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 #6 in MQ , with an average rating of 8.6, and holds a 3.7% mindshare in the category. Apache is ranked #8 in SA , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 3.5% mindshare. Additionally, 85% 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 7 Amazon MQ reviews

917 Views
761 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 88 Apache Kafka reviews

5,201 Views
884 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

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (6th)

Apache Kafka

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (8th)

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 3.7%, down 4.6% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 3.5% mindshare, up 1.9% since last year.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon MQ	3.7%
IBM MQ	26.9%
ActiveMQ	26.2%
Other	43.2%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Apache Kafka	3.5%
Apache Flink	14.5%
Databricks	13.5%
Other	68.5%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

AdnanKhan

Senior System Administrator at Ovrlod

Offers good web hosting capacity and security features, but price needs to be reduced

In terms of Amazon MQ's scalability and throughput capabilities, the tool is mostly accessible, stable, and competent with similar platforms. The tool's web hosting capacity and security features are good. The impact of the solution on process efficiencies depends on the clients. If the traffic is too high for a client, I suggest they go with Azure as it is more scalable and stable, while the support is good. I recommend Azure over Amazon MQ. Starting with Amazon MQ can be a bit tricky, but I know that the product is mature and the support is very good. The integration capabilities of Amazon MQ are flexible. I am not using AI with the tool. I would not recommend Amazon MQ to others. As a service provider, my company usually recommends cheaply priced and reliable solutions to our customers. Azure is one most reliable tool that comes at a good price point. Even Google Cloud is a super solution but for launching Google Cloud, support is not available, so one needs to do it with tutorials which are not completely available in YouTube. I rate the tool a seven and a half out of ten.

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Snehasish Das

Technology Leader at eTCaaS

Data streaming transforms real-time data movement with impressive scalability

I worked with Apache Kafka for customers in the financial industry and OTT platforms. They use Kafka particularly for data streaming. Companies offering movie and entertainment as a service, similar to Netflix, use Kafka Apache Kafka offers unique data streaming. It allows the use of data in…

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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

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

"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 important for being collaborative, allowing for centralized information."

"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."

"Amazon MQ is a secure solution."

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

"Amazon MQ is a very scalable solution."

"Apache Kafka is actually a distributed commit log. That is different than most messaging and queuing systems before it."

"With Kafka, events and streaming are persistent, and multiple subscribers can consume the data. This is an advantage of Kafka compared to simple queue-based solutions."

"The open-source version is relatively straightforward to set up and only takes a few minutes."

"Kafka's most valuable feature is its user-friendliness."

"I have seen a return on investment with this solution."

"I like the performance and reliability of Kafka. I needed a data streaming buffer that could handle thousands of messages per second with at least one processing point for an analytics pipeline. Kafka fits this requirement very well."

"Apache Kafka is very fast and stable."

"The most valuable feature of Kafka is the Kafka Streams client."

More Apache Kafka pros

Cons

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

"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."

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

"Amazon MQ isn't a cheap tool."

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

"If Amazon provided a templating engine, it would be great."

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

"There are some latency problems with Kafka."

"The manageability should be improved. There are lots of things we need to manage and it should have a function that enables us to manage them all cohesively."

"I would like them to reduce the learning curve around the creation of brokers and topics. They also need to improve on the concept of the partitions."

"Pulsar gives more scalability to an even grouping, but Apache Kafka is used more if you want to send something in a time series-based. If this does not matter to you then Pulsar could be more customizable. Apache Kafka is nothing but a streaming system with local storage."

"One of the things I am mostly looking for is that once the message is picked up from Kafka, it should not be visible or able to be consumed by other applications, or something along those lines. That feature is not present, but it is not a limitation or anything of the sort; rather, it is a desirable feature. The next release should include a feature that prevents messages from being consumed by other applications once they are picked up by Kafka."

"I would like to see an improvement in authentication management."

"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."

"Apache Kafka can improve by making the documentation more user-friendly. It would be beneficial if we could explain to customers in more detail how the solution operates but the documentation get highly technical quickly. For example, if they had a simple page where we can show the customers how it works without the need for the customer to have a computer science background."

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."

"Licensing issues are not applicable. Apache licensing makes it simple with almost zero cost for the software itself."

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

"It's quite affordable considering the value it provides."

"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution."

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

"I was using the product's free version."

"The solution is free, it is open-source."

"We use the free version."

More Apache Kafka pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	46

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?

The message queue requires an improvement in the message template MQ link. If Amazon provided a templating engine, it would be great.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon MQ?

We are using Amazon MQ for our AI model. It's used for notifications and other services. We have an application for which Amazon MQ acts as a broker.

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 do you like most about Apache Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open-source solution that can be used for messaging or event processing.

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

Comparisons

Amazon SQS vs Amazon MQ

Compared 34% of the time

IBM MQ vs Amazon MQ

Compared 26% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs Amazon MQ

Compared 14% of the time

Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service vs Amazon MQ

Compared 9% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs Amazon MQ

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon MQ Competitors

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 16% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 12% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 12% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 11% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Message Queue (MQ) Software

July 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

August 2025

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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