Amazon MQ vs Apache Kafka comparison

The compared Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Apache solutions aren't in the same category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #7 in MQ , with an average rating of 8.2, and holds a 4.4% mindshare in the category. Apache is ranked #7 in SA , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 4.2% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Apache users who would recommend it.

Amazon MQ

Read 8 Amazon MQ reviews

737 Views
649 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 90 Apache Kafka reviews

4,467 Views
1,340 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Amazon MQ

Apache Kafka

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon MQ and Apache Kafka based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Message Queue (MQ) Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon MQ vs. Apache Kafka Report (Updated: May 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MQ vs. Apache Kafka

May 2024

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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 MQ

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (7th)

Apache Kafka

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (7th)

Mindshare comparison

Amazon MQ and Apache Kafka aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Amazon MQ is designed for Message Queue (MQ) Software and holds a mindshare of 4.4%, up 3.2% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 4.2% mindshare, up 2.4% since last year.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon MQ	4.4%
IBM MQ	22.7%
ActiveMQ	22.0%
Other	50.9%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Apache Kafka	4.2%
Apache Flink	10.9%
Databricks	9.0%
Other	75.9%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

RamilCerrada

Solution architect at SM Supermalls

Has provided consistent functionality across on-premise and cloud while simplifying cloud integration

I have experience with on-premise setups using ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, but with regards to AWS, I use it via cloud only. There's a free tier with Amazon MQ based on their website, which is a six-month free trial of a single instance, allowing per month usage of either ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ, five gig of Amazon EFS storage, and for ActiveMQ, it's 20 gig of Amazon EBS storage for RabbitMQ. I did not purchase Amazon MQ through AWS Marketplace. Amazon MQ has published information about having 650 hours of free trial usage. This can be found via the AWS website by searching for AWS MQ. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Amazon MQ an eight out of ten.

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Bruno da Silva

Senior Manager at Timestamp, SA

Have worked closely with the team to deploy streaming and transaction pipelines in a flexible cloud environment

The interface of Apache Kafka could be significantly better. I started working with Apache Kafka from its early days, and I have seen many improvements. The back office functionality could be enhanced. Scaling up continues to be a challenge, though it is much easier now than it was in the beginning.

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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

"Amazon MQ is a good solution for small and medium-sized enterprises."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its managed service aspect. It's simple to implement and use. It requires minimal effort to maintain business operations."

"The initial Amazon MQ setup is very easy both when you do it on your own or use the self-managed instance."

"Amazon MQ is a very scalable solution."

"Amazon MQ is managed by AWS and is easy to use."

"Amazon MQ is a secure solution."

"Amazon MQ is important for being collaborative, allowing for centralized information."

"We have found Amazon MQ to provide scalability, robustness, and security."

More Amazon MQ pros

"Kafka is an open-source tool that's easy to use in our country, and the command line interface is powerful."

"Scalability is very good."

"The most valuable feature is the support for a high volume of data."

"Kafka, as compared with other messaging system options, is great for large scale message processing applications. It offers high throughput with built-in fault-tolerance and replication."

"Kafka makes data streaming asynchronous and decouples the reliance of events on consumers."

"The most valuable feature of Apache Kafka is its versatility. It can solve many use cases or can be a part of many use cases. Its fundamental value of it is in the real-time processing capability."

"For example, when you want to send a message to inform all your clients about a new feature, you can publish that message to a single topic in Apache Kafka. This allows all clients subscribed to that topic to receive the message. On the other hand, if you need to send billing information to a specific customer, you can publish that message on a topic dedicated to that customer. This message can then be sent as an SMS to the customer, allowing them to view it on their mobile device."

"When we're working with big data, we need a throughput computing panel, which is something that Kafka provides, and something we find extremely valuable."

More Apache Kafka pros

Cons

"Monitoring capabilities are not yet fully developed, since it's a message broker service, so it focuses more on the health of Apache."

"Amazon MQ is a good solution for small and medium-sized enterprises. It's open-source software, which means it's cheaper than its competitors."

"The solution needs improvement in the back end and security."

"The product should improve its monitoring capabilities. It needs to improve the pricing also."

"Depending on your use cases, Amazon MQ can be cheap or expensive."

"On a scale of one to 10, one being the best and 10 being the worst, I would give Amazon MQ an eight for overall performance."

"In community support, especially with distributed systems and integration, there is a need for better system organization."

"Amazon MQ isn't a cheap tool."

More Amazon MQ cons

"Kafka is a nightmare to administer."

"In the data sharing space, the performance of Apache Kafka could be improved."

"The UI used to access Kafka topics can be further improved."

"When compared to other commercial competitors, Kafka doesn't have the ability to scale down, the elasticity is lacking in the product."

"The user interface is one weakness. Sometimes, our data isn't as accessible as we'd like. It takes a lot of work to retrieve the data and the index."

"Confluent has improved aspects like documentation and cloud support, yet Kafka's reliance on older architectures like ZooKeeper in previous versions is a limitation."

"The UI is based on command line. It would be helpful if they could come up with a simpler user interface."

"The only reason I give Kafka as product a low rating is because there are far superior and cheaper alternatives in cloud-based solutions, where we save money on manpower, electricity, servers, datacenters, networking, etc."

More Apache Kafka cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Depending on your use cases, Amazon MQ can be cheap or expensive."

"As a client or as an end user, I would say that Google Cloud Storage or Google Cloud are cheaper than Amazon MQ."

"It's a bit cheaper compared to other Q applications."

"It's a premium product, so it is not price-effective for us."

"Kafka is open-source and it is cheaper than any other product."

"Running a Kafka cluster can be expensive, especially if you need to scale it up to handle large amounts of data."

"Kafka is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."

"Apache Kafka is open-source and can be used free of charge."

"I rate Apache Kafka's pricing a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. There are no additional costs apart from the licensing fees for Apache Kafka."

"Apache Kafka is free."

More Apache Kafka pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Comms Service Provider

Real Estate/Law Firm

Government

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	49

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon MQ?

The tool's most valuable feature is its managed service aspect. It's simple to implement and use. It requires minimal effort to maintain business operations.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon MQ?

Amazon MQ needs to have data collected on performance to analyze trends for improvement. Additionally, some tools can suggest how to improve performance in terms of speed, time, and processing, whi...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon MQ?

I have some experience working with Amazon MQ.

See all answers

What are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?

Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Kafka?

Its pricing is reasonable. It's not always about cost, but about meeting specific needs.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Apache Kafka?

The long-term data storage feature in Apache Kafka depends on the setting, but I believe the maximum duration is seven days.

See all answers

Comparisons

Amazon SQS vs Amazon MQ

Compared 25% of the time

IBM MQ vs Amazon MQ

Compared 18% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs Amazon MQ

Compared 16% of the time

Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service vs Amazon MQ

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs Amazon MQ

Compared 10% of the time

More Amazon MQ Competitors

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 14% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 12% of the time

Databricks vs Apache Kafka

Compared 12% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 9% of the time

ActiveMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 3% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Message Queue (MQ) Software

March 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

March 2026

Download Apache Kafka product report

Overview

Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. Message brokers allow different software systems–often using different programming languages, and on different platforms–to communicate and exchange information. Amazon MQ reduces your operational load by managing the provisioning, setup, and maintenance of ActiveMQ, a popular open-source message broker. Connecting your current applications to Amazon MQ is easy because it uses industry-standard APIs and protocols for messaging, including JMS, NMS, AMQP, STOMP, MQTT, and WebSocket. Using standards means that in most cases, there’s no need to rewrite any messaging code when you migrate to AWS.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming platform that serves as a central hub for handling real-time data streams. It allows efficient publishing, subscribing, and processing of data from various sources like applications, servers, and sensors.

Kafka's core benefits include high scalability for big data pipelines, fault tolerance ensuring continuous operation despite node failures, low latency for real-time applications, and decoupling of data producers from consumers.

Key features include topics for organizing data streams, producers for publishing data, consumers for subscribing to data, brokers for managing clusters, and connectors for easy integration with various data sources.

Large organizations use Kafka for real-time analytics, log aggregation, fraud detection, IoT data processing, and facilitating communication between microservices.

Apache

Sample Customers

SkipTheDishes, Malmberg, Dealer.com, Bench Accounting

Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MQ vs. Apache Kafka

May 2024

Free Report: Amazon MQ vs. Apache Kafka

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