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 #22. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 5.6% mindshare in SA, compared to Pulsar’s 2.6% 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

2,497 Views
2,497 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Apache Pulsar

Read 1 Apache Pulsar review

712 Views
712 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: 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

22nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 5.6%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Pulsar is 2.6%, 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	5.6%
Apache Pulsar	2.6%
Other	91.8%

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

"What turns out to be most valuable is its integration with Lambda functions because you can process the data as it comes in. As soon as data comes, you'll fire a Lambda function to process a trench of data."

"The integration between Amazon Kinesis and Lambda helps us significantly."

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

"The integration capabilities of the product are good."

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

"Everything is hosted and simple."

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

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

More Amazon Kinesis pros

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

Cons

"Kinesis is good for Amazon Cloud but not as suitable for other cloud vendors."

"For me, especially with video streams, there's sometimes a kind of delay when the data has to be pumped to other services. This delay could be improved in Kinesis, or especially the Kinesis Video Streams, which is being used for different use cases for Amazon Connect. With that improvement, a lot of other use cases of Amazon Connect integrating with third-party analytic tools would be easier."

"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."

"Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes."

"The solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."

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

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

"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."

More Amazon Kinesis cons

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"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."

"Under $1,000 per month."

"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 tool's pricing is cheap."

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

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

15%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

12%

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.

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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.

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

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