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Amazon Kinesis vs Confluent comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 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
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 7.1%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 8.4%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon Kinesis7.1%
Confluent8.4%
Other84.5%
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 find almost all features valuable, especially the timing and fast pace movement."
"Setting Amazon Kinesis up is quick and easy; it only takes a few minutes to configure the necessary settings and start using it."
"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 product's initial setup phase is not difficult because we are using the tool on the cloud."
"The solution's technical support is flawless."
"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."
"There is no problem with the tool's stability."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"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."
"It is also good for knowledge base management."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
 

Cons

"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."
"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 is good for Amazon Cloud but not as suitable for other cloud vendors."
"One thing that would be nice would be a policy for increasing the number of Kinesis streams because that's the one thing that's constant. You can change it in real time, but somebody has to change it, or you have to set some kind of meter. So, auto-scaling of adding and removing streams would be nice."
"The tool should focus on having an alert system rather than having to use a third-party solution."
"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."
"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."
"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."
"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."
"It would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"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."
"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."
"Confluent has fallen behind in being the tool of the industry. It's taking second place to things such as Word and SharePoint and other office tools that are more dynamic and flexible than Confluent."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Under $1,000 per month."
"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."
"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."
"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."
"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 is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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."
"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."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
14%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

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: July 2025.
867,445 professionals have used our research since 2012.