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Amazon MSK vs PubSub+ Platform 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
6.0
Organizations see mixed ROI with PubSub+ Platform, noting both operational benefits and challenges with costs and alternatives.
 

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
7.4
PubSub+ Platform excels in customer service with knowledgeable, responsive support and strong leadership involvement, ensuring efficient issue resolution.
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
they can come on calls and assist quite well,
Integration Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
I have looked into PubSub+ Platform's support forums to read and understand a few things that I did not understand.
Developer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
 

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
7.3
PubSub+ Platform is scalable with easy expansion, although some find Docker setup complex; supports multi-cloud messaging efficiently.
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
In terms of scalability, I would rate PubSub+ Platform as quite scalable, around 9.99.
Integration Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

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
8.3
PubSub+ Platform is praised for exceptional stability, handling data surges with high availability, and reliability in high-volume environments.
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
I think the stability of PubSub+ Platform is pretty good, and I would rate it at eight.
Developer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon MSK struggles with integration, configuration complexities, high costs, and operational challenges compared to services like Kinesis.
PubSub+ Platform needs simpler usage, better connectivity, enhanced tools, robust authentication, and improved integration with open-source and existing applications.
We are considering Confluent Cloud because they have many more connectors.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
The increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
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
It was as impressive as Kafka, better than Kafka based on my experience working on the Solace and Kafka white paper.
freelancer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
There is a lack of functionality in PubSub+ Platform; Solace has introduced microservices and micro-integrations recently with some capabilities, but they can improve on these.
Integration Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The analytics tools integrated within PubSub+ Platform are good, as it has already integrated with cloud logging and the cloud logging features, making the analytics pretty good already.
Developer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
 

Setup Cost

Amazon MSK is competitively priced with variable costs, appealing to enterprise users but potentially expensive for some.
Enterprise users value PubSub+ Platform’s flexibility, free version, and tailored agreements despite perceived high licensing costs.
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
Once we started using Kafka, our cloud costs rose by 50% to 60%.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
Pricing-wise for PubSub+ Platform, I find it a little expensive, so I would rate it at six.
Integration Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Valuable Features

Amazon MSK integrates AWS services, offering cost-effective, automated scaling, ease of use, real-time analytics, encryption, and event sourcing.
PubSub+ Platform offers advanced messaging with scalability, low latency, cloud integration, real-time support, and comprehensive analytics for businesses.
That data comes through Amazon MSK into our platforms in real-time and gets converted into actionable outputs for different teams including customer support.
Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI
The scalability and usability are quite remarkable.
CTO at Atulya Abhinav Tech Private Limited
It starts checking how the brokers are functioning, and automatically, Amazon MSK tries to resolve all the problems.
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
The solution's ability to decouple message producers and consumers allows us to have high cohesion and low coupling, making it an excellent solution for that purpose.
freelancer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The main benefits PubSub+ Platform provides for the end-user include building a robust and scalable system with very low network latency, which improves the customer experience, whether using mobile phones or applications.
Integration Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The best features of PubSub+ Platform include being highly scalable, allowing us to handle billions and billions of events.
Developer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon MSK
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
7th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
15th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (8th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 4.3%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 3.8%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon MSK4.3%
PubSub+ Platform3.8%
Other91.9%
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.
Deepankar Bbhowmick - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Messaging design has become visual and reliable and now supports fast microservice communication
The unique functions I appreciate about PubSub+ Platform are that it allows me to design my solution in a graphical manner, which is not available in many other products, and the design can also be pushed to the actual infrastructure layer, making it quite advantageous. Mesh technology is useful in scenarios where different geographies have to be connected, although such situations are not commonly found. It is beneficial but not a super-used feature of PubSub+ Platform. The event replay function is quite mature in PubSub+ Platform, allowing me to replay messages that are days in the past, which is a good feature. The main benefits PubSub+ Platform provides for the end-user include building a robust and scalable system with very low network latency, which improves the customer experience, whether using mobile phones or applications. This type of messaging framework is extremely important, and Solace is a very good product in that space. Nowadays, most applications are built using microservices technology, with small microservices interchanging messages via PubSub+ Platform. Without it, realizing a scalable system would not be possible; for example, one cannot have Netflix or similar services that require quick data transit and a good user experience, ensuring that data cannot be lost in transit. The analytics part of PubSub+ Platform is quite useful as it can connect with many analytical software tools, mainly for analysis of system logs, such as Splunk, DataDog, or Prometheus. It has the flexibility to connect with any of these and supports OpenTelemetry, which is not available in many other products, making traceability very easy. I can see how a message travels from a source system to the target system, end-to-end, along with what happens to that message along the path, making the analytics quite good.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
5%
Healthcare Company
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise14
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PubSub+ Event Broker?
Pricing-wise for PubSub+ Platform, I find it a little expensive, so I would rate it at six.
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
Potential areas for improvement in PubSub+ Platform are its authentication mechanisms, which could be slightly better. While simple authentication using basic methods is easy, moving to more robust...
What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?
PubSub+ Platform is primarily used for guaranteed delivery of messages from across systems, for microservice-based development, and for high-speed data consumption purposes. Guaranteed transmission...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet 
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MSK vs. PubSub+ Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.