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Amazon MSK vs Apache Kafka 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
4.1
Amazon MSK saves time and money, promotes innovation with flexible pricing, yet some users find costs hard to justify.
Sentiment score
6.2
Apache Kafka offers ROI through scalability, cost reduction, time savings, customization, and valuable insights, despite some challenges.
I can say we have noticed a strong return on investment largely due to improved scalability and reduced operational friction in asynchronous workflows.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.2
Amazon MSK support varies; some praise its effectiveness, while others note average service and seek external assistance.
Sentiment score
5.9
Apache Kafka primarily depends on an active open-source community for support, complemented by in-house expertise and optional paid services.
They can manage most of our queries, and for what they cannot manage, they guide us through the process of finding out.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
Amazon's support is excellent.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
Practically, the biggest support channels are its community ecosystem, documentation, GitHub discussions, and engineering forums.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
The Apache community provides support for the open-source version.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
There is plenty of community support available online.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.0
Amazon MSK is viewed as scalable, manageable, appealing to various environments, but may require manual scaling adjustments.
Sentiment score
7.7
Apache Kafka offers scalable solutions with Kubernetes, efficiently handling large data and users across industries, especially finance.
The functionality for scaling comes out of the box and is very effective.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
As a B2B enterprise client, our clientele consists of large ticket clients but low amounts of users.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
Customers have not faced issues with user growth or data streaming needs.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
For traffic spikes, Apache Kafka naturally helps by buffering events, allowing consumers to catch up instead of immediately overwhelming downstream services.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
I need to enable my solution with high availability and scalability.
Data Architect at Ascendion
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon MSK is stable with high ratings; minor issues are unrelated to MSK, maintaining success rates of 91% under load.
Sentiment score
7.6
Apache Kafka is stable and reliable, efficiently handling high data volumes with minimal issues and high user satisfaction.
It doesn't require any maintenance on my end yet, as I haven't had any issues.
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
Testing changes in lower environments before production rollout and verifying replication health and cluster stability is essential.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Apache Kafka is stable.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
This feature of Apache Kafka has helped enhance our system stability when handling high volume data.
DevOps Engineer
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon MSK struggles with integration, configuration complexities, high costs, and operational challenges compared to services like Kinesis.
Kafka needs improvements in duplicate management, UI, troubleshooting, cloud integration, messaging control, ZooKeeper dependency, and management tools.
The increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
The only issue with Amazon MSK that we are facing is the configurations.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
I had to remove and drop all the clusters and recreate them again, which is complicated in a production environment.
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
The performance angle is critical, and while it works in milliseconds, the goal is to move towards microseconds.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
Running and maintaining an Apache Kafka cluster at scale involves handling partitions, replications, retention policies, rebalancing, and monitoring, which requires strong expertise.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Apache Kafka groups could introduce themes or profiles of configuration to help manage this complexity without needing expertise.
Senior Principal Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

Amazon MSK is competitively priced with variable costs, appealing to enterprise users but potentially expensive for some.
Apache Kafka is open-source and affordable, but managed services and support can incur additional costs.
Once we started using Kafka, our cloud costs rose by 50% to 60%.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
We use Kafka M5 Large instance, and depending on the instances, that is the cost we have, along with storage cost and data transfer costs.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
From a price perspective, if you are asking about Apache Kafka, I would rate it a nine.
Senior Principal Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
The open-source version of Apache Kafka results in minimal costs, mainly linked to accessing documentation and limited support.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
Its pricing is reasonable.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon MSK integrates AWS services, offering cost-effective, automated scaling, ease of use, real-time analytics, encryption, and event sourcing.
Apache Kafka provides scalable, fault-tolerant, real-time data streaming for reliable message processing and integration across platforms with open-source flexibility.
The scalability and usability are quite remarkable.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
The best features of Amazon MSK are the real-time analytics that are excellent.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
Amazon MSK is basically Kafka in the cloud, and when you need to create a cluster of Kafka brokers, Amazon MSK helps with that by automatically creating all the brokers according to the configuration you provide.
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
Apache Kafka is effective when dealing with large volumes of data flowing at high speeds, requiring real-time processing.
Apache Kafka is particularly valuable for managing high levels of transactions.
Senior Manager at Timestamp, SA
Regarding durability and reliability, messages are persisted, so temporary consumer failures do not automatically lead to data loss, which is valuable in financial workflows where losing events is unacceptable.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon MSK
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
9th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Apache Kafka
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 4.0%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Kafka is 3.8%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache Kafka3.8%
Amazon MSK4.0%
Other92.2%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

SYED SHAAZ - PeerSpot reviewer
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
Improved data streaming and integration challenges prompt search for alternatives
The integration capabilities of Amazon MSK are not very flexible. If you have your own self-managed Kafka, that helps significantly because you can set up configurations. We are considering self-managed Kafka since our product is only one year old. The Kafka integrations are fine, but the configurations are an issue. The only issue with Amazon MSK that we are facing is the configurations. There are preset configurations and limited configurations that we can set for our unique use case. The product could improve by allowing us to set different configurations. I would also like to see Amazon MSK improve in the area of connectors. We are considering Confluent Cloud because they have many more connectors. They have KSQL DB and governance features. It is slightly costlier, but Confluent offers more flexibility with their connectors.
Varuns Ug - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Event-driven workflows have improved payment processing and reduced latency across services
One area for improvement in Apache Kafka is operational complexity. Running and maintaining an Apache Kafka cluster at scale involves handling partitions, replications, retention policies, rebalancing, and monitoring, which requires strong expertise. Debugging and observability can be complex in large systems, as troubleshooting issues such as consumer lag, offset management problems, or uneven partition distribution can become challenging. The learning curve is relatively steep, requiring a good understanding of concepts such as partition, consumer group, offset commit, and delivery guarantees to avoid subtle production issues. One area where Apache Kafka could improve is the developer experience around debugging and tracing events end to end. In distributed systems, when an event passes through multiple topics and consumer services, troubleshooting can become time-consuming. Better built-in observability for tracing event flows across services would be very useful.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise51
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?
The integration capabilities of Amazon MSK are not very flexible. If you have your own self-managed Kafka, that helps significantly because you can set up configurations. We are considering self-ma...
What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?
We are recently working with Amazon MSK at Fortis, where we have multiple dashboards in our revenue intelligence platform. We are streaming data from different apps into those dashboards. The data ...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon MSK?
We are working with Amazon MSK product, Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka. The main benefits I have seen from using Amazon MSK is that as a B2B enterprise client, we have many SLAs to fulfill. Tra...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Kafka?
From the AWS perspective, the price is on the higher side. However, if you go for Apache Kafka, it is low. From a price perspective, if you are asking about Apache Kafka, I would rate it a nine.
What needs improvement with Apache Kafka?
Apache Kafka is abundant with features which only an expert-level person will be able to manage due to the high volume and high concurrent expectations. Apache Kafka groups could introduce themes o...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MSK vs. Apache Kafka and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
904,748 professionals have used our research since 2012.