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Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Spark Streaming comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Apache Spark Streaming
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 4.7%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Spark Streaming is 4.2%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Kinesis4.7%
Apache Spark Streaming4.2%
Other91.1%
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.
Himansu Jena - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Project Manager at Raj Subhatech
Efficient real-time data management and analysis with advanced features
There are various ways we can improve Apache Spark Streaming through best practices. The initial part requires attention to batch interval tuning, which helps small intervals in micro batches based on latency requirements and helps prevent back pressure. We can use data formats such as Parquet or ORC for storage that needs faster reads and leveraging feature predicate push-down optimizations. We can implement serialization which helps with any Kyro in terms of .NET or Java. We have boxing and unboxing serialization for XML and JSON for converting key-pair values stored in browser. We can also implement caching mechanisms for storing and recomputing multiple operations. We can use specified joins which help with smaller databases, and distributed joins can minimize users. We can implement project optimization memory for CPU efficiency, known as Tungsten. Additionally, load balancing, checkpointing, and schema evaluation are areas to consider based on performance and bottlenecks. We can use Bugzilla tools for tracking and Splunk to monitor the performance of process systems, utilization, and performance based on data frames or data sets.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Kinesis VideoStream and DataStream are the most important features."
"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"The solution works well in rather sizable environments."
"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."
"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."
"Before Data Streams, we were using a couple of other solutions, including Talend and Pentaho, to move data around, and the ability to have one single flow of data from multiple consumers simplified our architecture a lot, saves us a lot of time, and will help us in the future when we have to build additional applications based on the same input data."
"Kinesis is a fully managed program streaming application. You can manage any infrastructure. It is also scalable. Kinesis can handle any amount of data streaming and process data from hundreds, thousands of processes in every source with very low latency."
"The solution has the capacity to store the data anywhere from one day to a week and provides limitless storage for us."
"Apache Spark Streaming was straightforward in terms of maintenance. It was actively developed, and migrating from an older to a newer version was quite simple."
"The main benefits of Apache Spark Streaming include cost savings, time savings, and efficiency improvements about data storage."
"Apache Spark Streaming has features like checkpointing and Streaming API that are useful."
"By integrating Apache Spark Streaming, the data freshness rate, and latency have significantly improved from 24-hour batch processing to less than one minute, facilitating faster communication to downstream systems, aiding marketing campaigns."
"It's the fastest solution on the market with low latency data on data transformations."
"For Apache Spark Streaming, the feature I appreciated most is that it provides live data delivery; additionally, it provides the capability to send a larger amount of data in parallel."
"The solution is better than average and some of the valuable features include efficiency and stability."
"Apache Spark's capabilities for machine learning are quite extensive and can be used in a low-code way."
 

Cons

"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."
"In order to do a successful setup, the person handling the implementation needs to know the solution very well."
"Lacks first in, first out queuing."
"The services which are described in the documentation could use some visual presentation because for someone who is new to the solution the documentation is not easy to follow or beginner friendly and can leave a person feeling helpless."
"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."
"The technical support could be improved. They tend to send you back to the documentation."
"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."
"The service structure of Apache Spark Streaming can improve. There are a lot of issues with memory management and latency. There is no real-time analytics. We recommend it for the use cases where there is a five-second latency, but not for a millisecond, an IOT-based, or the detection anomaly-based. Flink as a service is much better."
"The solution itself could be easier to use."
"The cost and load-related optimizations are areas where the tool lacks and needs improvement."
"One improvement I would expect is real-time processing instead of micro-batch or near real-time."
"We would like to have the ability to do arbitrary stateful functions in Python."
"In terms of improvement, the UI could be better."
"The service structure of Apache Spark Streaming can improve. There are a lot of issues with memory management and latency."
"We don't have enough experience to be judgmental about its flaws."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."
"The tool's entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."
"The solution's pricing is fair."
"Amazon Kinesis pricing is sometimes reasonable and sometimes could be better, depending on the planning, so it's a five out of ten for me."
"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."
"People pay for Apache Spark Streaming as a service."
"Spark is an affordable solution, especially considering its open-source nature."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive, or not cost-effective, and ten is cheap, I rate the price a seven."
"I was using the open-source community version, which was self-hosted."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
 

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...
What needs improvement with Apache Spark Streaming?
One of the improvements we need is in Spark SQL and the machine learning library. I don't think there is too much to work on, but the issue is when we want to use machine learning, we always need t...
What is your primary use case for Apache Spark Streaming?
We work with Apache Spark Streaming for our project because we use that as one of the landing data sources, and we work with it to ensure we can get all of the data before it goes through our data ...
What advice do you have for others considering Apache Spark Streaming?
One thing I would share with other organizations considering Apache Spark Streaming is the necessity of having effective data storage. We want to ensure we acquire and manage our data storage effec...
 

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
Spark Streaming
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, eBay Inc.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kinesis vs. Apache Spark Streaming and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
891,869 professionals have used our research since 2012.