No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Amazon MSK vs Spring Cloud Data Flow 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:
 

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
Spring Cloud Data Flow
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
16th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (30th)
 

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 Spring Cloud Data Flow is 2.9%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon MSK4.3%
Spring Cloud Data Flow2.9%
Other92.8%
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.
NitinGoyal - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Lead at Naukri.com
Has a plug-and-play model and provides good robustness and scalability
The solution's community support could be improved. I don't know why the Spring Cloud Data Flow community is not very strong. Community support is very limited whenever you face any problem or are stuck somewhere. I'm not sure whether it has improved in the last six months because this pipeline was set up almost two years ago. I struggled with that a lot. For example, there was limited support whenever I got an exception and sought help from Stack Overflow or different forums. Interacting with Kubernetes needs a few certificates. You need to define all the certificates within your application. With the help of those certificates, your Java application or Spring Cloud Data Flow can interact with Kubernetes. I faced a lot of hurdles while placing those certificates. Despite following the official documentation to define all the replicas, readiness, and liveliness probes within the Spring Cloud Data Flow application, it was not working. So, I had to troubleshoot while digging in and debugging the internals of Spring Cloud Data Flow at that time. It was just a configuration mismatch, and I was doing nothing weird. There was a small spelling difference between how Spring Cloud Data Flow was expecting it and how I passed it. I was just following the official documentation.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"Amazon MSK's scalability is very good."
"Amazon MSK's separation of concerns and ease of creating and deploying new features are highly valuable. It just requires to assign them to the topic, and then anyone who needs to consume these messages can do so directly from Amazon MSK. This separation of concerns makes it very convenient, especially for new feature development, as developers can easily access the messages they need without having to deal with complex server communications or protocol setups."
"It provides installations, scaling, and other functionalities straight out of the box."
"The scalability and usability are quite remarkable."
"Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems."
"It offers good stability."
"What I appreciate most about Amazon MSK is that it doesn't require extensive concern about the configurations; it starts checking how the brokers are functioning, and automatically, Amazon MSK tries to resolve all the problems."
"This product will assist us in saving costs in many ways: No longer need to continue paying high fees for proprietary software, reduce the number of software engineers needed to support the product, and achieve faster time to market by using this product for our middleware."
"The best thing I like about Spring Cloud Data Flow is its plug-and-play model."
"The most valuable feature is real-time streaming."
"The dashboards in Spring Cloud Dataflow are quite valuable."
"Overall, Spring Cloud Data Flow is a really good solution and a lot cheaper than a lot of infrastructure provided by big companies like Google or Amazon."
"The ease of deployment on Kubernetes, the seamless integration for orchestration of various pipelines, and the visual dashboard that simplifies operations even for non-specialists such as quality analysts."
"The most valuable features of Spring Cloud Data Flow are the simple programming model, integration, dependency Injection, and ability to do any injection. Additionally, auto-configuration is another important feature because we don't have to configure the database and or set up the boilerplate in the database in every project. The composability is good, we can create small workloads and compose them in any way we like."
"There are a lot of options in Spring Cloud. It's flexible in terms of how we can use it. It's a full infrastructure."
 

Cons

"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."
"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 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."
"Horizontal scale-out is actually not easy, making it an area where improvements are required."
"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."
"MSK should be easier to integrate with other solutions. It should be more flexible, integration-wise."
"The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."
"Some of the features, like the monitoring tools, are not very mature and are still evolving."
"The visual user interface could use some help; it needs improvement."
"The documentation on offer is not that good."
"On the tool's online discussion forums, you may get stuck with an issue, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The solution's community support could be improved."
"The configurations could be better. Some configurations are a little bit time-consuming in terms of trying to understand using the Spring Cloud documentation."
"Some of the features, like the monitoring tools, are not very mature and are still evolving."
"I would improve the dashboard features as they are not very user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."
"The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."
"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 solution provides value for money, and we are currently using its community edition."
"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."
"If you want support from Spring Cloud Data Flow there is a fee. The Spring Framework is open-source and this is a free solution."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Streaming Analytics solutions are best for your needs.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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 Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

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 needs improvement with Spring Cloud Data Flow?
There were instances of deployment pipelines getting stuck, and the dashboard not always accurately showing the application status, requiring manual intervention such as rerunning applications or r...
What is your primary use case for Spring Cloud Data Flow?
We had a project for content management, which involved multiple applications each handling content ingestion, transformation, enrichment, and storage for different customers independently. We want...
What advice do you have for others considering Spring Cloud Data Flow?
I would definitely recommend Spring Cloud Data Flow. It requires minimal additional effort or time to understand how it works, and even non-specialists can use it effectively with its friendly docu...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MSK vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.