Amazon Kinesis vs Confluent comparison

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Amazon Kinesis

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

Confluent and Amazon Kinesis compete in real-time data streaming platforms. While Confluent is praised for its flexibility, Amazon Kinesis offers scalability and AWS integration.

Features: Confluent offers a robust Kafka ecosystem with stream processing, strong security, and multi-cloud capabilities. It provides versatility for various data workloads. Amazon Kinesis supports seamless AWS integration, enabling reliable large-scale streaming applications. Its real-time data ingestion and analytics are noteworthy features.

Room for Improvement: Confluent could enhance AWS integration to match the seamless experience Kinesis offers. Its infrastructure automation could also be improved. Additionally, more intuitive tooling for deployment might benefit users. Amazon Kinesis could benefit from a more user-friendly interface akin to Confluent's. It might also streamline its pricing structure and improve support for non-AWS services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Confluent simplifies deployment with intuitive configurations and strong customer support, appealing to teams with diverse technical expertise. Amazon Kinesis provides comprehensive AWS documentation and resource access, yet it may require specific AWS knowledge for optimal usage.

Pricing and ROI: Confluent offers competitive pricing with predictable costs, suitable for Kafka-centric companies. Amazon Kinesis may be costlier due to AWS integration but provides high ROI for businesses leveraging AWS services, due to its robust capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Kinesis vs. Confluent Report (Updated: June 2026).

Amazon Kinesis vs. Confluent

June 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

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Confluent

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

7th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 4.0%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 6.4%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Confluent	6.4%
Amazon Kinesis	4.0%
Other	89.6%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

reviewer1480695

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.

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PavanManepalli

AVP - Sr Middleware Messaging Integration Engineer at Wells Fargo

Has supported streaming use cases across data centers and simplifies fraud analytics with SQL-based processing

I recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools. They need to improve in that direction by not only reducing costs but also providing better solutions for the problems customers face to avoid frustrations, whether through future enhancement requests or ensuring product stability. The cost should be worked on, and they should provide better solutions for customers. Solutions should focus on hierarchical topics; if a customer has different types of data and sources, they should be able to send them to the same place for analytics. Currently, Confluent requires everything to send to the same topic, which becomes very large and makes running analytics difficult. The hierarchy of topics should be improved. This part is available in MQ and other products such as Solace, but it is missing in Confluent, leading many in capital markets and trading to switch to Solace. In terms of stability, it is not the stability itself that needs improvement but rather the delivery semantics. Other products offer exactly-once delivery out of the box, whereas Confluent states it will offer this but lacks the knobs or levers for tuning configurations effectively. Confluent has hundreds of configurations that application teams must understand, which creates a gap. Users are often unaware of what values to set for better performance or to achieve exactly-once semantics, making it difficult to navigate through them. Delivery semantics also need to be worked on.

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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

"The scalability is pretty good."

"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."

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

"Kinesis is a fully managed program streaming application. You can manage any infrastructure. It is also scalable. Kinesis can handle any amount of data streaming and process data from hundreds, thousands of processes in every source with very low latency."

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

"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."

"Great auto-scaling, auto-sharing, and auto-correction features."

"The major advantage with Amazon Kinesis is the availability, additionally the reliability is awesome, the replay is incredibly fast, and the ingesting, buffering, and processing of data are really fast."

More Amazon Kinesis pros

"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."

"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."

"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."

"I would rate the scalability of the solution at eight out of ten. We have 20 people who use Confluent in our organization now, and we hope to increase usage in the future."

"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."

"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."

"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."

"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."

More Confluent pros

Cons

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

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

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

"The tool should focus on having an alert system rather than having to use a third-party solution."

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

"Amazon Kinesis has a less meaningful and easy use than Azure Event Hub."

"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."

"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."

More Amazon Kinesis cons

"Confluent has fallen behind in being the tool of the industry. It's taking second place to things such as Word and SharePoint and other office tools that are more dynamic and flexible than Confluent."

"There is a limitation when it comes to seamlessly importing Microsoft documents into Confluent pages, which can be inconvenient for users who frequently work with Microsoft Office tools and need to transition their content to Confluent."

"The solution could have an extra plugin or upgrading feature. In addition, it could have more integration with different platforms and be more compatible."

"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."

"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."

"One area we've identified that could be improved is the governance and access control to the Kafka topics. We've found some limitations, like a threshold of 10,000 rules per cluster, that make it challenging to manage access at scale if we have many different data sources."

"The product should integrate tools for incorporating diagrams like Lucidchart. It also needs to improve its formatting features. We also faced issues while granting permissions."

"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."

More Confluent cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The tool's pricing is cheap."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Under $1,000 per month."

More Amazon Kinesis pricing and cost advice

"Regarding pricing, I think Confluent is a premium product, but it's hard for me to say definitively if it's overly expensive. We're still trying to understand if the features and reduced maintenance complexity justify the cost, especially as we scale our platform use."

"Confluent is highly priced."

"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."

"You have to pay additional for one or two features."

"The solution is cheaper than other products."

"It comes with a high cost."

"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate Confluent's pricing at five. I have not encountered any additional costs."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Retailer

12%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	17

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?

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...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?

They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.

What needs improvement with Confluent?

What is your primary use case for Confluent?

The main use cases for Confluent are log aggregation and streaming. I'm familiar with Confluent stream processing with KSQL. KSQL helps in terms of data analytics strategies because if we are the d...

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Product Reports

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Amazon Kinesis

August 2026

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August 2026

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis

No data available

Overview

Amazon Kinesis provides real-time data streaming with seamless AWS integration, ideal for analytics, data transformation, and external customer feeds. It offers cost-effective data management with high throughput and low latency, supporting multiple programming languages.

Amazon Kinesis enables organizations to manage real-time data streams efficiently. Its integration with AWS ensures seamless setup and operation, while features like auto-scaling and fault tolerance make it reliable for diverse data sources such as IoT devices and server logs. The platform's ability to handle large-scale event-driven systems and dynamic workloads makes it suitable for complex streaming architectures. Despite some challenges with costs and setup complexity, Kinesis remains a popular choice for its efficient data management and processing capabilities.

What are the key features of Amazon Kinesis?

Real-time Data Streaming: Enables live data processing and analytics.
Seamless AWS Integration: Ensures smooth operation with AWS services.
High Throughput: Consistent 2Mbps rate supports large volumes of data.
Auto-scaling: Automatically adjusts to data load.
Fault Tolerance: Maintains system reliability and data integrity.
Lambda Function Processing: Processes data efficiently using Lambda.

What benefits or ROI should users expect?

Scalable Data Management: Handles data influx effortlessly.
Efficiency: Streamlines data flows without impacting performance.
Cost-effectiveness: Delivers value for budget-conscious users.
Low Latency: Provides real-time insights and reactions.
Multi-language Support: Accommodates various development needs.

In industries such as IoT, finance, and entertainment, Amazon Kinesis facilitates the real-time ingestion and processing of data streams. It connects seamlessly to data lakes and warehouses, enabling businesses to harness data-driven insights without performance loss. This capability is essential for managing dynamic workloads and large-scale event systems. By supporting tools like KDS, Firehose, and Video Streams, Kinesis empowers organizations to respond quickly to changing data environments, enhancing operational effectiveness across different sectors.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Confluent offers scalable, open-source flexibility and seamless data replication, supported by strong cloud integration. Key features like Kafka Connect and real-time processing make it valuable for data streaming projects while ensuring high availability with a Multi-Region Cluster.

Confluent is a robust data streaming platform that enables efficient management and integration of real-time data pipelines. Its message-driven architecture and fault tolerance provide reliability, while a user-friendly dashboard and connectors support diverse data sources. Cloud integration reduces costs, and extensive documentation, plugins, and monitoring capabilities enhance collaboration and revision management. Despite some areas needing improvement, including security in the SaaS version and integration flexibility, Confluent remains a staple in industries requiring vast data processing and task automation.

What are Confluent's key features?

Scalability: Handles large volumes of data, ensuring continuous performance.
Kafka Connect: Enables seamless data integration across multiple systems.
Real-time Processing: Facilitates instant data insights for rapid decision-making.
Multi-Region Cluster: Maintains data availability across different geographical locations.
Cloud Integration: Reduces operational costs and enhances deployment flexibility.
User Dashboard: Simplifies management with an intuitive interface.

What benefits and ROI should users consider in reviews?

Cost-Efficiency: Improved processes reduce operational expenses.
Data Reliability: Ensures consistent and accurate data handling.
Increased Collaboration: Boosts team efficiency with comprehensive documentation and management tools.
Scalability: Supports business growth without compromising performance.
Integration Flexibility: Seamlessly connects with diverse data sources and systems.

Confluent is commonly implemented in finance, insurance, and software industries for applications like fraud detection, ETL tasks, and enterprise communication. It supports real-time data processing, project management, and task automation, often integrating with project management tools like Jira, providing valuable solutions for business processes.

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost