Amazon MSK vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Solace are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.4, while Solace is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.3. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Solace users who would recommend it.

Amazon MSK

Read 10 Amazon MSK reviews

6,132 Views
4,748 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 16 PubSub+ Platform reviews

2,039 Views
1,605 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon MSK

PubSub+ Platform

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon MSK and PubSub+ Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Streaming Analytics solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon MSK vs. PubSub+ Platform Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK vs. PubSub+ Platform

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Amazon MSK

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

6th

Average Rating

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

PubSub+ Platform

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

11th

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (7th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (10th)

Featured Reviews

FNU AKSHANSH

Senior Data Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

May 9, 2024

Streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's automatic

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 coupling streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's…

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BhanuChidigam

Sofware Engineering Manager at Wells Fargo

Apr 20, 2023

Performs well, high availability, and helpful support

We are using PubSub+ Event Broker for specific application processing. We have used the solution In banking systems The speed of the throughout has been helpful for our organization. The valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the speed of processing, publishing, and consumption. The…

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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

"It is a stable product."

"The solution's technical support was helpful."

"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 most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."

"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'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."

More Amazon MSK pros

"The topic hierarchy is pretty flexible. Once you have the subject defined just about anybody who knows Java can come onboard. The APIs are all there."

"This solution reduces the latency to access changes in real-time and the effort required to onboard a new subscriber. It also reduces the maintenance of each of those interfaces because now the publisher and subscribers are decoupled. Event Broker handles all the communication and engagement. We can just push one update, then we don't have to know who is consuming it and what's happening to that publication downstream. It's all done by the broker, which is a huge benefit of using Event Broker."

"The valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the speed of processing, publishing, and consumption."

"Guaranteed Messaging allows for us to transport messages between on-prem and the cloud without any loss of data."

"The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable. It can be used for any kind of business where you've got multiple users who need information. Any company, such as LinkedIn, with a huge number of subscribers and any business, such as publishing, supermarket, airline, or shipping can use it."

"The most useful features has been the WAN optimization and probably the HybridEdge, which requires some third-party adapters or plugins. The idea that we can position Solace as a protocol-agnostic message transport fabric is key to our company having all manners of asynchronous messaging protocols from MQ, Kafka, JMS, etc. I really like the WAN optimization: Send once over a WAN, then distribute locally as many times as there are subscribers."

"Going from something where we had outages and capacity issues constantly to a system that was able to scale with the massive market data and messaging spikes that happened during the initial stages of the COVID crisis in March, we were able to scale with 40 plus percent growth in our platform over the course of days."

"In my assessment of Solace against other products — as I was responsible for evaluating various products and bringing the right tool into companies in the past — I worked with multiple platforms like RabbitMQ, Confluent, Kafka, and various other tools in the market. But I found the event mesh capability to be a very interesting as well as fulfilling capability, towards what we want to achieve from a digital-integration-strategy point of view... It's distributed, yet it is intelligently connected. It can also span and I can plug and play any number of brokers into the event mesh, so it's a great deal. That's a differentiator."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"It should be more flexible, integration-wise."

"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."

"Horizontal scale-out is actually not easy, making it an area where improvements are required."

"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."

"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."

"One of the reasons why we prefer Kafka is because the support is a little bit difficult to manage with Amazon MSK."

"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."

More Amazon MSK cons

"For improvements, I would suggest increasing the max payload size to a limit of 100MB or more. The current max payload size is limited to 5MB."

"Some of the feature's gaps with some of the open-source vendors have been closed in a lot of ways. Being more agile and addressing those earlier could be an area for improvement."

"The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls."

"One of the areas of improvement would be if we could tell the story a bit better about what an event mesh does or why an event mesh is foundational to a large enterprise that has a wide diversity of applications that are homegrown and a small number off the shelf."

"The ease of management could be approved. The GUI is very good, but to configure and manage these devices programmatically in the software version is not easy. For example, if I would like to spin up a new software broker, then I could in theory use the API, but it would require a considerable amount of development effort to do so. There should be a tool, or something that Solace supports, that we could use for this, e.g., a platform like Terraform where we could use infrastructure as code to configure our source appliances."

"We've pointed out some things with the DMR piece, the event mesh, in edge cases where we could see a problem. Something like 99 percent of users wouldn't ever see this problem, but it has to do with if you get multiple bad clients sending data over a WAN, for example. That could then impact other clients."

"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."

"We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building. A current workaround is using the message's header, where the business data can be put into this header and be used for a dynamic topic lookup. I want to see this in action when there are a couple of hundred cases live. E.g., how does it perform? From an administration perspective, is the ease of use there?"

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."

"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."

"There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."

"We are looking for something that will add value and fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only."

"Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"We have been really happy with the product licensing rates. It has been free for us, up to a 100,000 transactions per second, and all we have to do is pay for support. Making their product available and accessible to us has not been a problem at all."

"Having a free version is critical for our technology operations use case. This is primarily because our technology operations team is a cost center in our company. They are not profit drivers and having a free version for installation will probably meet our needs. Even for production, it'll support up to a 100,000 messages per second. I don't think in technology operations that we have that many events and alerts from our detection tools. Even if I have 20 or 30 event detection products out there, they're only going to publish the things which are critical or warnings. I don't think we'll ever reach a 100,000 messages per second."

"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."

"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

36%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about PubSub+ Event Broker?

The most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was done manually with a file, and it can be done instantly live.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PubSub+ Event Broker?

The price of the solution is expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?

The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively. Additionally, providing a comprehensive dashboard t...

See all answers

Comparisons

Azure Stream Analytics vs Amazon MSK

Compared 28% of the time

Confluent vs Amazon MSK

Compared 24% of the time

Amazon Kinesis vs Amazon MSK

Compared 17% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs Amazon MSK

Compared 13% of the time

More Amazon MSK Competitors

Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 28% of the time

IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 21% of the time

ActiveMQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

More PubSub+ Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK

October 2024

Download Amazon MSK product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

October 2024

Download PubSub+ Platform product report

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka

PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal

Learn More

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Solace

Overview

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is a fully managed service that enables you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. Amazon MSK provides the control-plane operations, such as those for creating, updating, and deleting clusters.

PubSub+ Platform supports real-time shipment tracking, IT event management in multiclouds, and connects legacy and cloud-native systems for application modernization. It's utilized for trading, streaming market data, and app-to-app messaging, enhancing event-driven architectures with reliable message queuing.

Organizations adopt PubSub+ to efficiently transport events across hybrid and cloud environments, managing audit trails and long processing tasks. The platform aids integration through dynamic data publication, event mesh capabilities, and WAN optimization. Features like seamless integration, protocol agnosticism, and flexible topic hierarchy enhance versatility. Solace Admin Utility simplifies configuration and management, while the event portal allows hybrid deployment.

What are the key features of PubSub+ Platform?

Dynamic Data Publication: Enables flexible and responsive data handling.
Event Mesh Capabilities: Facilitates efficient event transportation.
WAN Optimization: Enhances data transfer across networks.
Protocol Agnosticism: Supports a wide range of protocols for integration.
Flexible Topic Hierarchy: Allows detailed and organized data exchange.
Solace Admin Utility: Provides intuitive configuration and management.
Granular Topic Filtering: Offers precise data filtering options.
Guaranteed Messaging: Ensures reliable message delivery.

What benefits or ROI should users consider?

Seamless Integration: Reduces complexity in connecting systems.
Performance and Scaling: Supports high-load environments efficiently.
Asynchronous Messaging: Improves application performance.
Robust Support System: Provides guidance and problem resolution.

PubSub+ is implemented in industries requiring real-time data handling and integration between disparate systems. Financial institutions use it for trading and streaming market data, while logistics companies benefit from real-time shipment tracking. Enterprises apply it to modernize operations by connecting legacy systems with cloud-native applications, enhancing their architecture and ensuring data reliability across environments.

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK vs. PubSub+ Platform

October 2024

Free Report: Amazon MSK vs. PubSub+ Platform

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