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Amazon MSK vs Upsolver comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Upsolver
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
22nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (41st)
 

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 Upsolver is 1.4%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon MSK3.8%
Upsolver1.4%
Other94.8%
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.
reviewer2784462 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Streaming pipelines have become simpler and onboarding new data sources is now much faster
One of the best features Upsolver offers is the automatic schema evolution. Another good feature is SQL-based streaming transformations. Complex streaming transformations such as cleansing, deduplication, and enrichment were implemented using SQL and drastically reduced the need for custom Spark code. My experience with the SQL-based streaming transformations in Upsolver is that it had a significant positive impact on the overall data engineering workflow. By replacing custom Spark streaming jobs with declarative SQL logic, I simplified development, review, and deployment processes. Data transformations such as parsing, filtering, enrichment, and deduplication could be implemented and modified quickly without rebuilding or redeploying complex code-based pipelines. Upsolver has impacted my organization positively because it brings many benefits. The first one is faster onboarding of new data sources. Another one is more reliable streaming pipelines. Another one is near-real-time data availability, which is very important for us. It also reduced operational effort for data engineering teams. A specific outcome that highlights these benefits is that the time to onboard new sources is reduced from weeks to days. Custom Spark code reduction reached 50 to 40 percent. Pipeline failures are reduced by 70 to 80 percent. Data latency is improved from hours to minutes.

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 good integration because our team has been undergoing significant changes. Coupling it with MSK within AWS is helpful. We don't have to set up additionals or monitor external environments. This"
"I have Amazon MSK integrated with other AWS services such as S3 and Lambda."
"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 offers good stability."
"The solution's technical support was helpful."
"The scalability and usability are quite remarkable."
"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature."
"Amazon MSK's scalability is very good."
"I have saved 50 to 60% on maintaining pipelines since using Upsolver."
"The most prominent feature of Upsolver is its function as an ETL tool, allowing data to be moved across platforms and different data technologies."
"A specific outcome that highlights these benefits is that the time to onboard new sources is reduced from weeks to days, custom Spark code reduction reached 50 to 40 percent, pipeline failures are reduced by 70 to 80 percent, and data latency is improved from hours to minutes."
"Customer service is excellent, and I would rate it between eight point five to nine out of ten."
"It was easy to use and set up, with a nearly no-code interface that relied mostly on drag-and-drop functionality."
 

Cons

"One of the reasons why we prefer Kafka is because the support is a little bit difficult to manage with Amazon MSK."
"The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."
"MSK should be easier to integrate with other solutions. It should be more flexible, integration-wise."
"Horizontal scale-out is actually not easy, making it an area where improvements are required."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Upsolver excels in ETL and data aggregation, while ThoughtSpot is strong in natural language processing for querying datasets. Combining these tools can be very effective: Upsolver handles aggregation and ETL, and ThoughtSpot allows for natural language queries. There’s potential for highlighting these integrations in the future."
"I would say Upsolver's scalability is eight out of 10 because of pricing."
"I think that Upsolver can be improved in orchestration because it is not a full orchestration tool."
"On the stability side, I would rate it seven out of ten. Using multiple cloud providers and data engineering technologies creates complexity, and managing different plugins is not always easy, but they are working on it."
"There is room for improvement in query tuning."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."
"The platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."
"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."
"Upsolver is affordable at approximately $225 per terabyte per year."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Real Estate/Law Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Retailer
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Upsolver?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the pricing is nine out of 10.
What needs improvement with Upsolver?
I think Upsolver can be improved with deeper integration with external orchestration out of the box. I would appreciate more clear dashboards with billing in real time as a needed improvement.
What is your primary use case for Upsolver?
My main use case for Upsolver is to operate with changes in the structure of new data without a pipeline disrupting. I write SQL queries in Upsolver, and the platform takes care of the data itself,...
 

Comparisons

 

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. Upsolver and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.