No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Pulsar 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

Amazon Kinesis
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
4th
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
21st
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 May 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 4.5%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Pulsar is 2.9%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Kinesis4.5%
Apache Pulsar2.9%
Other92.6%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

CD
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real-time streaming and seamless integration enhance workloads with room for competitive pricing improvements
Amazon Kinesis is easy to get started with, provides good documentation, and has a multilang daemon interface that makes it programming-language agnostic. The throughput is convenient for processing volumes out of the box and does not require complex configurations. It also provides auto-scaling with different partition keys into various shards. Lambda's scalability, seamless integration with other AWS services, and support for multiple programming languages are very beneficial.
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

"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"Great auto-scaling, auto-sharing, and auto-correction features."
"The solution works well in rather sizable environments."
"I find data Firehose and data streams are much more intelligent than other streaming solutions."
"The solution works well in rather sizable environments."
"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."
"Kinesis replaced a whole tier of servers, so we didn't need to have a server to catch the data and then send the data somewhere else, because Kinesis was the input port for very large amounts of data."
"Setting Amazon Kinesis up is quick and easy; it only takes a few minutes to configure the necessary settings and start using it."
"The solution operates as a classic message broker but also as a streaming platform."
"The solution operates as a classic message broker but also as a streaming platform."
 

Cons

"Lacks first in, first out queuing."
"When we had some of those slow downs, we used AWS support and I can't say that we had a great experience and they resolved the issues, but they looked into some of the flow downs and ultimately we just decided there was nothing we could do."
"Amazon Kinesis should improve its limits."
"Amazon Kinesis involved a more complex setup and configuration than Azure Event Hub."
"Kinesis is good for Amazon Cloud but not as suitable for other cloud vendors."
"We were charged high costs for the solution’s enhanced fan-out feature."
"There are certain shortcomings in the machine learning capacity offered by the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"AI processing or cleaning up data would be nice since I don't think it is a feature in Amazon Kinesis right now."
"Documentation is poor because much of it is in Chinese with no English translation."
"Documentation is poor because much of it is in Chinese with no English translation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."
"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."
"It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."
"The solution's pricing is fair."
"Under $1,000 per month."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Streaming Analytics solutions are best for your needs.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Insurance Company
7%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise9
No data available
 

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?
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

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: May 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.