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.
"The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things."
"The integration capabilities of the product are good."
"The solution works well in rather sizable environments."
"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."
"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 has improved our ROI."
"The solution has the capacity to store the data anywhere from one day to a week and provides limitless storage for us."
"From my experience, one of the most valuable features is the ability to track silent events on endpoints. Previously, these events might have gone unnoticed, but now we can access them within the product range. For example, if a customer reports that their calls are not reaching the portal files, we can use this feature to troubleshoot and optimize the system."
"Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."
"Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow."
"It offers good stability."
"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature."
"It is a stable product."
"One thing that would be nice would be a policy for increasing the number of Kinesis streams because that's the one thing that's constant. You can change it in real time, but somebody has to change it, or you have to set some kind of meter. So, auto-scaling of adding and removing streams would be nice."
"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."
"One area for improvement in the solution is the file size limitation of 10 Mb. My company works with files with a larger file size. The batch size and throughput also need improvement in Amazon Kinesis."
"AI processing or cleaning up data would be nice since I don't think it is a feature in Amazon Kinesis right now."
"Amazon Kinesis should improve its limits."
"We were charged high costs for the solution’s enhanced fan-out feature."
"Could include features that make it easier to scale."
"Lacks first in, first out queuing."
"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 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."
"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."
"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."
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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