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's main purpose is to provide near real-time data streaming at a consistent 2Mbps rate, which is really impressive."
"Amazon Kinesis has improved our ROI."
"The integration capabilities of the product are good."
"Its scalability is very high. There is no maintenance and there is no throughput latency. I think data scalability is high, too. You can ingest gigabytes of data within seconds or milliseconds."
"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."
"Amazon Kinesis also provides us with plenty of flexibility."
"I like the ease of use and how we can quickly get the configurations done, making it pretty straightforward and stable."
"Great auto-scaling, auto-sharing, and auto-correction features."
"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature."
"It offers good stability."
"Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems."
"It is a stable product."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."
"Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow."
"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"
"There are certain shortcomings in the machine learning capacity offered by the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."
"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."
"Something else to mention is that we use Kinesis with Lambda a lot and the fact that you can only connect one Stream to one Lambda, I find is a limiting factor. I would definitely recommend to remove that constraint."
"Amazon Kinesis involved a more complex setup and configuration than Azure Event Hub."
"We were charged high costs for the solution’s enhanced fan-out feature."
"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."
"Kinesis Data Analytics needs to be improved somewhat. It's SQL based data but it is not as user friendly as MySQL or Athena tools."
"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."
"The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."
"It should be more flexible, integration-wise."
"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."
"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."
Amazon Kinesis is ranked 1st in Streaming Analytics with 24 reviews while Amazon MSK is ranked 6th in Streaming Analytics with 7 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 "Streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's automatic". 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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