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Amazon MSK vs Confluent comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 6, 2025

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
6.8
Number of Reviews
12
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 July 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 6.8%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 8.3%, down from 10.6% 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.
Gustavo-Barbosa Dos Santos - PeerSpot reviewer
Has good technical support services and a valuable feature for real-time data streaming
Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance. It helps us understand the various requirements of multiple customers and validates the information for different versions. We can automate the tasks using Confluent Kafka. Thus, it guarantees us the data quality and maintains the integrity of message contracts.

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 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"
"The solution's technical support was helpful."
"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature."
"It is a stable product."
"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."
"It provides installations, scaling, and other functionalities straight out of the box."
"The scalability and usability are quite remarkable."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."
"I would rate the scalability of the solution at eight out of ten. We have 20 people who use Confluent in our organization now, and we hope to increase usage in the future."
"The most valuable feature that we are using is the data replication between the data centers allowing us to configure a disaster recovery or software. However, is it's not mandatory to use and because most of the features that we use are from Apache Kafka, such as end-to-end encryption. Internally, we can develop our own kind of product or service from Apache Kafka."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."
"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 tools."
 

Cons

"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."
"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."
"It should be more flexible, integration-wise."
"Horizontal scale-out is actually not easy, making it an area where improvements are required."
"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 configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."
"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 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."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"The product should integrate tools for incorporating diagrams like Lucidchart. It also needs to improve its formatting features. We also faced issues while granting permissions."
"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 no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"The Schema Registry service could be improved. I would like a bigger knowledge base of other use cases and more technical forums. It would be good to have more flexible monitoring features added to the next release as well."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."
"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 solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Regarding pricing, I think Confluent is a premium product, but it's hard for me to say definitively if it's overly expensive. We're still trying to understand if the features and reduced maintenance complexity justify the cost, especially as we scale our platform use."
"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."
"Confluent is highly priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
6%
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: June 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.