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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 July 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 8.0%, down from 12.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 8.3%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Prabin Silwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Pipeline setup is very simple
I am not exactly sure about where improvements are needed in the tool. When I was working on the tool, it was very scalable, and the only thing we needed in our company was temporary streaming stuff that could work well. We didn't want to set up our own Kafka, other queues, or processing systems. As it is a cloud tool, it is easy for us to use the tool, and it satisfies all our requirements. Maybe for the other cases, if we need, then it may need some improvements. The tool satisfies our particular needs. Currently, the pipeline setup is very simple. For our particular use cases, it is because we just want to get the data and send it to the different data lakes or some logging system. Previously, we also used Amazon Kinesis to log those to Splunk, and later on, we removed Splunk and transferred that to Datadog. For our use cases, I don't want any new features in the tool. Amazon Kinesis' use case is for collecting, processing, and analyzing. If anything can be added to the tool, then I feel one should be able to use the same kind of tool so that everything is there in the product, like an alert system, and so that one can analyze, make a query, and do sourcing from the solution itself rather than using other logging and monitoring systems. The tool should focus on having an alert system rather than having to use a third-party solution. We can just get the data over Amazon Kinesis, and we can directly use all the benefits of current analytical tools, like in the areas involving BI, Looker, and Tableau. One would not need to buy the aforementioned tools, and we can just get started with Amazon Kinesis.
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

"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"Amazon Kinesis is easy to get started with, provides good documentation, and has a multilang daemon interface that makes it programming-language agnostic."
"The integration capabilities of the product are good."
"The Kinesis VideoStream and DataStream are the most important features."
"The solution works well in rather sizable environments."
"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."
"Great auto-scaling, auto-sharing, and auto-correction features."
"The solution has the capacity to store the data anywhere from one day to a week and provides limitless storage for us."
"The most valuable feature that we are using is the data replication between the data centers allowing us to configure a disaster recovery or software. However, is it's not mandatory to use and because most of the features that we use are from Apache Kafka, such as end-to-end encryption. Internally, we can develop our own kind of product or service from Apache Kafka."
"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"I would rate the scalability of the solution at eight out of ten. We have 20 people who use Confluent in our organization now, and we hope to increase usage in the future."
"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."
 

Cons

"I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services."
"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."
"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."
"AI processing or cleaning up data would be nice since I don't think it is a feature in Amazon Kinesis right now."
"Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes."
"Could include features that make it easier to scale."
"We were charged high costs for the solution’s enhanced fan-out feature."
"The price is not much cheaper. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"It could have more themes. They should also have more reporting-oriented plugins as well. It would be great to have free custom reports that can be dispatched directly from Jira."
"The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."
"We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."
"Under $1,000 per month."
"The solution's pricing is fair."
"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."
"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 tool's entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."
"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."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"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."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Educational Organization
4%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Insurance Company
5%
 

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: June 2025.
860,745 professionals have used our research since 2012.