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Aiven Platform vs Amazon MSK comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Aiven Platform
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
17th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon MSK
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
6th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Aiven Platform is 2.1%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon MSK is 5.1%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon MSK5.1%
Aiven Platform2.1%
Other92.8%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

NM
CTO and Co-Founder at PeerSpot
Seamlessly handle database upgrades and minimize downtime disruptions
One of the most valuable features of Aiven Platform is that it handles the upgrades for us seamlessly, saving us time that would be spent on routine upgrades. It also provides reliable backups. The ability to minimize disruption during upgrades is very important since any database downtime would mean system-wide disruptions.
SYED SHAAZ - PeerSpot reviewer
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
Improved data streaming and integration challenges prompt search for alternatives
The integration capabilities of Amazon MSK are not very flexible. If you have your own self-managed Kafka, that helps significantly because you can set up configurations. We are considering self-managed Kafka since our product is only one year old. The Kafka integrations are fine, but the configurations are an issue. 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. The product could improve by allowing us to set different configurations. I would also like to see Amazon MSK improve in the area of connectors. We are considering Confluent Cloud because they have many more connectors. They have KSQL DB and governance features. It is slightly costlier, but Confluent offers more flexibility with their connectors.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the most valuable features of Aiven Platform is that it handles the upgrades for us seamlessly, saving us time that would be spent on routine upgrades."
"What I like best about the tool is that the process for the services is faster compared to other methods. It's easier to use because Aiven for Apache Kafka handles the maintenance, so we have less to manage. We only use Kafka to manage its connectivity."
"The solution's technical support was helpful."
"I have Amazon MSK integrated with other AWS services such as S3 and Lambda."
"It is a stable product."
"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."
"It provides installations, scaling, and other functionalities straight out of the box."
"The scalability and usability are quite remarkable."
"It offers good stability."
"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."
 

Cons

"I would really like to see Aiven Platform add a user interface for database backups, as this would eliminate the need for a third-party solution."
"One challenge we face is when we want to update the version, for example, from 3.6 to 3.7. It will spawn new nodes, and then there's rebalancing and syncing from other brokers. There's high CPU usage during this process, so the solution can't be used for a while, causing some downtime in our services. To tackle this challenge, we schedule maintenance updates during low-traffic periods when there's less risk and fewer users use the services."
"Horizontal scale-out is actually not easy, making it an area where improvements are required."
"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."
"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."
"The product's schema support needs enhancement. It will help enhance integration with many kinds of languages of programming languages, especially for environments using languages like .NET."
"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."
"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."
"One of the reasons why we prefer Kafka is because the support is a little bit difficult to manage with Amazon MSK."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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 platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Hospitality Company
6%
Media Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Construction Company
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Aiven for Apache Kafka?
I would really like to see Aiven Platform add a user interface for database backups, as this would eliminate the need for a third-party solution. Additionally, the customer service could be more re...
What is your primary use case for Aiven for Apache Kafka?
Our primary use case is having our PostgreSQL and MySQL databases hosted by Aiven Platform. They serve as our production databases.
What advice do you have for others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka?
In our experience, we encountered issues with Aiven Platform's connection to Redis. It was not smooth, and though we like the solution overall, we are hesitant about using Redis integration again. ...
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 integration capabilities of Amazon MSK are not very flexible. If you have your own self-managed Kafka, that helps significantly because you can set up configurations. We are considering self-ma...
What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?
We are recently working with Amazon MSK at Fortis, where we have multiple dashboards in our revenue intelligence platform. We are streaming data from different apps into those dashboards. The data ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Find out what your peers are saying about Aiven Platform vs. Amazon MSK and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,986 professionals have used our research since 2012.