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Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud 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:
 

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
5.2
Confluent Cloud's Apache Kafka saves costs and enhances ROI with efficient, reliable data processing, stability, and scalability.
With Lambda, there is no need for data transfer charges, which is beneficial for less frequent workloads.
Returns depend on the application you deploy and the amount of benefits you are getting, which depends on how many applications you are deploying, what are the sorts of applications, and what are the requirements.
 

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
7.7
Confluent Cloud offers strong Apache Kafka support, praised for expertise and timely solutions, though some users seek additional resources.
We receive prompt support from AWS solution architects or TAMs.
I would rate them eight if 10 was the best and one was the worst.
 

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
6.5
Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud offers scalable, efficient data handling, though some reliability concerns exist during scaling operations.
Amazon Kinesis provides auto-scaling with streams that handle large volumes well.
 

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
1.0
Users praise Confluent Cloud's Apache Kafka for stability and monitoring but cite unresponsiveness during traffic spikes, suggesting improvements.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Kinesis requires improvements in throughput, automation, setup complexity, data retention, machine learning features, and user-friendly interfaces.
Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud needs better integrations, improved features, and more efficient tools to address usability and cost issues.
Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes.
Observability and monitoring are areas that could be enhanced.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Kinesis is cost-effective compared to self-managed solutions, but prices can increase with high data usage and features.
Enterprise users find Confluent Cloud's mid-range pricing flexible yet complex, with costs escalating for premium connectors and high data volumes.
Amazon Kinesis and Lambda pricing is competitive, but we noticed that scaling and large volumes could potentially increase costs significantly.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Kinesis offers easy configuration, real-time analytics, and robust AWS integration, ideal for managing large, complex data workflows.
Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud provides scalable, cost-effective real-time data processing with robust integration, multi-cloud support, and serverless architecture.
Lambda's scalability, seamless integration with other AWS services, and support for multiple programming languages are very beneficial.
These features are important due to scalability and resiliency.
 

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
Apache Kafka on Confluent C...
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.1
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 7.6%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud is 0.0%. 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.
Ritik Varshney - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced data streaming with reliable features and good analytics
Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud provides an enhanced level of reliability and resources compared to Apache Kafka alone. It offers more features which are beneficial for our clients, including cluster linking, schema registry, error handling, and dead-letter queues. It significantly improves customer and publisher satisfaction, especially with topic integration and data streaming.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Educational Organization
5%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
Government
6%
 

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 Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud?
Kafka and Confluent Cloud have proven to be cost-effective, especially when compared to other tools. In a recent BI integration program over the past year, we assessed multiple use cases spanning s...
What needs improvement with Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud?
I think what I would improve about the solution is the cost, mostly. From my standpoint, it's the cost. From an engineering perspective, it works really well. There's always room for improvement. O...
What is your primary use case for Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud?
We find that the best features include using the CDC functionality with the connector to take the data from our SQL database and publish it to many consumers. Any changes enable us to easily publis...
 

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kinesis vs. Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud and other solutions. Updated: August 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.