Amazon Kinesis vs Redpanda comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Redpanda Data are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.8, while Redpanda Data is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.8. Additionally, 89% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Redpanda Data users who would recommend it.

Amazon Kinesis

Read 27 Amazon Kinesis reviews

5,675 Views
4,237 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Redpanda

Read 4 Redpanda reviews

202 Views
77 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon Kinesis

Redpanda

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Amazon Kinesis and Redpanda compete in the data streaming sector. Kinesis seems to have the upper hand due to its integration within the AWS ecosystem and real-time data processing capabilities.

Features: Amazon Kinesis is praised for its seamless integration with AWS services, real-time data processing, and scalability. It is easy to manage due to its fully-hosted nature. Redpanda is noted for its high-speed data streaming and efficient resource utilization thanks to its C++ foundation. It performs exceptionally well in self-hosted setups.

Room for Improvement: Amazon Kinesis could improve its sharding capabilities and increase default limits. Integration with other cloud services can be limited, and Kinesis Data Analytics might benefit from simplification. Redpanda’s version control requires enhancements, its documentation needs clarity, and its command-line tools could become more user-friendly.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon Kinesis offers ease of deployment in public cloud environments but has room for improvement in technical support. Redpanda supports both on-premises and cloud deployment, though users find its documentation and support could be improved.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon Kinesis is moderately priced and offers good ROI through AWS integration, though analytics features can be costly. Its cost can be higher than self-hosted solutions. Redpanda offers competitive pricing and free versions, making it cost-effective against Kafka while considering its high performance.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Kinesis vs. Redpanda Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Redpanda

March 2025

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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

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Featured Reviews

Rajni Kumar Jha

Senior Software Engineer at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

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.

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Vishal M Godi

Big Data Teaching Assistant at Center for Cloud Computing and Big Data, PES University

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution's technical support is flawless."

"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."

"Setting Amazon Kinesis up is quick and easy; it only takes a few minutes to configure the necessary settings and start using it."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Kinesis is real-time data streaming."

"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."

"The solution works well in rather sizable environments."

"The Kinesis VideoStream and DataStream are the most important features."

"The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things."

More Amazon Kinesis pros

"The UI is modern."

"I tested it with ten-plus nodes, and it's highly scalable."

"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

"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."

"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."

"It would be beneficial if Amazon Kinesis provided document based support on the internet to be able to read the data from the Kinesis site."

"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."

"Lacks first in, first out queuing."

"Amazon Kinesis involved a more complex setup and configuration than Azure Event Hub."

"Could include features that make it easier to scale."

More Amazon Kinesis cons

"When it comes to self-hosting, their documentation could be improved."

"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."

"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."

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 solution's pricing is fair."

"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."

"The tool's pricing is cheap."

"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."

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

"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."

More Amazon Kinesis pricing and cost advice

"It's free. Everybody can use it, only support is paid."

"Redpanda is cheaper than its competitors."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 31% of the time

Azure Stream Analytics vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 23% of the time

Apache Flink vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 17% of the time

Amazon MSK vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 9% of the time

Apache Pulsar vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 2% of the time

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Apache Pulsar vs Redpanda

Compared 51% of the time

More Redpanda Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Redpanda

March 2025

Download Redpanda product report

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis

No data available

Overview

Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost-effectively process streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit the requirements of your application. With Amazon Kinesis, you can ingest real-time data such as video, audio, application logs, website clickstreams, and IoT telemetry data for machine learning, analytics, and other applications. Amazon Kinesis enables you to process and analyze data as it arrives and respond instantly instead of having to wait until all your data is collected before the processing can begin.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Redpanda offers a modern, intuitive interface with efficient resource usage, seamlessly integrating with Kafka, and enhancing performance through fast operations and reliable support. Organizations benefit from its memory efficiency and high performance for demanding data workloads.

Built on a C++ foundation, Redpanda integrates easily with Kafka clients and stands out for fast operations, simplified Docker setup, and effective metrics monitoring. Performance is enhanced by memory efficiency and high throughput capabilities. The community provides robust support, and clear documentation aids the adoption process. However, improvements could be made in version control, command-line tools, and documentation, particularly in areas such as automation file management and chatbot documentation assistance. Redpanda is widely utilized in data streaming and normalization, efficiently handling large telemetry data volumes with minimal latency, essential for building asynchronous applications across microservices and monitoring systems.

What are the most important features of Redpanda?

Modern UI: Provides an intuitive interface for ease of use.
Efficient Resource Usage: Built on C++ for performance optimization.
Seamless Integration: Works well with Kafka clients for smooth operations.
Simplified Setup: Docker templates facilitate easy installation.
Built-in Metrics Exporters: Enhance monitoring and visibility.
High Performance: Ensures memory efficiency and quick data processing.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Fast Operations: Accelerates data processing for efficient workflows.
Reliable Support: Strong community aids troubleshooting and development.
Clear Documentation: Helps users quickly onboard and manage Redpanda.
Low Latency: Critical for applications requiring quick response times.
Sub-second Response: Supports demanding performance and latency needs.

Redpanda is commonly implemented in tech and software industries to streamline data streaming and normalization processes, handling high telemetry data volumes effectively. Its capacity for sub-second response times makes it crucial for companies developing asynchronous applications, especially in microservices and monitoring systems.

Redpanda Data

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Redpanda

March 2025

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