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Amazon MSK vs Starburst Enterprise 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:
 

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
Starburst Enterprise
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
19th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (16th)
 

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 Starburst Enterprise is 2.3%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon MSK3.9%
Starburst Enterprise2.3%
Other93.8%
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.
KamleshPant - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Architect at USEReady
Connects to any data source from any region and offers unified access
There are no specific projects supported by Starburst regarding AI initiatives or machine learning projects. In the future, if we have all the data available, we can definitely capitalize on AI/ML and LLM capabilities to summarize data and gain insights. That's our future goal, but we haven't reached that point yet. There should be support for REST API data sources to access data from the web. We often have data coming in and communicate with data sources via REST API calls. I don't see that capability in Starburst currently; everything is through JDBC or ODBC. If Starburst could seamlessly access data using REST API capabilities, it would be a game-changer. The self-service data management features, like self-service materialized views, are great, but they can be a bit complex for basic users to understand.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The scalability and usability are quite remarkable."
"It offers good stability."
"It is a stable product."
"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."
"My advice to others is this solution is straightforward and the integration is flawless."
"Amazon MSK has good integration because our team has been undergoing significant changes. Coupling it with MSK within AWS is helpful. We don't have to set up additionals or monitor external environments. This"
"It provides installations, scaling, and other functionalities straight out of the box."
"Amazon MSK's scalability is very good."
"It's very scalable, fast performing, and supports many catalogs."
"We have noticed improvements in performance using Starburst Enterprise. It handles complex data, including reading and partitioning files. We can add a new catalog to Starburst Enterprise by providing connection details and service account information. This allows us to integrate with existing tools, such as the Snowflake database, which we use for data protection in our project."
 

Cons

"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 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."
"One of the reasons why we prefer Kafka is because the support is a little bit difficult to manage with Amazon MSK."
"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 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."
"Horizontal scale-out is actually not easy, making it an area where improvements are required."
"We need to create connectors in Amazon MSK, but there are no default connectors in AWS for that purpose."
"Starburst Enterprise could improve by offering additional features similar to those provided by other SQL query tools. For example, incorporating functionalities like pivot tables would make it more feasible to use."
"There should be support for REST API data sources to access data from the web."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."
"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."
"I haven't personally dealt with the pricing aspects first-hand, but from what I understand, it largely depends on the specifics of your setup, especially the machines you use on AWS. The cost of using Starburst Enterprise can vary based on the amount of data you're processing and the type of machines you opt for, whether on AWS or another cloud platform."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
34%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Construction Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise5
No data available
 

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 needs improvement with Starburst Enterprise?
There are no specific projects supported by Starburst regarding AI initiatives or machine learning projects. In the future, if we have all the data available, we can definitely capitalize on AI/ML ...
What is your primary use case for Starburst Enterprise?
We use Starburst with one client who is exploring their ecosystem to remove data silos and enable data access across departments. It's a very big ecosystem, like a finance institute. They are curre...
What advice do you have for others considering Starburst Enterprise?
Starburst requires a heavy investment in infrastructure; it needs heavy computing and storage. If your use case doesn't involve heavy processing or storage, then Starburst might not be the solution...
 

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. Starburst Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.