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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
5th
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
20th
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 June 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 4.2%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Pulsar is 3.0%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Kinesis4.2%
Apache Pulsar3.0%
Other92.8%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1480695 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has enabled real-time processing of critical event streams with seamless cloud integration
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 us. The cost is a primary hindrance. That's why we are not using it widely. For our critical pipeline we are using it, but after that we are putting it in an S3 bucket. Other pipelines directly put the events in an S3 bucket and then process from there. There is no lack of functions in Amazon Kinesis. Functionality-wise, we feel it's complete. The cost aspect is what we are really concerned about.
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."
"I find data Firehose and data streams are much more intelligent than other streaming solutions."
"With AWS, you don't have to invest in any kind of infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things."
"The Kinesis VideoStream and DataStream are the most important features."
"There is no problem with the tool's stability."
"Before Data Streams, we were using a couple of other solutions, including Talend and Pentaho, to move data around, and the ability to have one single flow of data from multiple consumers simplified our architecture a lot, saves us a lot of time, and will help us in the future when we have to build additional applications based on the same input data."
"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 solution operates as a classic message broker but also as a streaming platform."
 

Cons

"If there were better documentation on optimal sharding strategies then it would be helpful."
"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There are certain shortcomings in the machine learning capacity offered by the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"AI processing or cleaning up data would be nice since I don't think it is a feature in Amazon Kinesis right now."
"The technical support could be improved. They tend to send you back to the documentation."
"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."
"It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."
"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."
"The solution's pricing is fair."
"Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
17%
University
7%
Government
7%
Insurance Company
7%
 

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...
Ask a question
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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: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.