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 #20. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 5.2% mindshare in SA, compared to Pulsar’s 2.8% 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

2,513 Views
2,513 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Apache Pulsar

Read 1 Apache Pulsar review

815 Views
815 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon Kinesis

Apache Pulsar

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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), Microsoft and others in Streaming Analytics.

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

Buyer's Guide

Streaming Analytics

February 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

20th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 5.2%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Pulsar is 2.8%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon Kinesis	5.2%
Apache Pulsar	2.8%
Other	92.0%

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Kinesis VideoStream and DataStream are the most important features."

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

"One of the best features of Amazon Kinesis is the multi-partition."

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

"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."

"The scalability is pretty good."

"The management and analytics are valuable features."

"I like the ease of use and how we can quickly get the configurations done, making it pretty straightforward and stable."

More Amazon Kinesis pros

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

Cons

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

"Lacks first in, first out queuing."

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

"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."

"We are contemplating moving away from Amazon Kinesis primarily because of the cost."

"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."

"AI processing or cleaning up data would be nice since I don't think it is a feature in Amazon Kinesis right now."

"There are certain shortcomings in the machine learning capacity offered by the product, making it an area where improvements are required."

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."

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

"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 was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."

"The solution's pricing is fair."

"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."

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

More Amazon Kinesis pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

16%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Insurance Company

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...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis

March 2026

Download Amazon Kinesis product report

Buyer's Guide

Streaming Analytics

February 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), Microsoft and others in Streaming Analytics. Updated: February 2026.

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