We compared Amazon Kinesis and Amazon MSK based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
Amazon Kinesis is praised for its efficient data handling and integration with AWS services, exceptional customer service, positive ROI, and suggestions for improvement in documentation, UI, scalability, and integrations. On the other hand, Amazon MSK offers ease of use, scalability, reliability, good customer service, positive user outcomes, and suggestions for enhancements in scalability, ease of use, and cost management.
Features: Amazon Kinesis stands out with its ability to handle high volumes of data in real-time. Its flexibility in data streaming and processing, along with seamless integration with other AWS services, are valuable features. On the other hand, users appreciate Amazon MSK for its ease of use, scalability, and reliability.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Amazon Kinesis is minimal and straightforward, allowing users to quickly start using the service. On the other hand, Amazon MSK offers an easy setup process without any additional costs. Both products offer competitive pricing and flexible licensing options., Amazon Kinesis has shown a highly positive ROI with significant cost savings, improved data processing efficiency, and enhanced real-time analytics capabilities. On the other hand, Amazon MSK users have reported positive outcomes and benefits indicating a valuable and effective platform.
Room for Improvement: Amazon Kinesis could improve by enhancing documentation, providing a better user interface, increasing flexibility in data handling, addressing scalability and performance issues, expanding integrations, enhancing error handling, streamlining pricing, and improving customer support. On the other hand, Amazon MSK could benefit from enhancements in scalability, ease of use, and cost management by providing better scalability options, a more intuitive interface, and transparent pricing models.
Deployment and customer support: The duration required to establish a new tech solution like Amazon Kinesis varies, ranging from three months for deployment and an additional week for setup to one week for both deployment and setup. User feedback on Amazon MSK's duration is not available., Amazon Kinesis is praised for its outstanding assistance and promptness, with representatives going above and beyond. On the other hand, Amazon MSK receives positive comments for its excellent customer service and support.
The summary above is based on 12 interviews we conducted recently with Amazon Kinesis and Amazon MSK users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon Kinesis is real-time data streaming."
"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."
"Great auto-scaling, auto-sharing, and auto-correction features."
"Setting Amazon Kinesis up is quick and easy; it only takes a few minutes to configure the necessary settings and start using it."
"The feature that I've found most valuable is the replay. That is one of the most valuable in our business. We are business-to-business so replay was an important feature - being able to replay for 24 hours. That's an important feature."
"What I like about Amazon Kinesis is that it's very effective for small businesses. It's a well-managed solution with excellent reporting. Amazon Kinesis is also easy to use, and even a novice developer can work with it, versus Apache Kafka, which requires expertise."
"Kinesis is a fully managed program streaming application. You can manage any infrastructure. It is also scalable. Kinesis can handle any amount of data streaming and process data from hundreds, thousands of processes in every source with very low latency."
"Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow."
"It offers good stability."
"It is a stable product."
"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature."
"Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."
"For me, especially with video streams, there's sometimes a kind of delay when the data has to be pumped to other services. This delay could be improved in Kinesis, or especially the Kinesis Video Streams, which is being used for different use cases for Amazon Connect. With that improvement, a lot of other use cases of Amazon Connect integrating with third-party analytic tools would be easier."
"The services which are described in the documentation could use some visual presentation because for someone who is new to the solution the documentation is not easy to follow or beginner friendly and can leave a person feeling helpless."
"In order to do a successful setup, the person handling the implementation needs to know the solution very well. You can't just come into it blind and with little to no experience."
"Amazon Kinesis should improve its limits."
"The solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."
"I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services."
"The price is not much cheaper. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing."
"I think the default settings are far too low."
"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."
"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."
"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."
"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."
"The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."
Amazon Kinesis is ranked 1st in Streaming Analytics with 24 reviews while Amazon MSK is ranked 6th in Streaming Analytics with 6 reviews. Amazon Kinesis is rated 8.0, while Amazon MSK is rated 7.2. The top reviewer of Amazon Kinesis writes "Used for media streaming and live-streaming data". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Amazon MSK writes "Efficient real-time transaction tracking but time-consuming installation". Amazon Kinesis is most compared with Azure Stream Analytics, Confluent, Apache Flink, Google Cloud Dataflow and Apache Spark Streaming, whereas Amazon MSK is most compared with Confluent, Azure Stream Analytics, Google Cloud Dataflow, Apache Flink and Aiven for Apache Kafka. See our Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon MSK report.
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