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Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Flink comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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
4th
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
3rd
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 May 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 4.5%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Flink is 8.9%, down from 13.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache Flink8.9%
Amazon Kinesis4.5%
Other86.6%
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

"Kinesis replaced a whole tier of servers, so we didn't need to have a server to catch the data and then send the data somewhere else, because Kinesis was the input port for very large amounts of data."
"Everything is hosted and simple."
"Setting Amazon Kinesis up is quick and easy; it only takes a few minutes to configure the necessary settings and start using it."
"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon Kinesis is real-time data streaming."
"The product's initial setup phase is not difficult because we are using the tool on the cloud."
"The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things."
"Its scalability is very high. There is no maintenance and there is no throughput latency. I think data scalability is high, too. You can ingest gigabytes of data within seconds or milliseconds."
"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."
"Apache Flink's best feature is its data streaming tool."
"The ease of usage, even for complex tasks, stands out."
"Among all of this, if I would talk about streaming, Apache Flink wins hands down, but there are other products like Apache Pulsar which I have no idea."
"This is truly a real-time solution."
"With Flink, it provides out-of-the-box checkpointing and state management. It helps us in that way. When Storm used to restart, sometimes we would lose messages. With Flink, it provides guaranteed message processing, which helped us. It also helped us with maintenance or restarts."
"Apache Flink offers a range of powerful configurations and experiences for development teams. Its strength lies in its development experience and capabilities."
 

Cons

"The solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."
"The technical support could be improved. They tend to send you back to the documentation."
"Lacks first in, first out queuing."
"If there were better documentation on optimal sharding strategies then it would be helpful."
"Something else to mention is that we use Kinesis with Lambda a lot and the fact that you can only connect one Stream to one Lambda, I find is a limiting factor."
"One thing that would be nice would be a policy for increasing the number of Kinesis streams because that's the one thing that's constant. You can change it in real time, but somebody has to change it, or you have to set some kind of meter. So, auto-scaling of adding and removing streams would be nice."
"It would be beneficial if Amazon Kinesis provided document based support on the internet to be able to read the data from the Kinesis site."
"One thing that would be nice would be a policy for increasing the number of Kinesis streams because that's the one thing that's constant."
"Apache Flink should improve its data capability and data migration."
"Amazon's CloudFormation templates don't allow for direct deployment in the private subnet."
"The technical support from Apache is not good; support needs to be improved. I would rate them from one to ten as not good."
"We have a machine learning team that works with Python, but Apache Flink does not have full support for the language."
"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."
"Apache Flink's documentation should be available in more languages."
"The state maintains checkpoints and they use RocksDB or S3. They are good but sometimes the performance is affected when you use RocksDB for checkpointing."
"In a future release, they could improve on making the error descriptions more clear."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is fair."
"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."
"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."
"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."
"I think for us, with Amazon Kinesis, if we have to set up our own Kafka or cluster, it will be very time-consuming. If one considers the aforementioned aspect, Amazon Kinesis is a cheap tool."
"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."
"It's an open-source solution."
"It's an open source."
"The solution is open-source, which is free."
"This is an open-source platform that can be used free of charge."
"Apache Flink is open source so we pay no licensing for the use of the software."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Retailer
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

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 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...
What is your primary use case for Apache Flink?
I am working with Apache Flink, which is the tool we use for data integration. Apache Flink is for data, and we are working on the data integration project, not big data, using Apache Flink and Apa...
 

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: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.