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Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Pulsar comparison

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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
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
29
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
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 3.9%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Pulsar is 2.8%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Kinesis3.9%
Apache Pulsar2.8%
Other93.3%
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.
it_user1087029 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

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."
"Compared to what we were doing with Kafka, which was taking about 30% just to keep things together, with Kinesis I think we're probably saving tens of thousands, if not $100,000 per year."
"The solution has the capacity to store the data anywhere from one day to a week and provides limitless storage for us."
"The integration between Amazon Kinesis and Lambda helps us significantly."
"I find data Firehose and data streams are much more intelligent than other streaming solutions."
"Amazon Kinesis is easy to get started with, provides good documentation, and has a multilang daemon interface that makes it programming-language agnostic."
"Setting Amazon Kinesis up is quick and easy; it only takes a few minutes to configure the necessary settings and start using it."
"We have seen a return on our investment with Amazon Kinesis, as we are able to process data without any issue and it is our solution for ingesting data in other databases, such as Snowflake."
"The solution operates as a classic message broker but also as a streaming platform."
 

Cons

"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."
"I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services."
"In general, the pain point for us was that once the data gets into Kinesis there is no way for us to understand what's happening because Kinesis divides everything into shards. So if we wanted to understand what's happening with a particular shard, whether it is published or not, we could not. Even with the logs, if we want to have some kind of logging it is in the shard."
"In order to do a successful setup, the person handling the implementation needs to know the solution very well. You can't just come into it blind and with little to no experience."
"Snapshot from the the from the the stream of the data analytic I have already on the cloud, do a snapshot to not to make great or to get the data out size of the web service. But to stop the process and restart a few weeks later when I have more data or more available of the client teams."
"Kinesis Data Analytics needs to be improved somewhat. It's SQL based data but it is not as user friendly as MySQL or Athena tools."
"Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes."
"Amazon Kinesis should improve its limits."
"Documentation is poor because much of it is in Chinese with no English translation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"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 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."
"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."
"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."
"The solution's pricing is fair."
"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise10
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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 primary use case for Amazon Kinesis?
We use Amazon Kinesis for stream processing. We get events from on-premise devices to the cloud. We get many device events and we have to process these events that are coming from the devices. To p...
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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, Microsoft, Apache and others in Streaming Analytics. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.