Amazon MSK vs Confluent comparison

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Amazon MSK

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 18, 2026

Confluent and Amazon MSK are significant competitors in the data streaming field. Confluent tends to have the upper hand with its flexible deployment and advanced features, appealing to enterprises needing robust solutions.

Features: Confluent offers comprehensive stream processing capabilities, enhanced security options, and seamless multi-cloud support. Amazon MSK stands out with its smooth integration with AWS services, strong reliability, and efficient scalability, which benefits AWS-centric frameworks.

Room for Improvement: Confluent could enhance its cost-effectiveness and simplify its setup for smaller-scale deployments. It could also improve cloud-native integrations outside of its proprietary ecosystem. Amazon MSK could enhance support for non-AWS integrations, offer more advanced analytics tools, and provide a more intuitive user interface for broader appeal.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Confluent provides flexible deployment across environments with a user-friendly approach, supporting businesses needing straightforward setups and robust assistance. Amazon MSK delivers seamless AWS ecosystem integration, facilitating easy deployments, with support primarily benefiting existing AWS users.

Pricing and ROI: Confluent's pricing might be higher due to enterprise-grade features, providing strong ROI when fully leveraged. Amazon MSK is cost-effective for AWS-native users, offering good ROI through its integration and scalability within the AWS platform.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon MSK vs. Confluent Report (Updated: September 2026).

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Amazon MSK vs. Confluent

September 2026

Helped 920,769 peers since 2012

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 MSK

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

13th

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Confluent

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

7th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 3.8%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 6.1%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Confluent	6.1%
Amazon MSK	3.8%
Other	90.1%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

SYED SHAAZ

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.

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PavanManepalli

AVP - Sr Middleware Messaging Integration Engineer at Wells Fargo

Has supported streaming use cases across data centers and simplifies fraud analytics with SQL-based processing

I recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools. They need to improve in that direction by not only reducing costs but also providing better solutions for the problems customers face to avoid frustrations, whether through future enhancement requests or ensuring product stability. The cost should be worked on, and they should provide better solutions for customers. Solutions should focus on hierarchical topics; if a customer has different types of data and sources, they should be able to send them to the same place for analytics. Currently, Confluent requires everything to send to the same topic, which becomes very large and makes running analytics difficult. The hierarchy of topics should be improved. This part is available in MQ and other products such as Solace, but it is missing in Confluent, leading many in capital markets and trading to switch to Solace. In terms of stability, it is not the stability itself that needs improvement but rather the delivery semantics. Other products offer exactly-once delivery out of the box, whereas Confluent states it will offer this but lacks the knobs or levers for tuning configurations effectively. Confluent has hundreds of configurations that application teams must understand, which creates a gap. Users are often unaware of what values to set for better performance or to achieve exactly-once semantics, making it difficult to navigate through them. Delivery semantics also need to be worked on.

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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 most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."

"Amazon MSK has contributed positively to our real-time analytics capabilities because Fortis's dashboards have dashboard health that needs to be maintained, user logs that need to be maintained, and usage tracking."

"It offers good stability."

"The scalability and usability are quite remarkable."

"Amazon MSK's scalability is very good."

"The solution's technical support was helpful."

"Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow."

"Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems."

More Amazon MSK pros

"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."

"Some of the best features are that it's very quick to set up, very easy to have a centralized area that gives us a history of changes, and the ability to give feedback on any information placed onto the pages."

"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."

"The most valuable feature that we are using is the data replication between the data centers allowing us to configure a disaster recovery or software. However, is it's not mandatory to use and because most of the features that we use are from Apache Kafka, such as end-to-end encryption. Internally, we can develop our own kind of product or service from Apache Kafka."

"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."

"Having used SharePoint in the past, when I compare with traditional, old document repositories, like SharePoint, I would definitely recommend Confluent."

"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."

"Confluent is an amazing tool that is highly configurable, integrates very well with Jira, and lets you create nice documentation for various products while also supporting reporting and online content hosting."

More Confluent pros

Cons

"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."

"The downside of Amazon MSK is that when I needed to make a small change in the MSK configuration, it wasn't possible. I had to remove and drop all the clusters and recreate them again, which is complicated in a production environment."

"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."

"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 configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."

"The cost of using Amazon MSK is high, which is a significant disadvantage, as the increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings."

"In my opinion, there are areas in Amazon MSK that could be improved, particularly in terms of configuration. Initially setting it up and getting it connected was quite challenging. The naming conventions for policies were updated by AWS, and some were undocumented, leading to confusion with outdated materials. It took us weeks of trial and error before discovering new methods through hidden tutorials and official documentation."

"One of the reasons why we prefer Kafka is because the support is a little bit difficult to manage with Amazon MSK."

More Amazon MSK cons

"The Schema Registry service could be improved. I would like a bigger knowledge base of other use cases and more technical forums. It would be good to have more flexible monitoring features added to the next release as well."

"The beginner who doesn't know how to work on HTML will struggle as when you create spaces in the Confluent, if you want to have some meeting notes or anything else, you need to know HTML and which HTML tags to include."

"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."

"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."

"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."

"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."

"Currently, in the early stages, I see a gap on the security side. If you are using the SaaS version, we would like to get a fuller, more secure solution that can be adopted right out of the box. Confluence could do a better job sharing best practices or a reusable pattern that others have used, especially for companies that can not afford to hire professional services from Confluent."

"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."

More Confluent cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When you create a complete enterprise-driven architecture that is deployable on an enterprise scale, I would say that the prices of Amazon MSK and Confluent Platform become comparable."

"The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."

"The platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."

"Confluence's pricing is quite reasonable, with a cost of around $10 per user that decreases as the number of users increases. Additionally, it's worth noting that for teams of up to 10 users, the solution is completely free."

"Regarding pricing, I think Confluent is a premium product, but it's hard for me to say definitively if it's overly expensive. We're still trying to understand if the features and reduced maintenance complexity justify the cost, especially as we scale our platform use."

"You have to pay additional for one or two features."

"The pricing model of Confluent could improve because if you have a classic use case where you're going to use all the features there is no plan to reduce the features. You should be able to pick and choose basic services at a reduced price. The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."

"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate Confluent's pricing at five. I have not encountered any additional costs."

"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."

"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Construction Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

14%

Retailer

12%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	17

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?

They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.

What needs improvement with Confluent?

What is your primary use case for Confluent?

The main use cases for Confluent are log aggregation and streaming. I'm familiar with Confluent stream processing with KSQL. KSQL helps in terms of data analytics strategies because if we are the d...

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Product Reports

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Amazon MSK

October 2026

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October 2026

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka

No data available

Overview

Amazon MSK offers seamless AWS integration, simplifying development and operation. It supports efficient data streaming and ensures cost-effective scalability without additional setup needs.

Amazon MSK stands out for its effortless creation, deployment, and access to new features without complex VPC configurations. Automating scalability, it demands minimal intervention, making it ideal for high-volume workflows. Developers benefit from real-time analytics, event sourcing, and log ingestion, aiding in dashboard maintenance and user log tracking. However, integration challenges exist as some face inflexibility, intricate configurations, and plugin development difficulties. Schema validation, connector variety, and complex update processes lead some to seek alternatives. Noteworthy for order data streaming, transaction tracking in retail and banking, and other real-time data applications, Amazon MSK remains attractive despite high cost concerns.

What are Amazon MSK's key features?

Seamless AWS Integration: No additional setup or VPC needed.
Automatic Scalability: Minimal intervention thanks to automatic configurations.
Real-time Analytics: Supports event sourcing and log ingestion.
Cost-effective: Tailored for high-volume workflows.
Encryption: Secure data during migrations.

What benefits should users consider when evaluating Amazon MSK?

Efficiency: Effortless deployment and development support.
Scalability: Automated processes reduce operational overhead.
Cost Management: Financially viable for larger data volumes.
Security: High level of encryption during data transfers.
Data Handling: Effective for streaming, integration, and real-time processing.

In retail and banking, Amazon MSK facilitates order data streaming and transaction tracking. Its capabilities in supporting CDC pipelines, high-volume data management, and asynchronous processes make it favorable for integrating systems, streaming IoT data, and managing dashboard flows. Challenges in integration and configuration persist, nudging users to explore different options in certain contexts.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Confluent offers scalable, open-source flexibility and seamless data replication, supported by strong cloud integration. Key features like Kafka Connect and real-time processing make it valuable for data streaming projects while ensuring high availability with a Multi-Region Cluster.

Confluent is a robust data streaming platform that enables efficient management and integration of real-time data pipelines. Its message-driven architecture and fault tolerance provide reliability, while a user-friendly dashboard and connectors support diverse data sources. Cloud integration reduces costs, and extensive documentation, plugins, and monitoring capabilities enhance collaboration and revision management. Despite some areas needing improvement, including security in the SaaS version and integration flexibility, Confluent remains a staple in industries requiring vast data processing and task automation.

What are Confluent's key features?

Scalability: Handles large volumes of data, ensuring continuous performance.
Kafka Connect: Enables seamless data integration across multiple systems.
Real-time Processing: Facilitates instant data insights for rapid decision-making.
Multi-Region Cluster: Maintains data availability across different geographical locations.
Cloud Integration: Reduces operational costs and enhances deployment flexibility.
User Dashboard: Simplifies management with an intuitive interface.

What benefits and ROI should users consider in reviews?

Cost-Efficiency: Improved processes reduce operational expenses.
Data Reliability: Ensures consistent and accurate data handling.
Increased Collaboration: Boosts team efficiency with comprehensive documentation and management tools.
Scalability: Supports business growth without compromising performance.
Integration Flexibility: Seamlessly connects with diverse data sources and systems.

Confluent is commonly implemented in finance, insurance, and software industries for applications like fraud detection, ETL tasks, and enterprise communication. It supports real-time data processing, project management, and task automation, often integrating with project management tools like Jira, providing valuable solutions for business processes.

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost