We compared Amazon Kinesis and Amazon MSK based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
Amazon Kinesis is praised for its efficient data handling and integration with AWS services, exceptional customer service, positive ROI, and suggestions for improvement in documentation, UI, scalability, and integrations. On the other hand, Amazon MSK offers ease of use, scalability, reliability, good customer service, positive user outcomes, and suggestions for enhancements in scalability, ease of use, and cost management.
Features: Amazon Kinesis stands out with its ability to handle high volumes of data in real-time. Its flexibility in data streaming and processing, along with seamless integration with other AWS services, are valuable features. On the other hand, users appreciate Amazon MSK for its ease of use, scalability, and reliability.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Amazon Kinesis is minimal and straightforward, allowing users to quickly start using the service. On the other hand, Amazon MSK offers an easy setup process without any additional costs. Both products offer competitive pricing and flexible licensing options., Amazon Kinesis has shown a highly positive ROI with significant cost savings, improved data processing efficiency, and enhanced real-time analytics capabilities. On the other hand, Amazon MSK users have reported positive outcomes and benefits indicating a valuable and effective platform.
Room for Improvement: Amazon Kinesis could improve by enhancing documentation, providing a better user interface, increasing flexibility in data handling, addressing scalability and performance issues, expanding integrations, enhancing error handling, streamlining pricing, and improving customer support. On the other hand, Amazon MSK could benefit from enhancements in scalability, ease of use, and cost management by providing better scalability options, a more intuitive interface, and transparent pricing models.
Deployment and customer support: The duration required to establish a new tech solution like Amazon Kinesis varies, ranging from three months for deployment and an additional week for setup to one week for both deployment and setup. User feedback on Amazon MSK's duration is not available., Amazon Kinesis is praised for its outstanding assistance and promptness, with representatives going above and beyond. On the other hand, Amazon MSK receives positive comments for its excellent customer service and support.
The summary above is based on 12 interviews we conducted recently with Amazon Kinesis and Amazon MSK users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things."
"The feature that I've found most valuable is the replay. That is one of the most valuable in our business. We are business-to-business so replay was an important feature - being able to replay for 24 hours. That's an important feature."
"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"The solution works well in rather sizable environments."
"I have worked in companies that build tools in-house. They face scaling challenges."
"The solution's technical support is flawless."
"What I like about Amazon Kinesis is that it's very effective for small businesses. It's a well-managed solution with excellent reporting. Amazon Kinesis is also easy to use, and even a novice developer can work with it, versus Apache Kafka, which requires expertise."
"I find almost all features valuable, especially the timing and fast pace movement."
"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature."
"It is a stable product."
"Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."
"It offers good stability."
"Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow."
"It would be beneficial if Amazon Kinesis provided document based support on the internet to be able to read the data from the Kinesis site."
"In order to do a successful setup, the person handling the implementation needs to know the solution very well. You can't just come into it blind and with little to no experience."
"Lacks first in, first out queuing."
"I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services."
"The price is not much cheaper. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing."
"The solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."
"In general, the pain point for us was that once the data gets into Kinesis there is no way for us to understand what's happening because Kinesis divides everything into shards. So if we wanted to understand what's happening with a particular shard, whether it is published or not, we could not. Even with the logs, if we want to have some kind of logging it is in the shard."
"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."
"It should be more flexible, integration-wise."
"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."
"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."
"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."
"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."
"The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."
Amazon Kinesis is ranked 2nd in Streaming Analytics with 21 reviews while Amazon MSK is ranked 6th in Streaming Analytics with 6 reviews. Amazon Kinesis is rated 8.0, while Amazon MSK is rated 7.2. The top reviewer of Amazon Kinesis writes "Used for media streaming and live-streaming data". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Amazon MSK writes "Efficient real-time transaction tracking but time-consuming installation". Amazon Kinesis is most compared with Azure Stream Analytics, Apache Flink, Confluent, Google Cloud Dataflow and Apache Spark Streaming, whereas Amazon MSK is most compared with Confluent, Azure Stream Analytics, Google Cloud Dataflow, Aiven for Apache Kafka and Apache Pulsar. See our Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK report.
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We monitor all Streaming Analytics reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
