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Amazon MSK vs Redpanda comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
4.1
Amazon MSK saves time and money, promotes innovation with flexible pricing, yet some users find costs hard to justify.
Sentiment score
3.5
Users experience high ROI from Redpanda due to cost savings, operational efficiency, easy setup, and enhanced investment experience.
I have seen a return on investment and personal gains since I started using Redpanda.
Senior Software Engineer at Prestatech
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.2
Amazon MSK support varies; some praise its effectiveness, while others note average service and seek external assistance.
Sentiment score
4.9
Redpanda's customer service is valued for its knowledgeable support, useful community, and helpful resources during onboarding processes.
They can manage most of our queries, and for what they cannot manage, they guide us through the process of finding out.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
Amazon's support is excellent.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
Redpanda has really amazing customer support based on my experience and from what I have read.
Senior Software Engineer at Prestatech
Not the technical support as in the usual way, but the community and the development support was great.
Software Engineer
The AWS team is also supporting us at any point.
SDE-2 at a tech vendor with 1-10 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.0
Amazon MSK is viewed as scalable, manageable, appealing to various environments, but may require manual scaling adjustments.
Sentiment score
6.6
Redpanda is highly scalable, praised for efficient storage and container compatibility, with minor concerns about data retention and complexity.
The functionality for scaling comes out of the box and is very effective.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
As a B2B enterprise client, our clientele consists of large ticket clients but low amounts of users.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
I would rate it ten out of ten for scalability.
Co Founder & CEO at SaYukth Private Limited
We never scaled horizontally by adding one machine, then two machines, then three machines, and so forth.
Software Analyst at CLSA
It is properly scalable and you can simply put it on a Kubernetes Pod or Docker Swarm and scale horizontally or vertically.
CTO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon MSK is stable with high ratings; minor issues are unrelated to MSK, maintaining success rates of 91% under load.
Sentiment score
8.5
Redpanda is considered highly stable by users, effectively handling workloads with high reliability, consistency, and minimal issues.
It doesn't require any maintenance on my end yet, as I haven't had any issues.
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
Redpanda is very stable.
SDE-2 at a tech vendor with 1-10 employees
I do not know about systems with ten thousand microservices and how they would react in that situation, but in our system where the latency and the throughput were way more important with less amount of things integrated with Redpanda, it was fine.
Software Engineer
I would rate it around eight or nine.
Software Analyst at CLSA
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon MSK struggles with integration, configuration complexities, high costs, and operational challenges compared to services like Kinesis.
Redpanda requires better documentation, clustering, hardware support, and improved tools for integration, debugging, and connector options.
The increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
The only issue with Amazon MSK that we are facing is the configurations.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
I had to remove and drop all the clusters and recreate them again, which is complicated in a production environment.
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
It needs better modern hardware with a better CPU, not just a normal CPU. A server-grade CPU is required.
Co Founder & CEO at SaYukth Private Limited
The biggest scalability improvement could be the retention.
Data Engineer at Datacrop
I think for the connectors, they are still young, so they need to enhance the connectors with anything such as MongoDB, cloud, big data, Elasticsearch, Datadog, Splunk, MySQL, databases, SGBDR, flat file, anything.
Middleware Tech Lead at MQnovaTool
 

Setup Cost

Amazon MSK is competitively priced with variable costs, appealing to enterprise users but potentially expensive for some.
Redpanda provides a cost-effective alternative to Kafka, offering free versions and straightforward setup, with paid support options.
Once we started using Kafka, our cloud costs rose by 50% to 60%.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
We use Kafka M5 Large instance, and depending on the instances, that is the cost we have, along with storage cost and data transfer costs.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
In terms of pricing, Redpanda is free.
Co Founder & CEO at SaYukth Private Limited
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Redpanda is that it is straightforward with fast deployment.
CTO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
 

Valuable Features

Amazon MSK integrates AWS services, offering cost-effective, automated scaling, ease of use, real-time analytics, encryption, and event sourcing.
Redpanda provides high performance and Kafka compatibility with low resource consumption, benefiting developers with efficient scaling and configuration.
The scalability and usability are quite remarkable.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
The best features of Amazon MSK are the real-time analytics that are excellent.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
Amazon MSK is basically Kafka in the cloud, and when you need to create a cluster of Kafka brokers, Amazon MSK helps with that by automatically creating all the brokers according to the configuration you provide.
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
Redpanda has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to move from a batch approach to a more streaming approach for our jobs, which cuts down on our delivery time and allows us to better meet our SLAs for our clients.
Senior Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
This is excellent for streaming data and it is faster than most alternatives, and without JVM, which is beneficial.
CTO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
The command-line interface and the UI have made my work easier by allowing me to deal with topics or with configurations really easily, issuing commands.
Senior Software Engineer at Prestatech
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon MSK
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
12th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Redpanda
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 3.9%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Redpanda is 2.0%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Redpanda2.0%
Amazon MSK3.9%
Other94.1%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

SYED SHAAZ - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
ArpitShah - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Analyst at CLSA
Event streaming has simplified video data cleanup and now powers real-time analytics
One area for improvement is providing more examples. For instance, Redpanda could be more useful as a sink where you get the data and can directly push to S3. While this is possible through the API, there are better and faster ways to do it. You can make a million API calls and accomplish the task in one and a half hours, but the same thing can be done in ten minutes through other methods. These faster approaches are not documented in obvious places. You have to find information scattered across various blogs. Redpanda should collect all the good blogs and best practices and put them in their documentation. This is more about knowledge management and making it easy for users to understand the product for complex use cases. For simple use cases, it is straightforward. We all use the basic pipe functionality. However, providing more examples would be useful. For example, integration with AWS and the AWS ecosystem would be cool.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Educational Organization
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?
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-ma...
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 Redpanda?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Redpanda, I am exploring the product. If I am convinced about the product and the capabilities, and I am sure I will be because I...
What needs improvement with Redpanda?
Redpanda can be improved in several ways, and the more I experiment with the product, the more limitations I find. I understand that this is about business, and the product should grow, and they ha...
What is your primary use case for Redpanda?
My main use case for Redpanda is primarily for streaming, and I am currently focusing on building data lakehouses because I find them really interesting. Redpanda fits into my data lakehouse setup ...
 

Comparisons

 

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. Redpanda and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.