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Amazon MSK vs Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
5.1
Amazon MSK enhances ROI through reduced integration time, flexibility, and cost-efficient experimentation, outperforming Confluent in innovation speed.
Sentiment score
5.2
Confluent Cloud's Apache Kafka saves costs and enhances ROI with efficient, reliable data processing, stability, and scalability.
Returns depend on the application you deploy and the amount of benefits you are getting, which depends on how many applications you are deploying, what are the sorts of applications, and what are the requirements.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.1
Amazon MSK support is generally satisfactory with expertise, but experiences vary based on support plans and perceived decline over time.
Sentiment score
7.7
Confluent Cloud offers strong Apache Kafka support, praised for expertise and timely solutions, though some users seek additional resources.
Amazon's support is excellent.
I would rate them eight if 10 was the best and one was the worst.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.4
Amazon MSK offers scalable, flexible serverless and classic options, efficiently handling user demands despite occasional manual interventions.
Sentiment score
6.5
Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud offers scalable, efficient data handling, though some reliability concerns exist during scaling operations.
The functionality for scaling comes out of the box and is very effective.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Amazon MSK is generally seen as stable, rated 8-9/10, with 99.9% availability but limited long-term usage insights.
Sentiment score
1.0
Users praise Confluent Cloud's Apache Kafka for stability and monitoring but cite unresponsiveness during traffic spikes, suggesting improvements.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon MSK struggles with integration, pricing, setup complexity, limited schema support, and lacks default connectors, complicating user experience.
Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud needs better integrations, improved features, and more efficient tools to address usability and cost issues.
The increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings.
Observability and monitoring are areas that could be enhanced.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon MSK offers competitive pricing for large workloads, but small use cases may incur higher costs, similar to Confluent.
Enterprise users find Confluent Cloud's mid-range pricing flexible yet complex, with costs escalating for premium connectors and high data volumes.
Once we started using Kafka, our cloud costs rose by 50% to 60%.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon MSK integrates with AWS services, offering cost-effectiveness, scalability, and ease of use for data pipelines and migrations.
Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud provides scalable, cost-effective real-time data processing with robust integration, multi-cloud support, and serverless architecture.
The scalability and usability are quite remarkable.
These features are important due to scalability and resiliency.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon MSK
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
6th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Apache Kafka on Confluent C...
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.1
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 6.5%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud is 0.0%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

FNU AKSHANSH - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's automatic
We don't have many use cases involving ingesting large amounts of data and scaling up and down. We have a clear understanding of our data volume, which remains relatively constant throughout the week. While we're aware of other features Amazon MSK offers, we feel confident in our current setup. If our requirements change significantly in the future, we'll reassess our needs and consider adopting Amazon MSK.
Ritik Varshney - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced data streaming with reliable features and good analytics
Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud provides an enhanced level of reliability and resources compared to Apache Kafka alone. It offers more features which are beneficial for our clients, including cluster linking, schema registry, error handling, and dead-letter queues. It significantly improves customer and publisher satisfaction, especially with topic integration and data streaming.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
4%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon MSK?
Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems.
What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?
I'm not sure exactly what benefit we have because we are using multiple AWS tools. We have AWS DMS, which is also the same as Amazon MSK, and we have Fivetran, which is a third-party website provid...
What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?
We are currently using Amazon MSK to transfer data from our PostgreSQL database to our DynamoDB, acting as a mediator between those two databases for migration purposes. Our data is in an on-premis...
What do you like most about Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud?
Kafka and Confluent Cloud have proven to be cost-effective, especially when compared to other tools. In a recent BI integration program over the past year, we assessed multiple use cases spanning s...
What needs improvement with Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud?
I think what I would improve about the solution is the cost, mostly. From my standpoint, it's the cost. From an engineering perspective, it works really well. There's always room for improvement. O...
What is your primary use case for Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud?
We find that the best features include using the CDC functionality with the connector to take the data from our SQL database and publish it to many consumers. Any changes enable us to easily publis...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MSK vs. Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud and other solutions. Updated: August 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.