Amazon MQ vs Apache Kafka comparison

The compared Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Apache solutions aren't in the same category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6 in MQ , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 4.4% mindshare in the category. Apache is ranked #7 in SA , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 4.0% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Apache users who would recommend it.

Amazon MQ

Read 8 Amazon MQ reviews

732 Views
637 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 90 Apache Kafka reviews

4,342 Views
1,172 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Amazon MQ

Apache Kafka

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon MQ and Apache Kafka based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Message Queue (MQ) Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon MQ vs. Apache Kafka Report (Updated: May 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MQ vs. Apache Kafka

May 2024

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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 MQ

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (6th)

Apache Kafka

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (7th)

Mindshare comparison

Amazon MQ and Apache Kafka aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Amazon MQ is designed for Message Queue (MQ) Software and holds a mindshare of 4.4%, up 3.4% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 4.0% mindshare, up 2.3% since last year.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon MQ	4.4%
IBM MQ	22.9%
ActiveMQ	22.4%
Other	50.300000000000004%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Apache Kafka	4.0%
Apache Flink	11.3%
Databricks	9.5%
Other	75.2%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

RamilCerrada

Solution architect at SM Supermalls

Has provided consistent functionality across on-premise and cloud while simplifying cloud integration

I have experience with on-premise setups using ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, but with regards to AWS, I use it via cloud only. There's a free tier with Amazon MQ based on their website, which is a six-month free trial of a single instance, allowing per month usage of either ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ, five gig of Amazon EFS storage, and for ActiveMQ, it's 20 gig of Amazon EBS storage for RabbitMQ. I did not purchase Amazon MQ through AWS Marketplace. Amazon MQ has published information about having 650 hours of free trial usage. This can be found via the AWS website by searching for AWS MQ. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Amazon MQ an eight out of ten.

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Bruno da Silva

Senior Manager at Timestamp, SA

Have worked closely with the team to deploy streaming and transaction pipelines in a flexible cloud environment

The interface of Apache Kafka could be significantly better. I started working with Apache Kafka from its early days, and I have seen many improvements. The back office functionality could be enhanced. Scaling up continues to be a challenge, though it is much easier now than it was in the beginning.

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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 initial Amazon MQ setup is very easy both when you do it on your own or use the self-managed instance."

"Amazon MQ is important for being collaborative, allowing for centralized information."

"Since we utilize AWS, it's easy to integrate Amazon MQ and work with other third-party software, as they have standard communications via API or native language."

"Amazon MQ is managed by AWS and is easy to use."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its managed service aspect. It's simple to implement and use. It requires minimal effort to maintain business operations."

"Amazon MQ is a very scalable solution."

"Amazon MQ is a secure solution."

"We have found Amazon MQ to provide scalability, robustness, and security."

"For example, when you want to send a message to inform all your clients about a new feature, you can publish that message to a single topic in Apache Kafka. This allows all clients subscribed to that topic to receive the message. On the other hand, if you need to send billing information to a specific customer, you can publish that message on a topic dedicated to that customer. This message can then be sent as an SMS to the customer, allowing them to view it on their mobile device."

"Apache Kafka is very fast and stable."

"The open-source version is relatively straightforward to set up and only takes a few minutes."

"With Kafka, events and streaming are persistent, and multiple subscribers can consume the data. This is an advantage of Kafka compared to simple queue-based solutions."

"Its availability is brilliant."

"Scalability is very good."

"We get amazing throughput. We don't get any delay."

"The processing power of Apache Kafka is good when you have requirements for high throughput and a large number of consumers."

More Apache Kafka pros

Cons

"Depending on your use cases, Amazon MQ can be cheap or expensive."

"The solution needs improvement in the back end and security."

"If Amazon provided a templating engine, it would be great."

"In community support, especially with distributed systems and integration, there is a need for better system organization."

"Monitoring capabilities are not yet fully developed, since it's a message broker service, so it focuses more on the health of Apache."

"The product should improve its monitoring capabilities. It needs to improve the pricing also."

"Amazon MQ isn't a cheap tool."

"Amazon MQ is a good solution for small and medium-sized enterprises. It's open-source software, which means it's cheaper than its competitors."

"I suggest using cloud services because the solution is expensive if you are using it on-premises."

"Kafka 2.0 has been released for over a month, and I wanted to try out the new features. However, the configuration is a little bit complicated: Kafka Broker, Kafka Manager, ZooKeeper Servers, etc."

"One complexity that I faced with the tool stems from the fact that since it is not kind of a stand-alone application, it won't integrate with native cloud, like AWS or Azure."

"As an open-source project, Kafka is still fairly young and has not yet built out the stability and features that other open-source projects have acquired over the many years. If done correctly, Kafka can also take over the stream-processing space that technologies such as Apache Storm cover."

"There are some latency problems with Kafka."

"The user interface is one weakness. Sometimes, our data isn't as accessible as we'd like. It takes a lot of work to retrieve the data and the index."

"The UI is based on command line. It would be helpful if they could come up with a simpler user interface."

"The management overhead is more compared to the messaging system. There are challenges here and there. Like for long usage, it requires restarts and nodes from time to time."

More Apache Kafka cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Depending on your use cases, Amazon MQ can be cheap or expensive."

"As a client or as an end user, I would say that Google Cloud Storage or Google Cloud are cheaper than Amazon MQ."

"It's a bit cheaper compared to other Q applications."

"Apache Kafka is an open-sourced solution. There are fees if you want the support, and I would recommend it for enterprises. There are annual subscriptions available."

"Kafka is open-source and it is cheaper than any other product."

"It is approximately $600,000 USD."

"I would not subscribe to the Confluent platform, but rather stay on the free open source version. The extra cost wasn't justified."

"Kafka is more reasonably priced than IBM MQ."

"The cost can vary depending on the provider and the specific flavor or version you use. I'm not very knowledgeable about the pricing details."

"This is an open-source solution and is free to use."

More Apache Kafka pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	49

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon MQ?

The tool's most valuable feature is its managed service aspect. It's simple to implement and use. It requires minimal effort to maintain business operations.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon MQ?

Amazon MQ needs to have data collected on performance to analyze trends for improvement. Additionally, some tools can suggest how to improve performance in terms of speed, time, and processing, whi...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon MQ?

I have some experience working with Amazon MQ.

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What are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?

Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Kafka?

Its pricing is reasonable. It's not always about cost, but about meeting specific needs.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Apache Kafka?

The long-term data storage feature in Apache Kafka depends on the setting, but I believe the maximum duration is seven days.

See all answers

Comparisons

Amazon SQS vs Amazon MQ

Compared 26% of the time

IBM MQ vs Amazon MQ

Compared 18% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs Amazon MQ

Compared 14% of the time

Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service vs Amazon MQ

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs Amazon MQ

Compared 10% of the time

More Amazon MQ Competitors

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 16% of the time

Databricks vs Apache Kafka

Compared 12% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 11% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 9% of the time

EMQX vs Apache Kafka

Compared 3% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Message Queue (MQ) Software

January 2026

Download Amazon MQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

February 2026

Download Apache Kafka product report

Overview

Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. Message brokers allow different software systems–often using different programming languages, and on different platforms–to communicate and exchange information. Amazon MQ reduces your operational load by managing the provisioning, setup, and maintenance of ActiveMQ, a popular open-source message broker. Connecting your current applications to Amazon MQ is easy because it uses industry-standard APIs and protocols for messaging, including JMS, NMS, AMQP, STOMP, MQTT, and WebSocket. Using standards means that in most cases, there’s no need to rewrite any messaging code when you migrate to AWS.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming platform that serves as a central hub for handling real-time data streams. It allows efficient publishing, subscribing, and processing of data from various sources like applications, servers, and sensors.

Kafka's core benefits include high scalability for big data pipelines, fault tolerance ensuring continuous operation despite node failures, low latency for real-time applications, and decoupling of data producers from consumers.

Key features include topics for organizing data streams, producers for publishing data, consumers for subscribing to data, brokers for managing clusters, and connectors for easy integration with various data sources.

Large organizations use Kafka for real-time analytics, log aggregation, fraud detection, IoT data processing, and facilitating communication between microservices.

Apache

Sample Customers

SkipTheDishes, Malmberg, Dealer.com, Bench Accounting

Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MQ vs. Apache Kafka

May 2024

Free Report: Amazon MQ vs. Apache Kafka

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