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Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Spark Streaming comparison

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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
8th
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
5th
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 November 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 3.9%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Spark Streaming is 4.7%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache Spark Streaming4.7%
Amazon Kinesis3.9%
Other91.4%
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

"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."
"The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things."
"Its scalability is very high. There is no maintenance and there is no throughput latency. I think data scalability is high, too. You can ingest gigabytes of data within seconds or milliseconds."
"The product's initial setup phase is not difficult because we are using the tool on the cloud."
"The Kinesis VideoStream and DataStream are the most important features."
"Compared to what we were doing with Kafka, which was taking about 30% just to keep things together, with Kinesis I think we're probably saving tens of thousands, if not $100,000 per year."
"With AWS, you don't have to invest in any kind of infrastructure."
"The integration capabilities of the product are good."
"Spark Streaming is critical, quite stable, full-featured, and scalable."
"Apache Spark's capabilities for machine learning are quite extensive and can be used in a low-code way."
"Apache Spark Streaming has features like checkpointing and Streaming API that are useful."
"With Apache Spark Streaming, you can have multiple kinds of windows; depending on your use case, you can select either a tumbling window, a sliding window, or a static window to determine how much data you want to process at a single point of time."
"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."
"It is the most scalable tool that I have seen before."
"It's the fastest solution on the market with low latency data on data transformations."
"I appreciate Apache Spark Streaming's micro-batching capabilities; the watermarking functionality and related features are quite good."
 

Cons

"The default limit that they have, which at the moment is 5,000 records per second seems too low."
"The technical support could be improved. They tend to send you back to the documentation."
"For me, especially with video streams, there's sometimes a kind of delay when the data has to be pumped to other services. This delay could be improved in Kinesis, or especially the Kinesis Video Streams, which is being used for different use cases for Amazon Connect. With that improvement, a lot of other use cases of Amazon Connect integrating with third-party analytic tools would be easier."
"Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes."
"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. So if we wanted to understand what's happening with a particular shard, whether it is published or not, we could not. Even with the logs, if we want to have some kind of logging it is in the shard."
"The price is not much cheaper. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing."
"AI processing or cleaning up data would be nice since I don't think it is a feature in Amazon Kinesis right now."
"The solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."
"Integrating event-level streaming capabilities could be beneficial."
"In terms of improvement, the UI could be better."
"The debugging aspect could use some improvement."
"It was resource-intensive, even for small-scale applications."
"There could be an improvement in the area of the user configuration section, it should be less developer-focused and more business user-focused."
"The solution itself could be easier to use."
"The problem is we need to use it in a certain manner. After that, we need to apply another pipeline for the machine learning processes, and that's what we work on."
"While it is reliable, there are some issues with Apache Spark Streaming as it is not 100% reliable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is fair."
"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."
"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."
"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."
"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"Under $1,000 per month."
"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."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"Spark is an affordable solution, especially considering its open-source nature."
"People pay for Apache Spark Streaming as a service."
"I was using the open-source community version, which was self-hosted."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

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

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...
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: September 2026.
920,223 professionals have used our research since 2012.