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Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Flink comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

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 Kinesis
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Apache Flink
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 5.6%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Flink is 12.3%, up from 11.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon Kinesis5.6%
Apache Flink12.3%
Other82.1%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

CD
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real-time streaming and seamless integration enhance workloads with room for competitive pricing improvements
Amazon Kinesis is easy to get started with, provides good documentation, and has a multilang daemon interface that makes it programming-language agnostic. The throughput is convenient for processing volumes out of the box and does not require complex configurations. It also provides auto-scaling with different partition keys into various shards. Lambda's scalability, seamless integration with other AWS services, and support for multiple programming languages are very beneficial.
Aswini Atibudhi - PeerSpot reviewer
Distinguished AI Leader at Walmart Global Tech at Walmart
Enables robust real-time data processing but documentation needs refinement
Apache Flink is very powerful, but it can be challenging for beginners because it requires prior experience with similar tools and technologies, such as Kafka and batch processing. It's essential to have a clear foundation; hence, it can be tough for beginners. However, once they grasp the concepts and have examples or references, it becomes easier. Intermediate users who are integrating with Kafka or other sources may find it smoother. After setting up and understanding the concepts, it becomes quite stable and scalable, allowing for customization of jobs. Every software, including Apache Flink, has room for improvement as it evolves. One key area for enhancement is user-friendliness and the developer experience; improving documentation and API specifications is essential, as they can currently be verbose and complex. Debugging and local testing pose challenges for newcomers, particularly when learning about concepts such as time semantics and state handling. Although the APIs exist, they aren't intuitive enough. We also need to simplify operational procedures, such as developing tools and tuning Flink clusters, as these processes can be quite complex. Additionally, implementing one-click rollback for failures and improving state management during dynamic scaling while retaining the last states is vital, as the current large states pose scaling challenges.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The scalability is pretty good."
"One of the best features of Amazon Kinesis is the multi-partition."
"The management and analytics are valuable features."
"What I like about Amazon Kinesis is that it's very effective for small businesses. It's a well-managed solution with excellent reporting. Amazon Kinesis is also easy to use, and even a novice developer can work with it, versus Apache Kafka, which requires expertise."
"Kinesis is a fully managed program streaming application. You can manage any infrastructure. It is also scalable. Kinesis can handle any amount of data streaming and process data from hundreds, thousands of processes in every source with very low latency."
"The solution works well in rather sizable environments."
"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"The Kinesis VideoStream and DataStream are the most important features."
"The top feature of Apache Flink is its low latency for fast, real-time data. Another great feature is the real-time indicators and alerts which make a big difference when it comes to data processing and analysis."
"What I appreciate best about Apache Flink is that it's open source and geared towards a distributed stream processing framework."
"It provides us the flexibility to deploy it on any cluster without being constrained by cloud-based limitations."
"Apache Flink provides faster and low-cost investment for me; I find it to have low hardware requirements, and it's faster with low code, meaning it's easy to understand for moving the streaming data."
"It is user-friendly and the reporting is good."
"Apache Flink is meant for low latency applications. You take one event opposite if you want to maintain a certain state. When another event comes and you want to associate those events together, in-memory state management was a key feature for us."
"Apache Flink allows you to reduce latency and process data in real-time, making it ideal for such scenarios."
"The setup was not too difficult."
 

Cons

"The solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."
"We are contemplating moving away from Amazon Kinesis primarily because of the cost."
"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."
"Lacks first in, first out queuing."
"Could include features that make it easier to scale."
"I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services."
"We were charged high costs for the solution’s enhanced fan-out feature."
"The services which are described in the documentation could use some visual presentation because for someone who is new to the solution the documentation is not easy to follow or beginner friendly and can leave a person feeling helpless."
"Apache Flink should improve its data capability and data migration."
"Apache should provide more examples and sample code related to streaming to help me better adapt and utilize the tool."
"There is room for improvement in the initial setup process."
"In terms of stability with Flink, it is something that you have to deal with every time. Stability is the number one problem that we have seen with Flink, and it really depends on the kind of problem that you're trying to solve."
"There is a learning curve. It takes time to learn."
"There are more libraries that are missing and also maybe more capabilities for machine learning."
"PyFlink is not as fully featured as Python itself, so there are some limitations to what you can do with it."
"Apache Flink is very powerful, but it can be challenging for beginners because it requires prior experience with similar tools and technologies, such as Kafka and batch processing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."
"The pricing depends on the use cases and the level of usage. If you wanted to use Kinesis for different use cases, there's definitely a cheaper base cost involved. However, it's not entirely cheap, as different use cases might require different levels of Kinesis usage."
"In general, cloud services are very convenient to use, even if we have to pay a bit more, as we know what we are paying for and can focus on other tasks."
"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."
"Under $1,000 per month."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."
"Amazon Kinesis pricing is sometimes reasonable and sometimes could be better, depending on the planning, so it's a five out of ten for me."
"It's an open source."
"The solution is open-source, which is free."
"Apache Flink is open source so we pay no licensing for the use of the software."
"It's an open-source solution."
"This is an open-source platform that can be used free of charge."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Retailer
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Kinesis?
Amazon Kinesis's main purpose is to provide near real-time data streaming at a consistent 2Mbps rate, which is really impressive.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Kinesis?
Amazon Kinesis and Lambda pricing is competitive, but we noticed that scaling and large volumes could potentially increase costs significantly.
What needs improvement with Amazon Kinesis?
We are contemplating moving away from Amazon Kinesis primarily because of the cost. It is very useful, but if we write our own analytics and data processing pipeline, it would be much cheaper for u...
What do you like most about Apache Flink?
The product helps us to create both simple and complex data processing tasks. Over time, it has facilitated integration and navigation across multiple data sources tailored to each client's needs. ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Flink?
The solution is expensive. I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with Apache Flink?
Apache could improve Apache Flink by providing more functionality, as they need to fully support data integration. The connectors are still very few for Apache Flink. There is a lack of functionali...
 

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
Flink
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
LogRhythm, Inc., Inter-American Development Bank, Scientific Technologies Corporation, LotLinx, Inc., Benevity, Inc.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kinesis vs. Apache Flink and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.