Amazon MSK vs Confluent comparison

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Amazon MSK

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 18, 2026

Confluent and Amazon MSK are significant competitors in the data streaming field. Confluent tends to have the upper hand with its flexible deployment and advanced features, appealing to enterprises needing robust solutions.

Features: Confluent offers comprehensive stream processing capabilities, enhanced security options, and seamless multi-cloud support. Amazon MSK stands out with its smooth integration with AWS services, strong reliability, and efficient scalability, which benefits AWS-centric frameworks.

Room for Improvement: Confluent could enhance its cost-effectiveness and simplify its setup for smaller-scale deployments. It could also improve cloud-native integrations outside of its proprietary ecosystem. Amazon MSK could enhance support for non-AWS integrations, offer more advanced analytics tools, and provide a more intuitive user interface for broader appeal.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Confluent provides flexible deployment across environments with a user-friendly approach, supporting businesses needing straightforward setups and robust assistance. Amazon MSK delivers seamless AWS ecosystem integration, facilitating easy deployments, with support primarily benefiting existing AWS users.

Pricing and ROI: Confluent's pricing might be higher due to enterprise-grade features, providing strong ROI when fully leveraged. Amazon MSK is cost-effective for AWS-native users, offering good ROI through its integration and scalability within the AWS platform.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon MSK vs. Confluent Report (Updated: June 2026).

Amazon MSK vs. Confluent

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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 MSK

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

7th

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Confluent

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

9th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 4.1%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 6.6%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon MSK	4.1%
Confluent	6.6%
Other	89.3%

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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PavanManepalli

AVP - Sr Middleware Messaging Integration Engineer at Wells Fargo

Has supported streaming use cases across data centers and simplifies fraud analytics with SQL-based processing

I recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools. They need to improve in that direction by not only reducing costs but also providing better solutions for the problems customers face to avoid frustrations, whether through future enhancement requests or ensuring product stability. The cost should be worked on, and they should provide better solutions for customers. Solutions should focus on hierarchical topics; if a customer has different types of data and sources, they should be able to send them to the same place for analytics. Currently, Confluent requires everything to send to the same topic, which becomes very large and makes running analytics difficult. The hierarchy of topics should be improved. This part is available in MQ and other products such as Solace, but it is missing in Confluent, leading many in capital markets and trading to switch to Solace. In terms of stability, it is not the stability itself that needs improvement but rather the delivery semantics. Other products offer exactly-once delivery out of the box, whereas Confluent states it will offer this but lacks the knobs or levers for tuning configurations effectively. Confluent has hundreds of configurations that application teams must understand, which creates a gap. Users are often unaware of what values to set for better performance or to achieve exactly-once semantics, making it difficult to navigate through them. Delivery semantics also need to be worked on.

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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

"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."

"My advice to others is this solution is straightforward and the integration is flawless."

"Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow."

"Amazon MSK's separation of concerns and ease of creating and deploying new features are highly valuable. It just requires to assign them to the topic, and then anyone who needs to consume these messages can do so directly from Amazon MSK. This separation of concerns makes it very convenient, especially for new feature development, as developers can easily access the messages they need without having to deal with complex server communications or protocol setups."

"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."

"Amazon MSK's scalability is very good."

"I have Amazon MSK integrated with other AWS services such as S3 and Lambda."

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

More Amazon MSK pros

"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."

"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."

"With Confluent Cloud we no longer need to handle the infrastructure and the plumbing, which is a concern for Confluent, and the other advantage is that all portfolios have access to the data that is being shared."

"Confluent is an amazing tool that is highly configurable, integrates very well with Jira, and lets you create nice documentation for various products while also supporting reporting and online content hosting."

"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."

"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."

"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."

"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."

More Confluent pros

Cons

"The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."

"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."

"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."

"MSK should be easier to integrate with other solutions. It should be more flexible, integration-wise."

"Horizontal scale-out is actually not easy, making it an area where improvements are required."

"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 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."

More Amazon MSK cons

"The product should integrate tools for incorporating diagrams like Lucidchart. It also needs to improve its formatting features. We also faced issues while granting permissions."

"The beginner who doesn't know how to work on HTML will struggle as when you create spaces in the Confluent, if you want to have some meeting notes or anything else, you need to know HTML and which HTML tags to include."

"One area we've identified that could be improved is the governance and access control to the Kafka topics. We've found some limitations, like a threshold of 10,000 rules per cluster, that make it challenging to manage access at scale if we have many different data sources."

"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."

"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."

"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."

"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."

"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."

More Confluent cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"Confluence's pricing is quite reasonable, with a cost of around $10 per user that decreases as the number of users increases. Additionally, it's worth noting that for teams of up to 10 users, the solution is completely free."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate Confluent's pricing at five. I have not encountered any additional costs."

"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."

"Confluent is highly priced."

"You have to pay additional for one or two features."

"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."

"The solution is cheaper than other products."

"It comes with a high cost."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Retailer

11%

Computer Software Company

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	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	17

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?

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 ...

What advice do you have for others considering Amazon MSK?

We are working with Amazon MSK product, Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka. The main benefits I have seen from using Amazon MSK is that as a B2B enterprise client, we have many SLAs to fulfill. Tra...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?

They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.

What needs improvement with Confluent?

What is your primary use case for Confluent?

The main use cases for Confluent are log aggregation and streaming. I'm familiar with Confluent stream processing with KSQL. KSQL helps in terms of data analytics strategies because if we are the d...

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Product Reports

Amazon MSK

Download Amazon MSK product report

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Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka

No data available

Overview

Amazon MSK offers seamless AWS integration, simplifying development and operation. It supports efficient data streaming and ensures cost-effective scalability without additional setup needs.

Amazon MSK stands out for its effortless creation, deployment, and access to new features without complex VPC configurations. Automating scalability, it demands minimal intervention, making it ideal for high-volume workflows. Developers benefit from real-time analytics, event sourcing, and log ingestion, aiding in dashboard maintenance and user log tracking. However, integration challenges exist as some face inflexibility, intricate configurations, and plugin development difficulties. Schema validation, connector variety, and complex update processes lead some to seek alternatives. Noteworthy for order data streaming, transaction tracking in retail and banking, and other real-time data applications, Amazon MSK remains attractive despite high cost concerns.

What are Amazon MSK's key features?

Seamless AWS Integration: No additional setup or VPC needed.
Automatic Scalability: Minimal intervention thanks to automatic configurations.
Real-time Analytics: Supports event sourcing and log ingestion.
Cost-effective: Tailored for high-volume workflows.
Encryption: Secure data during migrations.

What benefits should users consider when evaluating Amazon MSK?

Efficiency: Effortless deployment and development support.
Scalability: Automated processes reduce operational overhead.
Cost Management: Financially viable for larger data volumes.
Security: High level of encryption during data transfers.
Data Handling: Effective for streaming, integration, and real-time processing.

In retail and banking, Amazon MSK facilitates order data streaming and transaction tracking. Its capabilities in supporting CDC pipelines, high-volume data management, and asynchronous processes make it favorable for integrating systems, streaming IoT data, and managing dashboard flows. Challenges in integration and configuration persist, nudging users to explore different options in certain contexts.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Confluent offers scalable, open-source flexibility and seamless data replication, supported by strong cloud integration. Key features like Kafka Connect and real-time processing make it valuable for data streaming projects while ensuring high availability with a Multi-Region Cluster.

Confluent is a robust data streaming platform that enables efficient management and integration of real-time data pipelines. Its message-driven architecture and fault tolerance provide reliability, while a user-friendly dashboard and connectors support diverse data sources. Cloud integration reduces costs, and extensive documentation, plugins, and monitoring capabilities enhance collaboration and revision management. Despite some areas needing improvement, including security in the SaaS version and integration flexibility, Confluent remains a staple in industries requiring vast data processing and task automation.

What are Confluent's key features?

Scalability: Handles large volumes of data, ensuring continuous performance.
Kafka Connect: Enables seamless data integration across multiple systems.
Real-time Processing: Facilitates instant data insights for rapid decision-making.
Multi-Region Cluster: Maintains data availability across different geographical locations.
Cloud Integration: Reduces operational costs and enhances deployment flexibility.
User Dashboard: Simplifies management with an intuitive interface.

What benefits and ROI should users consider in reviews?

Cost-Efficiency: Improved processes reduce operational expenses.
Data Reliability: Ensures consistent and accurate data handling.
Increased Collaboration: Boosts team efficiency with comprehensive documentation and management tools.
Scalability: Supports business growth without compromising performance.
Integration Flexibility: Seamlessly connects with diverse data sources and systems.

Confluent is commonly implemented in finance, insurance, and software industries for applications like fraud detection, ETL tasks, and enterprise communication. It supports real-time data processing, project management, and task automation, often integrating with project management tools like Jira, providing valuable solutions for business processes.

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost

Amazon MSK vs. Confluent