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Amazon SQS vs Apache Kafka comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon SQS
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (3rd)
Apache Kafka
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
84
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Amazon SQS and Apache Kafka aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Amazon SQS is designed for Message Queue (MQ) Software and holds a mindshare of 11.9%, down 18.6% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 0.3% mindshare, up 0.0% since last year.
Message Queue (MQ) Software
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Aravind Nithiyanandham - PeerSpot reviewer
Used for notifying, queuing servers, and queuing messages
I created a support ticket one or two years ago. The technical support team responded promptly and helped us with the issues. I am very much happy with the solution’s technical support. They are knowledgeable, understand our problem easily, and then figure out the issues. On a scale from one to ten, where one is bad and ten is excellent, I rate the solution’s technical support nine and a half out of ten.
Eyob Alemu - PeerSpot reviewer
Significant cost savings with real-time processing and fast recovery
We use Kafka for a stage event-driven process from a process perspective. Our platform is an ID platform, so after registration data is received, it has to be stored from various registration locations. The process includes stages like quality checking, consistency, format, biometric data checking…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With SQS, we can trigger events in various cloud environments. It offers numerous benefits for us."
"The most valuable features of the solution are AWS Lambda services, ECS, and QuickSight reports, which are beneficial for data analysis."
"The scale it manages is quite impressive."
"Amazon SQS is reliable, with no issues to date."
"We use Amazon SQS for notifying, queuing servers, queuing messages, and notifying the people for alerting systems."
"The solution is easy to scale and cost-effective."
"We use the tool in interface integrations."
"Amazon SQS provides faster search through indexing via OpenSearch."
"The stream processing is a very valuable aspect of the solution for us."
"The most valuable feature is the documentation, which is good and clear."
"Kafka is an open-source tool that's easy to use in our country, and the command line interface is powerful."
"The valuable features are the group community and support."
"It's very easy to keep to install and it's pretty stable."
"The open-source version is relatively straightforward to set up and only takes a few minutes."
"It's an open-source product, which means it doesn't cost us anything to use it."
"Kafka can process messages in real-time, making it useful for applications that require near-instantaneous processing."
 

Cons

"The initial setup of Amazon SQS is in the middle range of difficulty. You need to learn Amazon AWS and know how to navigate, create resources, and structures, and provide rules."
"There is room for improvement in handling large-scale data."
"There are some issues with SQS's transaction queue regarding knowing if something has been received."
"It would be beneficial to have the ability to peek at messages currently in Amazon SQS without needing to monitor incoming messages."
"Sometimes, we have to switch to another component similar to SQS because the patching tool for SQS is relatively slow for us."
"I cannot send a message to multiple people simultaneously. It can only be sent to one recipient."
"For Amazon SQS, in particular, I think AWS Management Console has shortcomings. AWS Management Console should be a better pluggable option to help users with some integrations."
"The current visibility timeout of five minutes is okay. However, I'd like to explore the possibility of extending it for specific use cases."
"The user interface is one weakness. Sometimes, our data isn't as accessible as we'd like. It takes a lot of work to retrieve the data and the index."
"Pulsar gives more scalability to an even grouping, but Apache Kafka is used more if you want to send something in a time series-based. If this does not matter to you then Pulsar could be more customizable. Apache Kafka is nothing but a streaming system with local storage."
"I suggest using cloud services because the solution is expensive if you are using it on-premises."
"Kafka does not provide control over the message queue, so we do not know whether we are experiencing lost or duplicate messages."
"I would like them to reduce the learning curve around the creation of brokers and topics. They also need to improve on the concept of the partitions."
"Confluent has improved aspects like documentation and cloud support, yet Kafka's reliance on older architectures like ZooKeeper in previous versions is a limitation."
"The GUI tools for monitoring and support are still very basic and not very rich. There is no help in determining a shard key for performance."
"Too much dependency on the zookeeper and leader selection is still the bottleneck for Kafka implementation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon SQS is moderately priced."
"SQS's pricing is very good - I would rate it nine out of ten."
"The pricing of Amazon SQS is reasonable. The first million requests are free every month, and after, it's cost 40 cents for every million requests. There are not any additional fees."
"Compared to EC2 and other services, Amazon SQS' pricing is cheaper."
"Amazon SQS offers a generous free tier, beyond which it remains very cost-effective. The cost per million messages is less than a dollar, making it an economical choice."
"Amazon SQS is more affordable compared to other solutions."
"It's quite expensive."
"Amazon SQS is quite expensive and is at the highest price point compared to other solutions."
"Apache Kafka is free."
"When starting to look at a distributed message system, look for a cloud solution first. It is an easier entry point than an on-premises hardware solution."
"The cost can vary depending on the provider and the specific flavor or version you use. I'm not very knowledgeable about the pricing details."
"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution."
"I rate Apache Kafka's pricing a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. There are no additional costs apart from the licensing fees for Apache Kafka."
"Apache Kafka is an open-sourced solution. There are fees if you want the support, and I would recommend it for enterprises. There are annual subscriptions available."
"Running a Kafka cluster can be expensive, especially if you need to scale it up to handle large amounts of data."
"Kafka is open-source and it is cheaper than any other product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Retailer
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon SQS?
A primary area of improvement for Amazon SQS is the message size limitation, which is currently restricted to 256 kilobytes per message. If this could be increased, it would benefit many use cases....
What is your primary use case for Amazon SQS?
I have been heavily using Amazon SQS for the last more than four years in serverless and decoupled solutions. We use it in workflows like order creation, where the order creation task is queued, al...
What are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?
Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...
What do you like most about Apache Kafka?
Apache Kafka is an open-source solution that can be used for messaging or event processing.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Kafka?
We use Apache Kafka, which is open-source, so we don't have fees. I can't comment on ownership costs as I am not responsible for that domain.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

EMS, NASA, BMW, Capital One
Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon SQS vs. Apache Kafka and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
824,106 professionals have used our research since 2012.