is Kafka. Confluent Kafka has acquired it. Kafka is an open-source platform built by Apache. Confluent is the commercial version of it. The major improvement of Redpanda over Kafka is firstly, good documentation. Redpanda's documentation is very easily understandable, and they have a lot of examples. In addition to that, most of the setups include using another technology called Docker, which I am very familiar with. Setting up technologies using Docker is very convenient to me, and Redpanda has provided many templates for that. Redpanda has its own built-in metrics exporter, making it easier to monitor and check performance. What makes Redpanda superior is its performance since it's written in C++. C++ is pretty much the standard for high-performance applications.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Kinesis is real-time data streaming."
"The solution's technical support is flawless."
"Setting Amazon Kinesis up is quick and easy; it only takes a few minutes to configure the necessary settings and start using it."
"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."
"I find almost all features valuable, especially the timing and fast pace movement."
"The scalability is pretty good."
"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."
"I tested it with ten-plus nodes, and it's highly scalable."
"The UI is modern."
"What makes Redpanda superior is its performance since it's written in C++. C++ is pretty much the standard for high-performance applications."
"The cost savings have been significant."
 

Cons

"If there were better documentation on optimal sharding strategies then it would be helpful."
"The tool should focus on having an alert system rather than having to use a third-party solution."
"The solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."
"AI processing or cleaning up data would be nice since I don't think it is a feature in Amazon Kinesis right now."
"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."
"One thing that would be nice would be a policy for increasing the number of Kinesis streams because that's the one thing that's constant. You can change it in real time, but somebody has to change it, or you have to set some kind of meter. So, auto-scaling of adding and removing streams would be nice."
"The price is not much cheaper. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing."
"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."
"When it comes to self-hosting, their documentation could be improved."
"The version control mechanism must be improved."
"The command-line tools need to be improved. To quickly check the status of the topics and all."
"Recently, for the documentation, they've built their own AI chatbot, which is focused on giving you answers based on their documentation. While using that, I did not find it to be very good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Under $1,000 per 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."
"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."
"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."
"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 entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."
"Redpanda is cheaper than its competitors."
"It's free. Everybody can use it, only support is paid."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
5%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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 is moderately priced. In comparison with other competitors, it is fairly priced, however, if they reduced the price a little, it could add more value to customers.
What needs improvement with Amazon Kinesis?
I do not see any scope for improvement as it does what it is supposed to do. No changes are required. Since it's predominantly a back-end service, any end-user isn't going to interact with it direc...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Redpanda?
Redpanda is actually a commercial platform, but they do provide free versions as well. I've been working only with the free versions.
What needs improvement with Redpanda?
Recently, for the documentation, they've built their own AI chatbot, which is focused on giving you answers based on their documentation. While using that, I did not find it to be very good. Maybe ...
What is your primary use case for Redpanda?
I have worked with Redpanda for the past two to three months. Mainly in the tech industry or software industry, there's a huge rise of streaming data. Redpanda serves as a very reliable and fast me...
 

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kinesis vs. Redpanda and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.