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Amazon MSK vs Databricks 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
5.1
Amazon MSK enhances ROI through reduced integration time, flexibility, and cost-efficient experimentation, outperforming Confluent in innovation speed.
Sentiment score
6.5
Databricks enhances efficiency and ROI, offering scalable solutions and cost savings over traditional Hadoop with easy setup.
When it comes to big data processing, I prefer Databricks over other solutions.
For a lot of different tasks, including machine learning, it is a nice solution.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.1
Amazon MSK support is generally satisfactory with expertise, but experiences vary based on support plans and perceived decline over time.
Sentiment score
7.2
Databricks' support is generally praised for responsiveness, though some note delays, with resources often sufficient for independent problem-solving.
Amazon's support is excellent.
As of now, we are raising issues and they are providing solutions without any problems.
Whenever we reach out, they respond promptly.
I rate the technical support as fine because they have levels of technical support available, especially partners who get really good support from Databricks on new features.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.4
Amazon MSK offers scalable, flexible serverless and classic options, efficiently handling user demands despite occasional manual interventions.
Sentiment score
7.5
Databricks is praised for its adaptability, scalability, automation features, and performance across industries but needs improved autoscaling control.
The functionality for scaling comes out of the box and is very effective.
Databricks is an easily scalable platform.
I would rate the scalability of this solution as very high, about nine out of ten.
The patches have sometimes caused issues leading to our jobs being paused for about six hours.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Amazon MSK is generally seen as stable, rated 8-9/10, with 99.9% availability but limited long-term usage insights.
Sentiment score
7.7
Databricks is highly rated for stability and performance, with occasional minor issues often due to user or external factors.
Although it is too early to definitively state the platform's stability, we have not encountered any issues so far.
They release patches that sometimes break our code.
Databricks is definitely a very stable product and reliable.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon MSK struggles with integration, pricing, setup complexity, limited schema support, and lacks default connectors, complicating user experience.
Databricks should improve visualization, integration, user experience, and scalability, addressing concerns about pricing, error messages, and onboarding.
The increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings.
We could use their job clusters, however, that increases costs, which is challenging for us as a startup.
This feature, if made publicly available, may act as a game-changer, considering many global organizations use SAP data for their ERP requirements.
If I could right-click to copy absolute paths or to read files directly into a data frame, it would standardize and simplify the process.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon MSK offers competitive pricing for large workloads, but small use cases may incur higher costs, similar to Confluent.
Databricks offers flexible, often expensive pricing, mitigated by cloud deployment and tiered licensing, with varied user cost experiences.
Once we started using Kafka, our cloud costs rose by 50% to 60%.
It is not a cheap solution.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon MSK integrates with AWS services, offering cost-effectiveness, scalability, and ease of use for data pipelines and migrations.
Databricks offers an intuitive interface for data processing, integrating SQL, Python, and features like Delta Lake and MLflow.
The scalability and usability are quite remarkable.
The Unity Catalog is for data governance, and the Delta Lake is to build the lakehouse.
The platform allows us to leverage cloud advantages effectively, enhancing our AI and ML projects.
Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon MSK
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
6th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Databricks
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (8th), Data Science Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 6.5%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Databricks is 13.5%, up from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

FNU AKSHANSH - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's automatic
We don't have many use cases involving ingesting large amounts of data and scaling up and down. We have a clear understanding of our data volume, which remains relatively constant throughout the week. While we're aware of other features Amazon MSK offers, we feel confident in our current setup. If our requirements change significantly in the future, we'll reassess our needs and consider adopting Amazon MSK.
ShubhamSharma7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow
Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
4%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon MSK?
Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems.
What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?
I'm not sure exactly what benefit we have because we are using multiple AWS tools. We have AWS DMS, which is also the same as Amazon MSK, and we have Fivetran, which is a third-party website provid...
What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?
We are currently using Amazon MSK to transfer data from our PostgreSQL database to our DynamoDB, acting as a mediator between those two databases for migration purposes. Our data is in an on-premis...
Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MSK vs. Databricks and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.