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Amazon Kinesis vs Databricks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.0
Organizations benefit financially from Amazon Kinesis through improved data processing, cost savings, and seamless AWS service integration.
Sentiment score
6.4
Users experience mixed returns with Databricks, noting cost efficiency and scalability but facing challenges with measuring monetary gains.
With Lambda, there is no need for data transfer charges, which is beneficial for less frequent workloads.
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
For a lot of different tasks, including machine learning, it is a nice solution.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
When it comes to big data processing, I prefer Databricks over other solutions.
Head CEO at bizmetric
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Amazon Kinesis support varies, with response quality influenced by user-AWS relationships and complexity of the issues faced.
Sentiment score
7.0
Databricks customer service is praised for prompt, professional support, though some report delays; documentation helps many users.
We receive prompt support from AWS solution architects or TAMs.
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Whenever we reach out, they respond promptly.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
As of now, we are raising issues and they are providing solutions without any problems.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
I rate the technical support as fine because they have levels of technical support available, especially partners who get really good support from Databricks on new features.
Data Engineer at CRAFT Tech
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon Kinesis offers robust scalability with sharding and auto-scaling, ideal for high data throughput, despite some cost considerations.
Sentiment score
7.4
Databricks is praised for its scalability, elasticity, and auto-scaling, providing high performance and flexibility across industries.
Amazon Kinesis provides auto-scaling with streams that handle large volumes well.
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the scalability of Amazon Kinesis as a nine.
Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The sky's the limit with Databricks.
Governance And Engagement Lead
The patches have sometimes caused issues leading to our jobs being paused for about six hours.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
Databricks is an easily scalable platform.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon Kinesis is reliable with minor issues, praised for consistent performance and effective fault-tolerance features.
Sentiment score
7.6
Databricks is highly rated for reliability and efficiency, with minor issues quickly resolved, boasting strong user stability scores.
I would rate the stability of Amazon Kinesis as high, giving it a 10.
Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
They release patches that sometimes break our code.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
Although it is too early to definitively state the platform's stability, we have not encountered any issues so far.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
Databricks is definitely a very stable product and reliable.
Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Kinesis users seek enhancements in data aggregation, integration, automation, retention, cost reduction, compatibility, machine learning, and documentation.
Databricks needs better visualization, integration, clearer errors, UI enhancements, wider platform support, and improved documentation and usability.
There is no lack of functions in Amazon Kinesis. Functionality-wise, we feel it's complete.
Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes.
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Adjusting features like worker nodes and node utilization during cluster creation could mitigate these failures.
Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We prefer using a small to mid-sized cluster for many jobs to keep costs low, but this sometimes doesn't support our operations properly.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
We use MLflow for managing MLOps, however, further improvement would be beneficial, especially for large language models and related tools.
Solution Architect at Mercedes-Benz AG
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Kinesis offers competitive pricing, though costs rise with scaling, large data volumes, and Kinesis Analytics can be expensive.
Databricks' pricing varies widely based on usage and data volume, making it cost-effective yet potentially expensive for large-scale use.
Amazon Kinesis and Lambda pricing is competitive, but we noticed that scaling and large volumes could potentially increase costs significantly.
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
It is not a cheap solution.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
I believe that in terms of credits for Databricks, we're spending between £15,000 and £20,000 a month.
Governance And Engagement Lead
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Kinesis provides easy, scalable streaming with AWS integration, supporting analytics and monitoring without complex infrastructure management.
Databricks excels in ease of use, scalability, integration, and data governance, enhancing productivity and collaboration for data engineering.
Lambda's scalability, seamless integration with other AWS services, and support for multiple programming languages are very beneficial.
AWS Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Amazon Kinesis integrates easily with the AWS environment.
Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed.
Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The platform allows us to leverage cloud advantages effectively, enhancing our AI and ML projects.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
The Unity Catalog is for data governance, and the Delta Lake is to build the lakehouse.
Data Engineer at CRAFT Tech
 

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
Databricks
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (9th), Data Science Platforms (1st), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th)
 

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 Databricks is 10.0%, down from 13.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Databricks10.0%
Amazon Kinesis5.6%
Other84.4%
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.
SimonRobinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Governance And Engagement Lead
Improved data governance has enabled sensitive data tracking but cost management still needs work
I believe we could improve Databricks integration with cloud service providers. The impact of our current integration has not been particularly good, and it's becoming very expensive for us. The inefficiencies in our implementation, such as not shutting down warehouses when they're not in use or reserving the right number of credits, have led to increased costs. We made several beginner mistakes, such as not taking advantage of incremental loading and running overly complicated queries all the time. We should be using ETL tools to help us instead of doing it directly in Databricks. We need more experienced professionals to manage Databricks effectively, as it's not as forgiving as other platforms such as Snowflake. I think introducing customer repositories would facilitate easier implementation with Databricks.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

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 Business25
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise56
 

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...
Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis
Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos
Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Kinesis vs. Databricks and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.