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Amazon MSK vs Starburst Enterprise comparison

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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
13th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Starburst Enterprise
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
24th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (21st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 3.8%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Starburst Enterprise is 2.2%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon MSK3.8%
Starburst Enterprise2.2%
Other94.0%
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.
KamleshPant - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Architect at USEReady
Connects to any data source from any region and offers unified access
There are no specific projects supported by Starburst regarding AI initiatives or machine learning projects. In the future, if we have all the data available, we can definitely capitalize on AI/ML and LLM capabilities to summarize data and gain insights. That's our future goal, but we haven't reached that point yet. There should be support for REST API data sources to access data from the web. We often have data coming in and communicate with data sources via REST API calls. I don't see that capability in Starburst currently; everything is through JDBC or ODBC. If Starburst could seamlessly access data using REST API capabilities, it would be a game-changer. The self-service data management features, like self-service materialized views, are great, but they can be a bit complex for basic users to understand.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow."
"It provides installations, scaling, and other functionalities straight out of the box."
"My advice to others is this solution is straightforward and the integration is flawless."
"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature."
"The scalability and usability are quite remarkable."
"It is a stable product."
"I have Amazon MSK integrated with other AWS services such as S3 and Lambda."
"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."
"We have noticed improvements in performance using Starburst Enterprise. It handles complex data, including reading and partitioning files. We can add a new catalog to Starburst Enterprise by providing connection details and service account information. This allows us to integrate with existing tools, such as the Snowflake database, which we use for data protection in our project."
"It's very scalable, fast performing, and supports many catalogs."
 

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."
"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."
"MSK should be easier to integrate with other solutions. It should be more flexible, integration-wise."
"It does not autoscale. Because if you do keep it manually when you add a note to the cluster and then you register it, then it is scalable, but the fact that you have to go and do it, I think, makes it, again, a bit of some operational overhead when managing the cluster."
"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's schema support needs enhancement. It will help enhance integration with many kinds of languages of programming languages, especially for environments using languages like .NET."
"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."
"We need to create connectors in Amazon MSK, but there are no default connectors in AWS for that purpose."
"Starburst Enterprise could improve by offering additional features similar to those provided by other SQL query tools. For example, incorporating functionalities like pivot tables would make it more feasible to use."
"There should be support for REST API data sources to access data from the web."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."
"I haven't personally dealt with the pricing aspects first-hand, but from what I understand, it largely depends on the specifics of your setup, especially the machines you use on AWS. The cost of using Starburst Enterprise can vary based on the amount of data you're processing and the type of machines you opt for, whether on AWS or another cloud platform."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
33%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise5
No data available
 

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...
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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. Starburst Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
916,771 professionals have used our research since 2012.