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

Download the report

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

Download the complete report

Helped 884,873 peers since 2012

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

"Amazon Kinesis is easy to get started with, provides good documentation, and has a multilang daemon interface that makes it programming-language agnostic."

"I have worked in companies that build tools in-house. They face scaling challenges."

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

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

"The integration capabilities of the product are good."

"There is no problem with the tool's stability."

"The management and analytics are valuable features."

More Amazon Kinesis pros

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

Cons

"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."

"Lacks first in, first out queuing."

"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."

"Amazon Kinesis involved a more complex setup and configuration than Azure Event Hub."

"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."

"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."

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

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

More Amazon Kinesis cons

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is cheap."

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

"The tool's entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."

"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."

"Under $1,000 per month."

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

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

More Amazon Kinesis pricing and cost advice

Information not available

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Streaming Analytics solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Comparisons

Confluent vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 21% of the time

Apache Flink vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 20% of the time

Azure Stream Analytics vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon MSK vs Amazon Kinesis

Compared 9% of the time

More Amazon Kinesis Competitors

Apache Flink vs Apache Pulsar

Compared 17% of the time

Apache Kafka vs Apache Pulsar

Compared 16% of the time

Apache Spark Streaming vs Apache Pulsar

Compared 12% of the time

Redpanda vs Apache Pulsar

Compared 9% of the time

WSO2 Stream Processor vs Apache Pulsar

Compared 3% of the time

More Apache Pulsar Competitors

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.

DOWNLOAD NOW

884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our list of best Streaming Analytics vendors.

We monitor all Streaming Analytics reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.