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Amazon Kinesis vs Redpanda 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Kinesis
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Redpanda
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
16th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 8.0%, down from 12.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Redpanda is 1.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Prabin Silwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Pipeline setup is very simple
I am not exactly sure about where improvements are needed in the tool. When I was working on the tool, it was very scalable, and the only thing we needed in our company was temporary streaming stuff that could work well. We didn't want to set up our own Kafka, other queues, or processing systems. As it is a cloud tool, it is easy for us to use the tool, and it satisfies all our requirements. Maybe for the other cases, if we need, then it may need some improvements. The tool satisfies our particular needs. Currently, the pipeline setup is very simple. For our particular use cases, it is because we just want to get the data and send it to the different data lakes or some logging system. Previously, we also used Amazon Kinesis to log those to Splunk, and later on, we removed Splunk and transferred that to Datadog. For our use cases, I don't want any new features in the tool. Amazon Kinesis' use case is for collecting, processing, and analyzing. If anything can be added to the tool, then I feel one should be able to use the same kind of tool so that everything is there in the product, like an alert system, and so that one can analyze, make a query, and do sourcing from the solution itself rather than using other logging and monitoring systems. The tool should focus on having an alert system rather than having to use a third-party solution. We can just get the data over Amazon Kinesis, and we can directly use all the benefits of current analytical tools, like in the areas involving BI, Looker, and Tableau. One would not need to buy the aforementioned tools, and we can just get started with Amazon Kinesis.
ArpitShah - PeerSpot reviewer
Affordable, easy to deploy, and it is easy to find things on the user interface
We use the libraries in the different programming languages. We use the message format in Avro, convert the data in the format, and pass it on. We have contacted the sales team about the solution. So far, the product fulfills our requirements. We get lots of data. The data flows through Kafka to Redpanda. Then it goes to a database. If our infrastructure goes down for a week, we will not lose data. It is an advantage of Redpanda. I recommend the product to others. We might choose a different solution if we find something cheaper. We used Redpanda because we did not want to self-host our software. Redpanda is a piece of infrastructure. There is not much of a learning curve. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"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."
"There is no problem with the tool's stability."
"The scalability is pretty good."
"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."
"The solution's technical support is flawless."
"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."
"The solution has the capacity to store the data anywhere from one day to a week and provides limitless storage for us."
"The cost savings have been significant."
"I tested it with ten-plus nodes, and it's highly scalable."
"The UI is modern."
"What makes Redpanda superior is its performance since it's written in C++. C++ is pretty much the standard for high-performance applications."
 

Cons

"Amazon Kinesis involved a more complex setup and configuration than Azure Event Hub."
"The tool should focus on having an alert system rather than having to use a third-party solution."
"In order to do a successful setup, the person handling the implementation needs to know the solution very well. You can't just come into it blind and with little to no experience."
"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."
"Kinesis is good for Amazon Cloud but not as suitable for other cloud vendors."
"The price is not much cheaper. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing."
"Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes."
"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."
"When it comes to self-hosting, their documentation could be improved."
"The command-line tools need to be improved. To quickly check the status of the topics and all."
"Recently, for the documentation, they've built their own AI chatbot, which is focused on giving you answers based on their documentation. While using that, I did not find it to be very good."
"The version control mechanism must be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The tool's entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."
"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."
"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."
"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."
"It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month."
"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."
"It's free. Everybody can use it, only support is paid."
"Redpanda is cheaper than its competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Educational Organization
4%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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?
Amazon Kinesis could improve its pricing to be more competitive, especially for large volumes. Also, the KCL library's documentation could be improved to better explain the configuration parameters...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Redpanda?
Redpanda is actually a commercial platform, but they do provide free versions as well. I've been working only with the free versions.
What needs improvement with Redpanda?
Recently, for the documentation, they've built their own AI chatbot, which is focused on giving you answers based on their documentation. While using that, I did not find it to be very good. Maybe ...
What is your primary use case for Redpanda?
I have worked with Redpanda for the past two to three months. Mainly in the tech industry or software industry, there's a huge rise of streaming data. Redpanda serves as a very reliable and fast me...
 

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 Amazon Kinesis vs. Redpanda and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.