Amazon Kinesis vs Redpanda comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Redpanda Data are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.8, while Redpanda Data is ranked #18 with an average rating of 8.8. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 7.1% mindshare in SA, compared to Redpanda Data’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Redpanda Data users who would recommend it.

Amazon Kinesis

Read 28 Amazon Kinesis reviews

3,185 Views
3,185 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Redpanda

Read 4 Redpanda reviews

364 Views
353 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon Kinesis

Redpanda

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Amazon Kinesis and Redpanda compete in the data streaming sector. Kinesis seems to have the upper hand due to its integration within the AWS ecosystem and real-time data processing capabilities.

Features: Amazon Kinesis is praised for its seamless integration with AWS services, real-time data processing, and scalability. It is easy to manage due to its fully-hosted nature. Redpanda is noted for its high-speed data streaming and efficient resource utilization thanks to its C++ foundation. It performs exceptionally well in self-hosted setups.

Room for Improvement: Amazon Kinesis could improve its sharding capabilities and increase default limits. Integration with other cloud services can be limited, and Kinesis Data Analytics might benefit from simplification. Redpanda’s version control requires enhancements, its documentation needs clarity, and its command-line tools could become more user-friendly.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon Kinesis offers ease of deployment in public cloud environments but has room for improvement in technical support. Redpanda supports both on-premises and cloud deployment, though users find its documentation and support could be improved.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon Kinesis is moderately priced and offers good ROI through AWS integration, though analytics features can be costly. Its cost can be higher than self-hosted solutions. Redpanda offers competitive pricing and free versions, making it cost-effective against Kafka while considering its high performance.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Kinesis vs. Redpanda Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Redpanda

July 2025

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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

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Redpanda

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

18th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

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 Redpanda is 1.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon Kinesis	7.1%
Redpanda	1.2%
Other	91.7%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

Rajni Kumar Jha

Senior Software Engineer at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

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.

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Vishal M Godi

Big Data Teaching Assistant at Center for Cloud Computing and Big Data, PES University

High-performance message brokering with excellent documentation and an easy setup

The industry standard for this kind of platform is Kafka. Confluent Kafka has acquired it. Kafka is an open-source platform built by Apache. Confluent is the commercial version of it. The major improvement of Redpanda over Kafka is firstly, good documentation. Redpanda's documentation is very easily understandable, and they have a lot of examples. In addition to that, most of the setups include using another technology called Docker, which I am very familiar with. Setting up technologies using Docker is very convenient to me, and Redpanda has provided many templates for that. Redpanda has its own built-in metrics exporter, making it easier to monitor and check performance. What makes Redpanda superior is its performance since it's written in C++. C++ is pretty much the standard for high-performance applications.

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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 management and analytics are valuable features."

"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."

"There is no problem with the tool's stability."

"I like the ease of use and how we can quickly get the configurations done, making it pretty straightforward and stable."

"I have worked in companies that build tools in-house. They face scaling challenges."

"Its scalability is very high. There is no maintenance and there is no throughput latency. I think data scalability is high, too. You can ingest gigabytes of data within seconds or milliseconds."

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

"The integration capabilities of the product are good."

More Amazon Kinesis pros

"The UI is modern."

"The cost savings have been significant."

"I tested it with ten-plus nodes, and it's highly scalable."

"What makes Redpanda superior is its performance since it's written in C++. C++ is pretty much the standard for high-performance applications."

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."

"Kinesis is good for Amazon Cloud but not as suitable for other cloud vendors."

"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."

"There are some kind of hard limits on Amazon Kinesis, and if you hit that, then you will get the throughput exceed error."

"Amazon Kinesis should improve its limits."

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

"It would be beneficial if Amazon Kinesis provided document based support on the internet to be able to read the data from the Kinesis site."

"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."

More Amazon Kinesis cons

"The version control mechanism must be improved."

"The command-line tools need to be improved. To quickly check the status of the topics and all."

"When it comes to self-hosting, their documentation could 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."

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."

"The tool's pricing is cheap."

"The solution's pricing is fair."

"Under $1,000 per month."

"The tool's entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."

"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."

"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."

More Amazon Kinesis pricing and cost advice

"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

18%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Confluent vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 24% of the time

Apache Flink vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 23% of the time

Azure Stream Analytics vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 20% of the time

Databricks vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon MSK vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon Kinesis Competitors

Apache Pulsar vs Redpanda

Compared 31% of the time

StreamNative vs Redpanda

Compared 14% of the time

More Redpanda Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis

September 2025

Download Amazon Kinesis product report

Buyer's Guide

Redpanda

August 2025

Download Redpanda product report

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis

No data available

Overview

Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost-effectively process streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit the requirements of your application. With Amazon Kinesis, you can ingest real-time data such as video, audio, application logs, website clickstreams, and IoT telemetry data for machine learning, analytics, and other applications. Amazon Kinesis enables you to process and analyze data as it arrives and respond instantly instead of having to wait until all your data is collected before the processing can begin.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Redpanda offers a modern, intuitive interface with efficient resource usage, seamlessly integrating with Kafka, and enhancing performance through fast operations and reliable support. Organizations benefit from its memory efficiency and high performance for demanding data workloads.

Built on a C++ foundation, Redpanda integrates easily with Kafka clients and stands out for fast operations, simplified Docker setup, and effective metrics monitoring. Performance is enhanced by memory efficiency and high throughput capabilities. The community provides robust support, and clear documentation aids the adoption process. However, improvements could be made in version control, command-line tools, and documentation, particularly in areas such as automation file management and chatbot documentation assistance. Redpanda is widely utilized in data streaming and normalization, efficiently handling large telemetry data volumes with minimal latency, essential for building asynchronous applications across microservices and monitoring systems.

What are the most important features of Redpanda?

Modern UI: Provides an intuitive interface for ease of use.
Efficient Resource Usage: Built on C++ for performance optimization.
Seamless Integration: Works well with Kafka clients for smooth operations.
Simplified Setup: Docker templates facilitate easy installation.
Built-in Metrics Exporters: Enhance monitoring and visibility.
High Performance: Ensures memory efficiency and quick data processing.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Fast Operations: Accelerates data processing for efficient workflows.
Reliable Support: Strong community aids troubleshooting and development.
Clear Documentation: Helps users quickly onboard and manage Redpanda.
Low Latency: Critical for applications requiring quick response times.
Sub-second Response: Supports demanding performance and latency needs.

Redpanda is commonly implemented in tech and software industries to streamline data streaming and normalization processes, handling high telemetry data volumes effectively. Its capacity for sub-second response times makes it crucial for companies developing asynchronous applications, especially in microservices and monitoring systems.

Redpanda Data

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Redpanda

July 2025

Free Report: Amazon Kinesis vs. Redpanda

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