Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Pulsar comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Pulsar are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.9, while Pulsar is ranked #21. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 5.4% mindshare in SA, compared to Pulsar’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Pulsar users who would recommend it.

Amazon Kinesis

Read 29 Amazon Kinesis reviews

2,522 Views
2,522 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Apache Pulsar

Read 1 Apache Pulsar review

766 Views
766 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon Kinesis

Apache Pulsar

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon Kinesis and Apache Pulsar based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache and others in Streaming Analytics.

To learn more, read our detailed Streaming Analytics Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Streaming Analytics

January 2026

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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 Kinesis

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Apache Pulsar

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

21st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 5.4%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Pulsar is 2.7%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon Kinesis	5.4%
Apache Pulsar	2.7%
Other	91.9%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

Chandra Mohan Dhanasekaran

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.

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it_user1087029

Solution Architect at Vlaanderen connect.

The solution can mimic other APIs without changing a line of code

The solution operates as a classic message broker but also as a streaming platform. It operates differently than a traditional streaming platform with storage and computing handled separately. It scales easier and better than Kafka which can be stubborn. You can even make it act like Kafka because it understands Kafka APIs. There are even companies that will sell you Kafka but underneath it is Apache Pulsar. The solution is very compatible because it can mimic other APIs without changing a line of code.

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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

"Setting Amazon Kinesis up is quick and easy; it only takes a few minutes to configure the necessary settings and start using it."

"The solution has the capacity to store the data anywhere from one day to a week and provides limitless storage for us."

"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."

"The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things."

"I find almost all features valuable, especially the timing and fast pace movement."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Kinesis is real-time data streaming."

"Everything is hosted and simple."

"Amazon Kinesis's main purpose is to provide near real-time data streaming at a consistent 2Mbps rate, which is really impressive."

More Amazon Kinesis pros

"The solution operates as a classic message broker but also as a streaming platform."

Cons

"There are some kind of hard limits on Amazon Kinesis, and if you hit that, then you will get the throughput exceed error."

"We were charged high costs for the solution’s enhanced fan-out feature."

"The tool should focus on having an alert system rather than having to use a third-party solution."

"I think the default settings are far too low."

"Lacks first in, first out queuing."

"The price is not much cheaper. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing."

"Amazon Kinesis should improve its limits."

"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."

More Amazon Kinesis cons

"Documentation is poor because much of it is in Chinese with no English translation."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."

"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."

"The tool's pricing is cheap."

"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."

"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."

"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."

"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."

More Amazon Kinesis pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	9

No data available

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

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Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

Redpanda vs Apache Pulsar

Compared 12% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis

January 2026

Download Amazon Kinesis product report

Buyer's Guide

Streaming Analytics

January 2026

Download Apache Pulsar product report

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis

No data available

Overview

Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost-effectively process streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit the requirements of your application. With Amazon Kinesis, you can ingest real-time data such as video, audio, application logs, website clickstreams, and IoT telemetry data for machine learning, analytics, and other applications. Amazon Kinesis enables you to process and analyze data as it arrives and respond instantly instead of having to wait until all your data is collected before the processing can begin.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Apache Pulsar is a cloud-native, distributed messaging and streaming platform originally created at Yahoo! and now a top-level Apache Software Foundation project

Pulsar

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos

Information Not Available

Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache and others in Streaming Analytics. Updated: January 2026.

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