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Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Pulsar comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Apache Pulsar
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 8.0%, down from 12.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Pulsar is 2.1%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Prabin Silwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Pipeline setup is very simple
I am not exactly sure about where improvements are needed in the tool. When I was working on the tool, it was very scalable, and the only thing we needed in our company was temporary streaming stuff that could work well. We didn't want to set up our own Kafka, other queues, or processing systems. As it is a cloud tool, it is easy for us to use the tool, and it satisfies all our requirements. Maybe for the other cases, if we need, then it may need some improvements. The tool satisfies our particular needs. Currently, the pipeline setup is very simple. For our particular use cases, it is because we just want to get the data and send it to the different data lakes or some logging system. Previously, we also used Amazon Kinesis to log those to Splunk, and later on, we removed Splunk and transferred that to Datadog. For our use cases, I don't want any new features in the tool. Amazon Kinesis' use case is for collecting, processing, and analyzing. If anything can be added to the tool, then I feel one should be able to use the same kind of tool so that everything is there in the product, like an alert system, and so that one can analyze, make a query, and do sourcing from the solution itself rather than using other logging and monitoring systems. The tool should focus on having an alert system rather than having to use a third-party solution. We can just get the data over Amazon Kinesis, and we can directly use all the benefits of current analytical tools, like in the areas involving BI, Looker, and Tableau. One would not need to buy the aforementioned tools, and we can just get started with Amazon Kinesis.
it_user1087029 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things."
"I have worked in companies that build tools in-house. They face scaling challenges."
"The feature that I've found most valuable is the replay. That is one of the most valuable in our business. We are business-to-business so replay was an important feature - being able to replay for 24 hours. That's an important feature."
"Amazon Kinesis is easy to get started with, provides good documentation, and has a multilang daemon interface that makes it programming-language agnostic."
"The solution operates as a classic message broker but also as a streaming platform."
 

Cons

"Amazon Kinesis should improve its limits."
"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. I would definitely recommend to remove that constraint."
"If there were better documentation on optimal sharding strategies then it would be helpful."
"There could be valid data in Kinesis that is not being processed, which affects stability. Although it rarely happens, this issue has been observed in many deployments, making it not completely stable."
"One area for improvement in the solution is the file size limitation of 10 Mb. My company works with files with a larger file size. The batch size and throughput also need improvement in Amazon Kinesis."
"We were charged high costs for the solution’s enhanced fan-out feature."
"There are some kind of hard limits on Amazon Kinesis, and if you hit that, then you will get the throughput exceed error."
"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."
"Documentation is poor because much of it is in Chinese with no English translation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."
"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."
"Under $1,000 per month."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"The tool's entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."
"The solution's pricing is fair."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Educational Organization
4%
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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.
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?
Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes. Also, the KCL library's documentation could be improved to better explain the configuration parameters...
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Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and others in Streaming Analytics. Updated: June 2025.
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