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Amazon MSK vs Confluent comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 26, 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
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Confluent
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 7.9%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 8.6%, down from 11.5% 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.
Yantao Zhao - PeerSpot reviewer
Great tool for sharing knowledge, internal communication and allows for real-time collaboration on pages
Confluence is easy to use and modify. However, sometimes there are too many pages. We have to reorganize the folder or parent account. Since everyone can create a page, the same knowledge might be created in multiple places by different people. This leads to redundancy and makes it difficult to find information. It's not centralized. So it could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful. It's very easy to use, so everyone can create knowledge. But it would be good to synchronize and organize that information a bit better. Another improvement would be in Confluence search. You can search for keywords, but it's not like AI, not even ChatGPT or OpenAI. It would be nice to get more relevant or organized answers. If you're outside the company, you just get some titles containing the keyword you input. But if Confluence were like a database, you could input something and get a well-organized search offering from multiple pages.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The scalability and usability are quite remarkable."
"It provides installations, scaling, and other functionalities straight out of the box."
"The solution's technical support was helpful."
"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature."
"Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow."
"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"
"It offers good stability."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
 

Cons

"Horizontal scale-out is actually not easy, making it an area where improvements are required."
"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."
"One of the reasons why we prefer Kafka is because the support is a little bit difficult to manage with Amazon MSK."
"The cost of using Amazon MSK is high, which is a significant disadvantage, as the increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings."
"The cost of using Amazon MSK is high, which is a significant disadvantage, as the increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings."
"It should be more flexible, integration-wise."
"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."
"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 pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."
"It could have more themes. They should also have more reporting-oriented plugins as well. It would be great to have free custom reports that can be dispatched directly from Jira."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"It would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"One area we've identified that could be improved is the governance and access control to the Kafka topics. We've found some limitations, like a threshold of 10,000 rules per cluster, that make it challenging to manage access at scale if we have many different data sources."
"There is a limitation when it comes to seamlessly importing Microsoft documents into Confluent pages, which can be inconvenient for users who frequently work with Microsoft Office tools and need to transition their content to Confluent."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."
"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 platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"The pricing model of Confluent could improve because if you have a classic use case where you're going to use all the features there is no plan to reduce the features. You should be able to pick and choose basic services at a reduced price. The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate Confluent's pricing at five. I have not encountered any additional costs."
"Confluence's pricing is quite reasonable, with a cost of around $10 per user that decreases as the number of users increases. Additionally, it's worth noting that for teams of up to 10 users, the solution is completely free."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
5%
 

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?
The cost of using Amazon MSK is high, which is a significant disadvantage, as the increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings. There were no other notable issues.
What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?
We used Amazon MSK to manage high-volume third-party data entering our system. It served as a buffer when our system was unable to consume data at high speeds in real-time. The data initially went ...
What do you like most about Confluent?
I find Confluent's Kafka Connectors and Kafka Streams invaluable for my use cases because they simplify real-time data processing and ETL tasks by providing reliable, pre-packaged connectors and to...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?
They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.
What needs improvement with Confluent?
I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team. The lack of easy access to the Confluent support team is also a...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MSK vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.