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Amazon Kinesis vs Confluent comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Confluent
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
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 Confluent is 6.9%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Kinesis5.2%
Confluent6.9%
Other87.9%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

CD
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.
PavanManepalli - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"From my experience, one of the most valuable features is the ability to track silent events on endpoints. Previously, these events might have gone unnoticed, but now we can access them within the product range. For example, if a customer reports that their calls are not reaching the portal files, we can use this feature to troubleshoot and optimize the system."
"The Kinesis VideoStream and DataStream are the most important features."
"There is no problem with the tool's stability."
"The product's initial setup phase is not difficult because we are using the tool on the cloud."
"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 has the capacity to store the data anywhere from one day to a week and provides limitless storage for us."
"The feature that I've found most valuable is the replay. That is one of the most valuable in our business. We are business-to-business so replay was an important feature - being able to replay for 24 hours. That's an important feature."
"I have worked in companies that build tools in-house. They face scaling challenges."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
 

Cons

"Snapshot from the the from the the stream of the data analytic I have already on the cloud, do a snapshot to not to make great or to get the data out size of the web service. But to stop the process and restart a few weeks later when I have more data or more available of the client teams."
"The solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."
"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 should improve its limits."
"AI processing or cleaning up data would be nice since I don't think it is a feature in Amazon Kinesis right now."
"Kinesis is good for Amazon Cloud but not as suitable for other cloud vendors."
"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."
"There are certain shortcomings in the machine learning capacity offered by the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"It would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 tool's pricing is cheap."
"The solution's pricing is fair."
"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."
"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."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"The pricing model of Confluent could improve because if you have a classic use case where you're going to use all the features there is no plan to reduce the features. You should be able to pick and choose basic services at a reduced price. The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"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."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
11%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
 

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.
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 do you like most about Confluent?
I find Confluent's Kafka Connectors and Kafka Streams invaluable for my use cases because they simplify real-time data processing and ETL tasks by providing reliable, pre-packaged connectors and to...
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?
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 ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kinesis vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.