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Amazon MSK vs PubSub+ Platform 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.9
Amazon MSK enhances ROI through reduced integration time, flexibility, and cost-efficient experimentation, outperforming Confluent in innovation speed.
Sentiment score
7.0
PubSub+ Platform users see efficiency and cost benefits, though some find Kafka more economical long-term due to complex returns.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.9
Amazon MSK support is generally satisfactory with expertise, but experiences vary based on support plans and perceived decline over time.
Sentiment score
7.5
PubSub+ Platform offers exceptional, responsive customer service with efficient problem resolution and user-driven feature development.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.9
Amazon MSK offers scalable, flexible serverless and classic options, efficiently handling user demands despite occasional manual interventions.
Sentiment score
7.0
PubSub+ Platform seamlessly scales across IT environments, excelling in adaptability, performance, and transaction processing despite some complexity concerns.
The functionality for scaling comes out of the box and is very effective.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon MSK is generally seen as stable, rated 8-9/10, with 99.9% availability but limited long-term usage insights.
Sentiment score
8.2
PubSub+ Platform delivers stable, reliable performance with zero downtime, handling massive data efficiently and ensuring high availability.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon MSK struggles with integration, pricing, setup complexity, limited schema support, and lacks default connectors, complicating user experience.
PubSub+ Platform needs improvements in integration, user management, dashboard functionality, and open-source support for enhanced application deployment.
The increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings.
It was as impressive as Kafka, better than Kafka based on my experience working on the Solace and Kafka white paper.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon MSK offers competitive pricing for large workloads, but small use cases may incur higher costs, similar to Confluent.
Enterprise users value PubSub+ for its clear pricing, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, appreciating the free version for initial evaluation.
Once we started using Kafka, our cloud costs rose by 50% to 60%.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon MSK integrates with AWS services, offering cost-effectiveness, scalability, and ease of use for data pipelines and migrations.
PubSub+ Platform offers seamless integration, scalability, and WAN optimization with intuitive management, efficient data distribution, and advanced topic filtering.
The ability to handle everything, including installation, with minimal human intervention, is a strong point.
The solution's ability to decouple message producers and consumers allows us to have high cohesion and low coupling, making it an excellent solution for that purpose.
 

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
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (8th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (12th)
 

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 PubSub+ Platform is 2.9%, up from 2.9% 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.
BhanuChidigam - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs well, high availability, and helpful support
We use approximately four people for the maintenance of the solution. My advice to others is this solution has high throughput and is used for many stock exchanges. For business critical use cases, such as processing financial transactions at a quick speed, I would recommend this solution. I rate PubSub+ Event Broker an eight out of ten.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
8%
 

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?
I'm not sure exactly what benefit we have because we are using multiple AWS tools. We have AWS DMS, which is also the same as Amazon MSK, and we have Fivetran, which is a third-party website provid...
What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?
We are currently using Amazon MSK to transfer data from our PostgreSQL database to our DynamoDB, acting as a mediator between those two databases for migration purposes. Our data is in an on-premis...
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
Regarding improving the PubSub+ Platform, I'm not sure about the pricing aspect, but I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka. That's the only concern I can mention; otherwise, it was a...
What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?
My typical use case for the PubSub+ Platform is as an event-driven solution for communication between two components.
What advice do you have for others considering PubSub+ Event Broker?
I have experience working with Kafka, PubSub+ Platform, and IBM MQ, all three of them. We are customers, meaning my company uses Solace. We use it and customize it based on our needs. Based on my e...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet 
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MSK vs. PubSub+ Platform and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
863,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.