Amazon Kinesis vs Confluent comparison

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Amazon Kinesis

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

Confluent and Amazon Kinesis compete in real-time data streaming platforms. While Confluent is praised for its flexibility, Amazon Kinesis offers scalability and AWS integration.

Features: Confluent offers a robust Kafka ecosystem with stream processing, strong security, and multi-cloud capabilities. It provides versatility for various data workloads. Amazon Kinesis supports seamless AWS integration, enabling reliable large-scale streaming applications. Its real-time data ingestion and analytics are noteworthy features.

Room for Improvement: Confluent could enhance AWS integration to match the seamless experience Kinesis offers. Its infrastructure automation could also be improved. Additionally, more intuitive tooling for deployment might benefit users. Amazon Kinesis could benefit from a more user-friendly interface akin to Confluent's. It might also streamline its pricing structure and improve support for non-AWS services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Confluent simplifies deployment with intuitive configurations and strong customer support, appealing to teams with diverse technical expertise. Amazon Kinesis provides comprehensive AWS documentation and resource access, yet it may require specific AWS knowledge for optimal usage.

Pricing and ROI: Confluent offers competitive pricing with predictable costs, suitable for Kafka-centric companies. Amazon Kinesis may be costlier due to AWS integration but provides high ROI for businesses leveraging AWS services, due to its robust capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Kinesis vs. Confluent Report (Updated: September 2026).

Amazon Kinesis vs. Confluent

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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

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Confluent

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

7th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 3.9%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 6.3%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Confluent	6.3%
Amazon Kinesis	3.9%
Other	89.8%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

reviewer1480695

Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Has enabled real-time processing of critical event streams with seamless cloud integration

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 us. The cost is a primary hindrance. That's why we are not using it widely. For our critical pipeline we are using it, but after that we are putting it in an S3 bucket. Other pipelines directly put the events in an S3 bucket and then process from there. There is no lack of functions in Amazon Kinesis. Functionality-wise, we feel it's complete. The cost aspect is what we are really concerned about.

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PavanManepalli

AVP - Sr Middleware Messaging Integration Engineer at Wells Fargo

Has supported streaming use cases across data centers and simplifies fraud analytics with SQL-based processing

I recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools. They need to improve in that direction by not only reducing costs but also providing better solutions for the problems customers face to avoid frustrations, whether through future enhancement requests or ensuring product stability. The cost should be worked on, and they should provide better solutions for customers. Solutions should focus on hierarchical topics; if a customer has different types of data and sources, they should be able to send them to the same place for analytics. Currently, Confluent requires everything to send to the same topic, which becomes very large and makes running analytics difficult. The hierarchy of topics should be improved. This part is available in MQ and other products such as Solace, but it is missing in Confluent, leading many in capital markets and trading to switch to Solace. In terms of stability, it is not the stability itself that needs improvement but rather the delivery semantics. Other products offer exactly-once delivery out of the box, whereas Confluent states it will offer this but lacks the knobs or levers for tuning configurations effectively. Confluent has hundreds of configurations that application teams must understand, which creates a gap. Users are often unaware of what values to set for better performance or to achieve exactly-once semantics, making it difficult to navigate through them. Delivery semantics also need to be worked on.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product's initial setup phase is not difficult because we are using the tool on the cloud."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Kinesis is real-time data streaming."

"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 major advantage with Amazon Kinesis is the availability, additionally the reliability is awesome, the replay is incredibly fast, and the ingesting, buffering, and processing of data are really fast."

"The solution has the capacity to store the data anywhere from one day to a week and provides limitless storage for us."

"The scalability is pretty good."

"Everything is hosted and simple."

"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."

More Amazon Kinesis pros

"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."

"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."

"To date, we have seen improvements in performance and scalability, so we recommend this solution."

"Confluent is an amazing tool that is highly configurable, integrates very well with Jira, and lets you create nice documentation for various products while also supporting reporting and online content hosting."

"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."

"The biggest benefit of Confluent as a tool is that it is a distributed platform that provides more durability and stability."

"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."

"With Confluent Cloud we no longer need to handle the infrastructure and the plumbing, which is a concern for Confluent, and the other advantage is that all portfolios have access to the data that is being shared."

More Confluent pros

Cons

"AI processing or cleaning up data would be nice since I don't think it is a feature in Amazon Kinesis right now."

"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."

"The tool should focus on having an alert system rather than having to use a third-party solution."

"Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes."

"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."

"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."

"There are certain shortcomings in the machine learning capacity offered by the product, making it an area where improvements are required."

More Amazon Kinesis cons

"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."

"Currently, in the early stages, I see a gap on the security side. If you are using the SaaS version, we would like to get a fuller, more secure solution that can be adopted right out of the box. Confluence could do a better job sharing best practices or a reusable pattern that others have used, especially for companies that can not afford to hire professional services from Confluent."

"It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."

"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."

"There is a limitation when it comes to seamlessly importing Microsoft documents into Confluent pages, which can be inconvenient for users who frequently work with Microsoft Office tools and need to transition their content to Confluent."

"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."

"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."

"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."

More Confluent cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Under $1,000 per month."

"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."

"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 entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."

"It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."

"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."

More Amazon Kinesis pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Regarding pricing, I think Confluent is a premium product, but it's hard for me to say definitively if it's overly expensive. We're still trying to understand if the features and reduced maintenance complexity justify the cost, especially as we scale our platform use."

"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."

"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."

"You have to pay additional for one or two features."

"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."

"It comes with a high cost."

"The solution is cheaper than other products."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Retailer

12%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	17

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?

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?

They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.

What needs improvement with Confluent?

What is your primary use case for Confluent?

The main use cases for Confluent are log aggregation and streaming. I'm familiar with Confluent stream processing with KSQL. KSQL helps in terms of data analytics strategies because if we are the d...

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Product Reports

Amazon Kinesis

Download Amazon Kinesis product report

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Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis

No data available

Overview

Amazon Kinesis provides real-time data streaming with seamless AWS integration, ideal for analytics, data transformation, and external customer feeds. It offers cost-effective data management with high throughput and low latency, supporting multiple programming languages.

Amazon Kinesis enables organizations to manage real-time data streams efficiently. Its integration with AWS ensures seamless setup and operation, while features like auto-scaling and fault tolerance make it reliable for diverse data sources such as IoT devices and server logs. The platform's ability to handle large-scale event-driven systems and dynamic workloads makes it suitable for complex streaming architectures. Despite some challenges with costs and setup complexity, Kinesis remains a popular choice for its efficient data management and processing capabilities.

What are the key features of Amazon Kinesis?

Real-time Data Streaming: Enables live data processing and analytics.
Seamless AWS Integration: Ensures smooth operation with AWS services.
High Throughput: Consistent 2Mbps rate supports large volumes of data.
Auto-scaling: Automatically adjusts to data load.
Fault Tolerance: Maintains system reliability and data integrity.
Lambda Function Processing: Processes data efficiently using Lambda.

What benefits or ROI should users expect?

Scalable Data Management: Handles data influx effortlessly.
Efficiency: Streamlines data flows without impacting performance.
Cost-effectiveness: Delivers value for budget-conscious users.
Low Latency: Provides real-time insights and reactions.
Multi-language Support: Accommodates various development needs.

In industries such as IoT, finance, and entertainment, Amazon Kinesis facilitates the real-time ingestion and processing of data streams. It connects seamlessly to data lakes and warehouses, enabling businesses to harness data-driven insights without performance loss. This capability is essential for managing dynamic workloads and large-scale event systems. By supporting tools like KDS, Firehose, and Video Streams, Kinesis empowers organizations to respond quickly to changing data environments, enhancing operational effectiveness across different sectors.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Confluent offers scalable, open-source flexibility and seamless data replication, supported by strong cloud integration. Key features like Kafka Connect and real-time processing make it valuable for data streaming projects while ensuring high availability with a Multi-Region Cluster.

Confluent is a robust data streaming platform that enables efficient management and integration of real-time data pipelines. Its message-driven architecture and fault tolerance provide reliability, while a user-friendly dashboard and connectors support diverse data sources. Cloud integration reduces costs, and extensive documentation, plugins, and monitoring capabilities enhance collaboration and revision management. Despite some areas needing improvement, including security in the SaaS version and integration flexibility, Confluent remains a staple in industries requiring vast data processing and task automation.

What are Confluent's key features?

Scalability: Handles large volumes of data, ensuring continuous performance.
Kafka Connect: Enables seamless data integration across multiple systems.
Real-time Processing: Facilitates instant data insights for rapid decision-making.
Multi-Region Cluster: Maintains data availability across different geographical locations.
Cloud Integration: Reduces operational costs and enhances deployment flexibility.
User Dashboard: Simplifies management with an intuitive interface.

What benefits and ROI should users consider in reviews?

Cost-Efficiency: Improved processes reduce operational expenses.
Data Reliability: Ensures consistent and accurate data handling.
Increased Collaboration: Boosts team efficiency with comprehensive documentation and management tools.
Scalability: Supports business growth without compromising performance.
Integration Flexibility: Seamlessly connects with diverse data sources and systems.

Confluent is commonly implemented in finance, insurance, and software industries for applications like fraud detection, ETL tasks, and enterprise communication. It supports real-time data processing, project management, and task automation, often integrating with project management tools like Jira, providing valuable solutions for business processes.

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost

Amazon Kinesis vs. Confluent