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Amazon Kinesis vs Redpanda comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
7.0
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Redpanda
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
18th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 5.6%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Redpanda is 1.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon Kinesis5.6%
Redpanda1.6%
Other92.8%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

CD
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real-time streaming and seamless integration enhance workloads with room for competitive pricing improvements
Amazon Kinesis is easy to get started with, provides good documentation, and has a multilang daemon interface that makes it programming-language agnostic. The throughput is convenient for processing volumes out of the box and does not require complex configurations. It also provides auto-scaling with different partition keys into various shards. Lambda's scalability, seamless integration with other AWS services, and support for multiple programming languages are very beneficial.
ArpitShah - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Analyst at CLSA
Affordable, easy to deploy, and it is easy to find things on the user interface
We use the libraries in the different programming languages. We use the message format in Avro, convert the data in the format, and pass it on. We have contacted the sales team about the solution. So far, the product fulfills our requirements. We get lots of data. The data flows through Kafka to Redpanda. Then it goes to a database. If our infrastructure goes down for a week, we will not lose data. It is an advantage of Redpanda. I recommend the product to others. We might choose a different solution if we find something cheaper. We used Redpanda because we did not want to self-host our software. Redpanda is a piece of infrastructure. There is not much of a learning curve. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things."
"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 Kinesis VideoStream and DataStream are the most important features."
"The integration capabilities of the product are good."
"The integration between Amazon Kinesis and Lambda helps us significantly."
"From my experience, one of the most valuable features is the ability to track silent events on endpoints. Previously, these events might have gone unnoticed, but now we can access them within the product range. For example, if a customer reports that their calls are not reaching the portal files, we can use this feature to troubleshoot and optimize the system."
"Amazon Kinesis's main purpose is to provide near real-time data streaming at a consistent 2Mbps rate, which is really impressive."
"The scalability is pretty good."
"I tested it with ten-plus nodes, and it's highly scalable."
"The cost savings have been significant."
"The UI is modern."
"What makes Redpanda superior is its performance since it's written in C++. C++ is pretty much the standard for high-performance applications."
 

Cons

"We were charged high costs for the solution’s enhanced fan-out feature."
"Amazon Kinesis involved a more complex setup and configuration than Azure Event Hub."
"In general, the pain point for us was that once the data gets into Kinesis there is no way for us to understand what's happening because Kinesis divides everything into shards. So if we wanted to understand what's happening with a particular shard, whether it is published or not, we could not. Even with the logs, if we want to have some kind of logging it is in the shard."
"There could be valid data in Kinesis that is not being processed, which affects stability. Although it rarely happens, this issue has been observed in many deployments, making it not completely stable."
"AI processing or cleaning up data would be nice since I don't think it is a feature in Amazon Kinesis right now."
"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 solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."
"There are some kind of hard limits on Amazon Kinesis, and if you hit that, then you will get the throughput exceed error."
"When it comes to self-hosting, their documentation could be improved."
"The version control mechanism must be improved."
"Recently, for the documentation, they've built their own AI chatbot, which is focused on giving you answers based on their documentation. While using that, I did not find it to be very good."
"The command-line tools need to be improved. To quickly check the status of the topics and all."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."
"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."
"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."
"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."
"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."
"The tool's entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."
"It's free. Everybody can use it, only support is paid."
"Redpanda is cheaper than its competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Media Company
4%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise9
No data available
 

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?
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 u...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Redpanda?
Redpanda is actually a commercial platform, but they do provide free versions as well. I've been working only with the free versions.
What needs improvement with Redpanda?
Recently, for the documentation, they've built their own AI chatbot, which is focused on giving you answers based on their documentation. While using that, I did not find it to be very good. Maybe ...
What is your primary use case for Redpanda?
I have worked with Redpanda for the past two to three months. Mainly in the tech industry or software industry, there's a huge rise of streaming data. Redpanda serves as a very reliable and fast me...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kinesis vs. Redpanda and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
880,435 professionals have used our research since 2012.