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Amazon Kinesis vs Amazon MSK comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon Kinesis offers significant cost savings, seamless integration, improved monitoring, and reduces data ingestion costs, enhancing ROI and architecture.
Sentiment score
7.1
Amazon MSK provides positive ROI by reducing integration time, minimizing licensing costs, and supporting flexible, cost-efficient experimentation with large data volumes.
With Lambda, there is no need for data transfer charges, which is beneficial for less frequent workloads.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Amazon Kinesis customer support is generally quick and effective, but experiences vary in technical guidance and response times.
Sentiment score
7.2
Amazon MSK customer service is generally praised for accessibility and responsiveness, but expertise and cost can vary by plan.
We receive prompt support from AWS solution architects or TAMs.
Amazon's support is excellent.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon Kinesis is scalable for reliable streaming, but complex processing and costs may vary with implementation and data volumes.
Sentiment score
7.5
Amazon MSK offers efficient manual scalability, rated six to nine by users, suitable for different organizational needs.
Amazon Kinesis provides auto-scaling with streams that handle large volumes well.
The functionality for scaling comes out of the box and is very effective.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon Kinesis is praised for stability and fault tolerance, though some users report slowdowns and capacity issues.
Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon MSK is stable with high user ratings, though concerns exist due to its newness and some Windows-specific issues.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Kinesis requires improvements in throughput, automation, setup complexity, data retention, machine learning features, and user-friendly interfaces.
Amazon MSK needs better integration, configuration ease, improved documentation, cost reduction, and feature enhancements to compete and integrate effectively.
Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes.
The increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Kinesis is cost-effective compared to self-managed solutions, but prices can increase with high data usage and features.
Amazon MSK is cost-effective for large workloads but can be expensive for smaller use cases, needing careful evaluation.
Amazon Kinesis and Lambda pricing is competitive, but we noticed that scaling and large volumes could potentially increase costs significantly.
Once we started using Kafka, our cloud costs rose by 50% to 60%.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Kinesis offers easy configuration, real-time analytics, and robust AWS integration, ideal for managing large, complex data workflows.
Amazon MSK offers seamless AWS integration, cost-efficiency, simplified setup, and reliable performance for CDC pipelines and asynchronous data collection.
Lambda's scalability, seamless integration with other AWS services, and support for multiple programming languages are very beneficial.
The scalability and usability are quite remarkable.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Kinesis
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon MSK
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
6th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 7.9%, down from 13.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon MSK is 6.9%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Prabin Silwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Pipeline setup is very simple
I am not exactly sure about where improvements are needed in the tool. When I was working on the tool, it was very scalable, and the only thing we needed in our company was temporary streaming stuff that could work well. We didn't want to set up our own Kafka, other queues, or processing systems. As it is a cloud tool, it is easy for us to use the tool, and it satisfies all our requirements. Maybe for the other cases, if we need, then it may need some improvements. The tool satisfies our particular needs. Currently, the pipeline setup is very simple. For our particular use cases, it is because we just want to get the data and send it to the different data lakes or some logging system. Previously, we also used Amazon Kinesis to log those to Splunk, and later on, we removed Splunk and transferred that to Datadog. For our use cases, I don't want any new features in the tool. Amazon Kinesis' use case is for collecting, processing, and analyzing. If anything can be added to the tool, then I feel one should be able to use the same kind of tool so that everything is there in the product, like an alert system, and so that one can analyze, make a query, and do sourcing from the solution itself rather than using other logging and monitoring systems. The tool should focus on having an alert system rather than having to use a third-party solution. We can just get the data over Amazon Kinesis, and we can directly use all the benefits of current analytical tools, like in the areas involving BI, Looker, and Tableau. One would not need to buy the aforementioned tools, and we can just get started with Amazon Kinesis.
FNU AKSHANSH - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's automatic
We don't have many use cases involving ingesting large amounts of data and scaling up and down. We have a clear understanding of our data volume, which remains relatively constant throughout the week. While we're aware of other features Amazon MSK offers, we feel confident in our current setup. If our requirements change significantly in the future, we'll reassess our needs and consider adopting Amazon MSK.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Retailer
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Kinesis?
Amazon Kinesis's main purpose is to provide near real-time data streaming at a consistent 2Mbps rate, which is really impressive.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Kinesis?
Amazon Kinesis and Lambda pricing is competitive, but we noticed that scaling and large volumes could potentially increase costs significantly.
What needs improvement with Amazon Kinesis?
Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes. Also, the KCL library's documentation could be improved to better explain the configuration parameters...
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 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. There were no other notable issues.
What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?
We used Amazon MSK to manage high-volume third-party data entering our system. It served as a buffer when our system was unable to consume data at high speeds in real-time. The data initially went ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.