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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

"Everything is hosted and simple."
"I find almost all features valuable, especially the timing and fast pace movement."
"I find data Firehose and data streams are much more intelligent than other streaming solutions."
"Kinesis has the best of Amazon: data streaming, building processes, data analytics, data in real-time are very good."
"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."
"Amazon Kinesis's main purpose is to provide near real-time data streaming at a consistent 2Mbps rate, which is really impressive."
"What I like about Amazon Kinesis is that it's very effective for small businesses. It's a well-managed solution with excellent reporting. Amazon Kinesis is also easy to use, and even a novice developer can work with it, versus Apache Kafka, which requires expertise."
"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 solution operates as a classic message broker but also as a streaming platform."
 

Cons

"I think the default settings are far too low."
"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."
"Kinesis is good for Amazon Cloud but not as suitable for other cloud vendors."
"One thing that would be nice would be a policy for increasing the number of Kinesis streams because that's the one thing that's constant. You can change it in real time, but somebody has to change it, or you have to set some kind of meter. So, auto-scaling of adding and removing streams would be nice."
"We are contemplating moving away from Amazon Kinesis primarily because of the cost."
"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."
"Amazon Kinesis has a less meaningful and easy use than Azure Event Hub."
"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."
"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."
"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"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."
"Under $1,000 per month."
"It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."
"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
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...
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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.