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Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Pulsar comparison

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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

Amazon Kinesis
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Apache Pulsar
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 3.9%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Pulsar is 2.9%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Kinesis3.9%
Apache Pulsar2.9%
Other93.2%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1480695 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has enabled real-time processing of critical event streams with seamless cloud integration
We are contemplating moving away from Amazon Kinesis primarily because of the cost. It is very useful, but if we write our own analytics and data processing pipeline, it would be much cheaper for us. The cost is a primary hindrance. That's why we are not using it widely. For our critical pipeline we are using it, but after that we are putting it in an S3 bucket. Other pipelines directly put the events in an S3 bucket and then process from there. There is no lack of functions in Amazon Kinesis. Functionality-wise, we feel it's complete. The cost aspect is what we are really concerned about.
it_user1087029 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at Vlaanderen connect.
The solution can mimic other APIs without changing a line of code
The solution operates as a classic message broker but also as a streaming platform. It operates differently than a traditional streaming platform with storage and computing handled separately. It scales easier and better than Kafka which can be stubborn. You can even make it act like Kafka because it understands Kafka APIs. There are even companies that will sell you Kafka but underneath it is Apache Pulsar. The solution is very compatible because it can mimic other APIs without changing a line of code.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution's technical support is flawless."
"The solution has the capacity to store the data anywhere from one day to a week and provides limitless storage for us."
"With AWS, you don't have to invest in any kind of infrastructure."
"The major advantage with Amazon Kinesis is the availability, additionally the reliability is awesome, the replay is incredibly fast, and the ingesting, buffering, and processing of data are really fast."
"We have been able to drop our costs for ingesting data by about 60 to 70%."
"The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things."
"What turns out to be most valuable is its integration with Lambda functions because you can process the data as it comes in. As soon as data comes, you'll fire a Lambda function to process a trench of data."
"The scalability is pretty good, as one can have any number of nodes spawned or replicated on the primary so that any load can be handled, perhaps a few terabytes with ease in around 15 seconds."
"The solution operates as a classic message broker but also as a streaming platform."
 

Cons

"Amazon Kinesis has a less meaningful and easy use than Azure Event Hub."
"Something else to mention is that we use Kinesis with Lambda a lot and the fact that you can only connect one Stream to one Lambda, I find is a limiting factor. I would definitely recommend to remove that constraint."
"Could include features that make it easier to scale."
"Kinesis is good for Amazon Cloud but not as suitable for other cloud vendors."
"There are certain shortcomings in the machine learning capacity offered by the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The technical support could be improved. They tend to send you back to the documentation."
"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."
"One thing that would be nice would be a policy for increasing the number of Kinesis streams because that's the one thing that's constant. You can change it in real time, but somebody has to change it, or you have to set some kind of meter. So, auto-scaling of adding and removing streams would be nice."
"Documentation is poor because much of it is in Chinese with no English translation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In general, cloud services are very convenient to use, even if we have to pay a bit more, as we know what we are paying for and can focus on other tasks."
"It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."
"Under $1,000 per month."
"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"I think for us, with Amazon Kinesis, if we have to set up our own Kafka or cluster, it will be very time-consuming. If one considers the aforementioned aspect, Amazon Kinesis is a cheap tool."
"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"The pricing depends on the use cases and the level of usage. If you wanted to use Kinesis for different use cases, there's definitely a cheaper base cost involved. However, it's not entirely cheap, as different use cases might require different levels of Kinesis usage."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise10
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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?
We are contemplating moving away from Amazon Kinesis primarily because of the cost. It is very useful, but if we write our own analytics and data processing pipeline, it would be much cheaper for u...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Kinesis?
We use Amazon Kinesis for stream processing. We get events from on-premise devices to the cloud. We get many device events and we have to process these events that are coming from the devices. To p...
Ask a question
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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 Databricks, Microsoft, Apache and others in Streaming Analytics. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.