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Amazon Kinesis vs Confluent comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Confluent
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 8.3%, down from 13.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 8.2%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Rajni Kumar Jha - PeerSpot reviewer
Used for media streaming and live-streaming data
It is not compulsory to use Amazon Kinesis. If you don't want to use the data streaming, you can use just the Kinesis data firehose. Using the Kinesis data firehose is compulsory because we can't store all chats and recordings in Amazon S3 without it. When a call comes in the Amazon Kinesis instance, it will go to Data Streams if we use it. Otherwise, it will go to the Kinesis data firehose, where we need to define the S3 bucket path, and it will go to Amazon S3. So, without the Kinesis data firehose, we can't store all the chats and recordings in Amazon S3. Using Amazon Kinesis totally depends upon the user's requirements. If you want to use live streaming for the data lake or data analyst team, you need to use Amazon Kinesis. If you don't want to use it, you can directly use the Kinesis data firehose, which will be stored in Amazon S3. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Gustavo-Barbosa Dos Santos - PeerSpot reviewer
Has good technical support services and a valuable feature for real-time data streaming
Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance. It helps us understand the various requirements of multiple customers and validates the information for different versions. We can automate the tasks using Confluent Kafka. Thus, it guarantees us the data quality and maintains the integrity of message contracts.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I have worked in companies that build tools in-house. They face scaling challenges."
"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."
"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."
"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"The solution's technical support is flawless."
"I like the ease of use and how we can quickly get the configurations done, making it pretty straightforward and stable."
"The scalability is pretty good."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon Kinesis is real-time data streaming."
"With Confluent Cloud we no longer need to handle the infrastructure and the plumbing, which is a concern for Confluent. The other advantage is that all portfolios have access to the data that is being shared."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"The benefit is escaping email communication. Sometimes people ignore emails or put them into spam, but with Confluence, everyone sees the same text at the same time."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"The monitoring module is impressive."
 

Cons

"Snapshot from the the from the the stream of the data analytic I have already on the cloud, do a snapshot to not to make great or to get the data out size of the web service. But to stop the process and restart a few weeks later when I have more data or more available of the client teams."
"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."
"There are some kind of hard limits on Amazon Kinesis, and if you hit that, then you will get the throughput exceed error."
"In order to do a successful setup, the person handling the implementation needs to know the solution very well. You can't just come into it blind and with little to no experience."
"Kinesis Data Analytics needs to be improved somewhat. It's SQL based data but it is not as user friendly as MySQL or Athena tools."
"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."
"I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services."
"The solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"Confluent's price needs improvement."
"One area we've identified that could be improved is the governance and access control to the Kafka topics. We've found some limitations, like a threshold of 10,000 rules per cluster, that make it challenging to manage access at scale if we have many different data sources."
"The product should integrate tools for incorporating diagrams like Lucidchart. It also needs to improve its formatting features. We also faced issues while granting permissions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."
"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 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."
"Under $1,000 per month."
"The tool's entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."
"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."
"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."
"It comes with a high cost."
"The pricing model of Confluent could improve because if you have a classic use case where you're going to use all the features there is no plan to reduce the features. You should be able to pick and choose basic services at a reduced price. The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluence's pricing is quite reasonable, with a cost of around $10 per user that decreases as the number of users increases. Additionally, it's worth noting that for teams of up to 10 users, the solution is completely free."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate Confluent's pricing at five. I have not encountered any additional costs."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
4%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
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 Confluent?
I find Confluent's Kafka Connectors and Kafka Streams invaluable for my use cases because they simplify real-time data processing and ETL tasks by providing reliable, pre-packaged connectors and to...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?
They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.
What needs improvement with Confluent?
I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team. The lack of easy access to the Confluent support team is also a...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kinesis vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
852,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.