Amazon MSK vs Apache Pulsar comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Pulsar are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.2, while Pulsar is ranked #21. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 5.9% mindshare in SA, compared to Pulsar’s 2.3% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Pulsar users who would recommend it.

Amazon MSK

Read 14 Amazon MSK reviews

2,530 Views
2,479 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Apache Pulsar

Read 1 Apache Pulsar review

719 Views
719 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon MSK

Apache Pulsar

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon MSK and Apache Pulsar based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Confluent and others in Streaming Analytics.

To learn more, read our detailed Streaming Analytics Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Streaming Analytics

September 2025

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Helped 868,759 peers since 2012

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 MSK

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

6th

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Apache Pulsar

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

21st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 5.9%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Pulsar is 2.3%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon MSK	5.9%
Apache Pulsar	2.3%
Other	91.8%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

SYED SHAAZ

Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI

Improved data streaming and integration challenges prompt search for alternatives

The integration capabilities of Amazon MSK are not very flexible. If you have your own self-managed Kafka, that helps significantly because you can set up configurations. We are considering self-managed Kafka since our product is only one year old. The Kafka integrations are fine, but the configurations are an issue. The only issue with Amazon MSK that we are facing is the configurations. There are preset configurations and limited configurations that we can set for our unique use case. The product could improve by allowing us to set different configurations. I would also like to see Amazon MSK improve in the area of connectors. We are considering Confluent Cloud because they have many more connectors. They have KSQL DB and governance features. It is slightly costlier, but Confluent offers more flexibility with their connectors.

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it_user1087029

Solution Architect at Vlaanderen connect.

The solution can mimic other APIs without changing a line of code

The solution operates as a classic message broker but also as a streaming platform. It operates differently than a traditional streaming platform with storage and computing handled separately. It scales easier and better than Kafka which can be stubborn. You can even make it act like Kafka because it understands Kafka APIs. There are even companies that will sell you Kafka but underneath it is Apache Pulsar. The solution is very compatible because it can mimic other APIs without changing a line of code.

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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

"It provides installations, scaling, and other functionalities straight out of the box."

"It is a stable product."

"Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."

"What I appreciate most about Amazon MSK is that it doesn't require extensive concern about the configurations; it starts checking how the brokers are functioning, and automatically, Amazon MSK tries to resolve all the problems."

"Amazon MSK has contributed positively to our real-time analytics capabilities because Fortis's dashboards have dashboard health that needs to be maintained, user logs that need to be maintained, and usage tracking."

"The solution's technical support was helpful."

More Amazon MSK pros

"The solution operates as a classic message broker but also as a streaming platform."

Cons

"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."

"The cost of using Amazon MSK is high, which is a significant disadvantage, as the increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings."

"The downside of Amazon MSK is that when I needed to make a small change in the MSK configuration, it wasn't possible. I had to remove and drop all the clusters and recreate them again, which is complicated in a production environment."

"In my opinion, there are areas in Amazon MSK that could be improved, particularly in terms of configuration. Initially setting it up and getting it connected was quite challenging. The naming conventions for policies were updated by AWS, and some were undocumented, leading to confusion with outdated materials. It took us weeks of trial and error before discovering new methods through hidden tutorials and official documentation."

"The product's schema support needs enhancement. It will help enhance integration with many kinds of languages of programming languages, especially for environments using languages like .NET."

"We need to create connectors in Amazon MSK, but there are no default connectors in AWS for that purpose."

"It does not autoscale. Because if you do keep it manually when you add a note to the cluster and then you register it, then it is scalable, but the fact that you have to go and do it, I think, makes it, again, a bit of some operational overhead when managing the cluster."

"The only issue with Amazon MSK that we are facing is the configurations. There are preset configurations and limited configurations that we can set for our unique use case."

More Amazon MSK cons

"Documentation is poor because much of it is in Chinese with no English translation."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."

"When you create a complete enterprise-driven architecture that is deployable on an enterprise scale, I would say that the prices of Amazon MSK and Confluent Platform become comparable."

"The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	4

No data available

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.

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What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?

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What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?

We are recently working with Amazon MSK at Fortis, where we have multiple dashboards in our revenue intelligence platform. We are streaming data from different apps into those dashboards. The data ...

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Compared 16% of the time

Amazon Kinesis vs Amazon MSK

Compared 7% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs Amazon MSK

Compared 5% of the time

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Redpanda vs Apache Pulsar

Compared 17% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK

September 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Streaming Analytics

September 2025

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Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka

No data available

Overview

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is a fully managed service that enables you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. Amazon MSK provides the control-plane operations, such as those for creating, updating, and deleting clusters.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Apache Pulsar is a cloud-native, distributed messaging and streaming platform originally created at Yahoo! and now a top-level Apache Software Foundation project

Pulsar

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Information Not Available

Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Confluent and others in Streaming Analytics. Updated: September 2025.

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