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Amazon MSK pros and cons

Vendor: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

3.6 out of 5

14 reviews
93% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Amazon MSK offers private network functionality and excellent AWS integration, enabling cost-effective solutions with good stability and facilitating feature development through scalability. It enhances real-time analytics and usage tracking. However, its integration and feature flexibility lags behind rivals like Confluent, lacks autoscaling, and involves complex configuration. Insufficient documentation complicates setup. Schema support requires improvements for programming environments like .NET, while high costs significantly increase cloud expenses.

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Amazon MSK offers a private network as an out-of-box feature and provides significant integration capabilities.

It is noted for cost-effectiveness regarding workflow and contributes positively to real-time analytics capabilities.

Amazon MSK is stable with good scalability and usability, adding ease to creating and deploying new features.

The separation of concerns simplifies access to message consumption without complex communications.

Amazon MSK ensures minimal configuration needs, as it automatically checks broker functioning and resolves issues.

CONS

Amazon MSK lacks flexibility in integrations and autoscaling capabilities, increasing operational overhead when managing clusters.

Configuration and documentation are complex, with challenges in initial setup and outdated materials causing confusion.

Schema support requires enhancement to improve integration with various programming languages, especially environments using .NET.

High costs, with increases of 50% to 60%, are significant disadvantages without justifiable savings.

Adjusting configurations and limited options for unique use cases create difficulties in production environments.

Amazon MSK Pros review quotes

reviewer2237604

Integration Solution Architect at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

May 24, 2024

Amazon MSK's scalability is very good.

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Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI

Aug 22, 2025

Amazon MSK has contributed positively to our real-time analytics capabilities because Fortis's dashboards have dashboard health that needs to be maintained, user logs that need to be maintained, and usage tracking.

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Keorapetse Naane

Cloud DevOps Engineer at Restack

May 18, 2023

Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow.

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Aniruddh Kurundkar

Lead Consultant at Neutrino Tech Systems

Jun 19, 2023

It is a stable product.

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Mauro Velasco Sarmiento

Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 201-500 employees

Sep 3, 2025

What I appreciate most about Amazon MSK is that it doesn't require extensive concern about the configurations; it starts checking how the brokers are functioning, and automatically, Amazon MSK tries to resolve all the problems.

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FW

Senior Software Engineer at a recreational facilities/services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 12, 2024

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.

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

May 9, 2024

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

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reviewer1500498

Team Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Mar 16, 2021

MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature.

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PP

ParsuramPanigrahi

CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited

Feb 25, 2025

It provides installations, scaling, and other functionalities straight out of the box.

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SDE at Mindtickle

Jul 10, 2024

The solution's technical support was helpful.

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Amazon MSK Cons review quotes

reviewer2237604

Integration Solution Architect at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

May 24, 2024

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

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Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI

Aug 22, 2025

The only issue with Amazon MSK that we are facing is the configurations. There are preset configurations and limited configurations that we can set for our unique use case.

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Keorapetse Naane

Cloud DevOps Engineer at Restack

May 18, 2023

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.

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Free Report: Amazon MSK Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Amazon MSK. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2025.

867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Aniruddh Kurundkar

Lead Consultant at Neutrino Tech Systems

Jun 19, 2023

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

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Mauro Velasco Sarmiento

Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 201-500 employees

Sep 3, 2025

The downside of Amazon MSK is that when I needed to make a small change in the MSK configuration, it wasn't possible. I had to remove and drop all the clusters and recreate them again, which is complicated in a production environment.

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RP

devops engineer at bpm links

Jul 3, 2025

We need to create connectors in Amazon MSK, but there are no default connectors in AWS for that purpose.

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FW

Senior Software Engineer at a recreational facilities/services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 12, 2024

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.

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reviewer1500498

Team Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Mar 16, 2021

It should be more flexible, integration-wise.

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PP

ParsuramPanigrahi

CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited

Feb 25, 2025

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.

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SDE at Mindtickle

Jul 10, 2024

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

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Show 3 more reviews (out of 13)

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