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Amazon MSK vs Azure Stream Analytics 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 MSK
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
6th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Azure Stream Analytics
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 8.9%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure Stream Analytics is 12.4%, down from 13.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

FNU AKSHANSH - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's automatic
We don't have many use cases involving ingesting large amounts of data and scaling up and down. We have a clear understanding of our data volume, which remains relatively constant throughout the week. While we're aware of other features Amazon MSK offers, we feel confident in our current setup. If our requirements change significantly in the future, we'll reassess our needs and consider adopting Amazon MSK.
Sudhendra Umarji - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to set up and user-friendly, but could be priced better
I haven't come across missing items. It does what I need it to do. The pricing is a little bit high. The UI should be a little bit better from a usability perspective. The endpoint, if you are outsourcing to a third party, should have easier APIs. I'd like to have more destination sources available to us.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems."
"Amazon MSK has good integration because our team has been undergoing significant changes. Coupling it with MSK within AWS is helpful. We don't have to set up additionals or monitor external environments. This"
"Amazon MSK's scalability is very good."
"Amazon MSK's separation of concerns and ease of creating and deploying new features are highly valuable. It just requires to assign them to the topic, and then anyone who needs to consume these messages can do so directly from Amazon MSK. This separation of concerns makes it very convenient, especially for new feature development, as developers can easily access the messages they need without having to deal with complex server communications or protocol setups."
"The solution's technical support was helpful."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."
"It is a stable product."
"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature."
"I like all the connected ecosystems of Microsoft, it is really good with other BI tools that are easy to connect."
"It's scalable as a cloud product."
"Real-time analytics is the most valuable feature of this solution. I can send the collected data to Power BI in real time."
"The life cycle, report management and crash management features are great."
"We find the query editor feature of this solution extremely valuable for our business."
"It's easy to implement and maintain pipelines with minimal complexity."
"The most valuable aspect is the SQL option that Azure Stream Analytics provides."
"I like the way the UI looks, and the real-time analytics service is aligned to this. That can be helpful if I have to use this on a production service."
 

Cons

"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."
"In my opinion, there are areas in Amazon MSK that could be improved, particularly in terms of configuration. Initially setting it up and getting it connected was quite challenging. The naming conventions for policies were updated by AWS, and some were undocumented, leading to confusion with outdated materials. It took us weeks of trial and error before discovering new methods through hidden tutorials and official documentation."
"The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."
"Horizontal scale-out is actually not easy, making it an area where improvements are required."
"One of the reasons why we prefer Kafka is because the support is a little bit difficult to manage with Amazon MSK."
"It does not autoscale. Because if you do keep it manually when you add a note to the cluster and then you register it, then it is scalable, but the fact that you have to go and do it, I think, makes it, again, a bit of some operational overhead when managing the cluster."
"The product's schema support needs enhancement. It will help enhance integration with many kinds of languages of programming languages, especially for environments using languages like .NET."
"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."
"The solution could be improved by providing better graphics and including support for UI and UX testing."
"Azure Stream Analytics could improve by having clearer metrics as to the scale, more metrics around the data set size that is flowing through it, and performance tuning recommendations."
"If something goes wrong, it's very hard to investigate what caused it and why."
"The solution offers a free trial, however, it is too short."
"The collection and analysis of historical data could be better."
"The solution's interface could be simpler to understand for non-technical people."
"It is not complex, but it requires some development skills. When the data is sent from Azure Stream Analytics to Power BI, I don't have the access to modify the data. I can't customize or edit the data or do some queries. All queries need to be done in the Azure Stream Analytics."
"I would like to have a contact individual at Microsoft."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."
"When you create a complete enterprise-driven architecture that is deployable on an enterprise scale, I would say that the prices of Amazon MSK and Confluent Platform become comparable."
"The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."
"There are different tiers based on retention policies. There are four tiers. The pricing varies based on steaming units and tiers. The standard pricing is $10/hour."
"The current price is substantial."
"The cost of this solution is less than competitors such as Amazon or Google Cloud."
"The product's price is at par with the other solutions provided by the other cloud service providers in the market."
"I rate the price of Azure Stream Analytics a four out of five."
"When scaling up, the pricing for Azure Stream Analytics can get relatively high. Considering its capabilities compared to other solutions, I would rate it a seven out of ten for cost. However, we've found ways to optimize costs using tools like Databricks for specific tasks."
"Azure Stream Analytics is a little bit expensive."
"We pay approximately $500,000 a year. It's approximately $10,000 a year per license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon MSK?
Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems.
What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?
From AWS, I would consider more MSK schema validation is needed. It is easy to integrate if you have an application, but on-topic integration is more complex. You can do it with EvenBridge very eas...
What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?
I have used Confluent Cloud and Amazon MSK in my company. We are not using it for analytics and it is more for CDC processes, so we change the capture processes. It is used to extract data from a d...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Stream Analytics?
Stream Analytics is cheaper, especially for small-scale requirements or telemetry needs. However, for enterprise-level data handling, structured streaming with Databricks might be more cost-effecti...
What needs improvement with Azure Stream Analytics?
More flexibility in terms of writing queries and accommodating additional facilities would be beneficial. The complexity of handling messages that need decoding and contain different characters sho...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
ASA
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Rockwell Automation, Milliman, Honeywell Building Solutions, Arcoflex Automation Solutions, Real Madrid C.F., Aerocrine, Ziosk, Tacoma Public Schools, P97 Networks
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MSK vs. Azure Stream Analytics and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.