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 #7 in MQ , with an average rating of 8.2, 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 4.2% 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

737 Views
649 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 90 Apache Kafka reviews

4,467 Views
1,340 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 (7th)

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 3.2% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 4.2% mindshare, up 2.4% since last year.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon MQ	4.4%
IBM MQ	22.7%
ActiveMQ	22.0%
Other	50.9%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Apache Kafka	4.2%
Apache Flink	10.9%
Databricks	9.0%
Other	75.9%

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."

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

"Amazon MQ is a secure solution."

"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 important for being collaborative, allowing for centralized information."

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

"Amazon MQ is a very scalable solution."

"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."

"This is a system for email and other small devices. There has been a relay of transactions continuously over the last two years it has been in production."

"It seemed pretty stable and didn't have any issues at all."

"The stream processing is a very valuable aspect of the solution for us."

"The publisher-subscriber pattern and low latency are also essential features that greatly piqued my interest."

"Apache Kafka is very fast and stable."

"Apache Kafka is actually a distributed commit log. That is different than most messaging and queuing systems before it."

"The solution is very scalable. We started with a cluster of three and then scaled it to seven."

"Overall, I rate Apache Kafka as nine out of ten for its scalability and stability."

More Apache Kafka pros

Cons

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

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

"Amazon MQ isn't a cheap tool."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"Stability of the API and the technical support could be improved."

"Something that could be improved is having an interface to monitor the consuming rate."

"We haven't seen a return on investment with Apache Kafka. It's used for a specific use case rather than cost reduction."

"Maintaining and configuring Apache Kafka can be challenging, especially when you want to fine-tune its behavior."

"Config management can be better."

"While the solution scales well and easily, you need to understand your future needs and prep for the peaks."

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

More Apache Kafka cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"We use the free version."

"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution and there are no fees, but there are fees associated with confluence, which are based on subscription."

"I rate Apache Kafka's pricing a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. There are no additional costs apart from the licensing fees for Apache Kafka."

"The price of the solution is low."

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

"The price for the enterprise version is quite high. For on-premise, there is an annual fee, which starts at 60,000 euros, but it is usually higher than 100,000 euros. The cost for a project including the subscription is usually between 100,000 to 200,000 euros. The cost also depends on the level of support. There are two different levels of support."

"Licensing issues are not applicable. Apache licensing makes it simple with almost zero cost for the software itself."

"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."

More Apache Kafka pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Comms Service Provider

Energy/Utilities Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

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.

See all answers

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 16% of the time

Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service vs Amazon MQ

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs Amazon MQ

Compared 9% of the time

More Amazon MQ Competitors

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 14% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 12% of the time

Databricks vs Apache Kafka

Compared 12% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 8% of the time

TIBCO Streaming vs Apache Kafka

Compared 2% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Message Queue (MQ) Software

February 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

March 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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