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: June 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

5th

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

9th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 4.2%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 6.6%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon Kinesis	4.2%
Confluent	6.6%
Other	89.2%

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 scalability is pretty good."

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

"Setting Amazon Kinesis up is quick and easy; it only takes a few minutes to configure the necessary settings and start using it."

"The solution works well in rather sizable environments."

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

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

"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."

"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."

More Amazon Kinesis pros

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."

"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 tools."

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

"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."

More Confluent pros

Cons

"One area for improvement in the solution is the file size limitation of 10 Mb. My company works with files with a larger file size. The batch size and throughput also need improvement in Amazon Kinesis."

"The technical support could be improved. They tend to send you back to the documentation."

"I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services."

"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."

"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."

"We are contemplating moving away from Amazon Kinesis primarily because of the cost."

More Amazon Kinesis cons

"The beginner who doesn't know how to work on HTML will struggle as when you create spaces in the Confluent, if you want to have some meeting notes or anything else, you need to know HTML and which HTML tags to include."

"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."

"The Schema Registry service could be improved. I would like a bigger knowledge base of other use cases and more technical forums. It would be good to have more flexible monitoring features added to the next release as well."

"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."

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

"The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."

"It could have more themes. The themes in the version I'm using are very limited; they offer two to three themes."

"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."

More Confluent cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is fair."

"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."

"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."

"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."

"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."

"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."

More Amazon Kinesis pricing and cost advice

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

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

"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."

"Confluent is an expensive solution."

"Confluent is highly priced."

"The solution is cheaper than other products."

"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."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Retailer

11%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing 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

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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