Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Amazon Kinesis VS Apache Kafka

Compare Amazon Kinesis VS Apache Kafka and see what are their differences

Amazon Kinesis logo Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis services make it easy to work with real-time streaming data in the AWS cloud.

Apache Kafka logo Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.
  • Amazon Kinesis Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-28
  • Apache Kafka Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-01

Amazon Kinesis features and specs

  • Real-time data processing
    Amazon Kinesis allows for real-time processing of data streams, enabling rapid ingestion and analysis of data as it arrives.
  • Scalability
    Kinesis is highly scalable and can handle massive volumes of streaming data, expanding automatically to meet your needs.
  • Fully managed service
    As a fully managed service, Kinesis handles infrastructure maintenance, provisioning, and scaling, reducing operational overhead.
  • Integration with AWS ecosystem
    Kinesis integrates seamlessly with other AWS services such as Lambda, Redshift, S3, and Elasticsearch, facilitating comprehensive data workflows.
  • Multiple data stream applications
    The service supports different types of data stream applications including data delivery, analytics, and real-time processing, making it versatile.
  • Security
    Offers robust security through integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), encryption at rest with AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and in-transit encryption.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon Kinesis

  • Cost
    While pricing is scalable, costs can escalate quickly with high data throughput and storage requirements, potentially becoming expensive for large-scale implementations.
  • Complex setup and management
    Despite being a managed service, the initial setup and tuning of Kinesis can be complex and may require specialized knowledge.
  • Latency
    Although designed for real-time data processing, there can be minor latency involved that might not fit ultra-low latency requirements.
  • Limited data retention
    Kinesis typically supports up to 7 days of data retention in streams, which might be insufficient for use cases requiring longer retention periods without extra storage solutions.
  • API Rate Limits
    API access to Kinesis is subject to rate limits, which could impact applications requiring high-frequency data ingestion and retrieval.
  • Dependence on AWS services
    Tight integration with AWS services can pose a challenge for organizations looking for a multi-cloud or cloud-agnostic strategy.

Apache Kafka features and specs

  • High Throughput
    Kafka is capable of handling thousands of messages per second due to its distributed architecture, making it suitable for applications that require high throughput.
  • Scalability
    Kafka can easily scale horizontally by adding more brokers to a cluster, making it highly scalable to serve increased loads.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Kafka has built-in replication, ensuring that data is replicated across multiple brokers, providing fault tolerance and high availability.
  • Durability
    Kafka ensures data durability by writing data to disk, which can be replicated to other nodes, ensuring data is not lost even if a broker fails.
  • Real-time Processing
    Kafka supports real-time data streaming, enabling applications to process and react to data as it arrives.
  • Decoupling of Systems
    Kafka acts as a buffer and decouples the production and consumption of messages, allowing independent scaling and management of producers and consumers.
  • Wide Ecosystem
    The Kafka ecosystem includes various tools and connectors such as Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and KSQL, which enrich the functionality of Kafka.
  • Strong Community Support
    Kafka has strong community support and extensive documentation, making it easier for developers to find help and resources.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Kafka

  • Complex Setup and Management
    Kafka's distributed nature can make initial setup and ongoing management complex, requiring expert knowledge and significant administrative effort.
  • Operational Overhead
    Running Kafka clusters involves additional operational overhead, including hardware provisioning, monitoring, tuning, and scaling.
  • Latency Sensitivity
    Despite its high throughput, Kafka may experience increased latency in certain scenarios, especially when configured for high durability and consistency.
  • Learning Curve
    The concepts and architecture of Kafka can be difficult for new users to grasp, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Hardware Intensive
    Kafka's performance characteristics often require dedicated and powerful hardware, which can be costly to procure and maintain.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing Kafka's dependencies and ensuring compatibility between versions of Kafka, Zookeeper, and other ecosystem tools can be challenging.
  • Limited Support for Small Messages
    Kafka is optimized for large throughput and can be inefficient for applications that require handling a lot of small messages, where overhead can become significant.
  • Operational Complexity for Small Teams
    Smaller teams might find the operational complexity and maintenance burden of Kafka difficult to manage without a dedicated operations or DevOps team.

Amazon Kinesis videos

AWS Big Data - Amazon Kinesis Analytics Introduction and Demonstration

More videos:

  • Review - Analyzing Data Streams in Real Time with Amazon Kinesis: PNNL's Serverless Data Lake Ingestion

Apache Kafka videos

Apache Kafka Tutorial | What is Apache Kafka? | Kafka Tutorial for Beginners | Edureka

More videos:

  • Review - Apache Kafka - Getting Started - Kafka Multi-node Cluster - Review Properties
  • Review - 4. Apache Kafka Fundamentals | Confluent Fundamentals for Apache Kafka®
  • Review - Apache Kafka in 6 minutes
  • Review - Apache Kafka Explained (Comprehensive Overview)
  • Review - 2. Motivations and Customer Use Cases | Apache Kafka Fundamentals

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon Kinesis and Apache Kafka)
Stream Processing
30 30%
70% 70
Data Management
100 100%
0% 0
Data Integration
11 11%
89% 89
Big Data
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Amazon Kinesis and Apache Kafka

Amazon Kinesis Reviews

Top 10 AWS ETL Tools and How to Choose the Best One | Visual Flow
Amazon Kinesis was built to handle massive amounts of data, allowing it to be uploaded to a Redshift cluster. After the event stream is read and the data is transformed, it is placed into a table in Amazon SCTS in an Amazon ES domain. Thus, there is no need to use a server (instead, you need to integrate AWS ETL and AWS Lambda).
Source: visual-flow.com
6 Best Kafka Alternatives: 2022’s Must-know List
Kinesis enables streaming applications to be managed without additional infrastructure management. This highly scalable platform can process data from various sources with low latency. Known for its speed, ease of use, reliability, and capability of cross-platform replication, Amazon Kinesis is one of the most popular Kafka Alternatives. It is used for many purposes,...
Source: hevodata.com
Top 15 Kafka Alternatives Popular In 2021
Amazon Kinesis, also known as Kinesis Streams, is a popular alternative to Kafka, for collecting, processing, and analyzing video and data streams in real-time. It offers timely and insightful information, streaming data in a cost-effective manner with complete flexibility and scalability. It is easy to ingest data encompassing audios, videos, app logs, etc. It offers an...
16 Top Big Data Analytics Tools You Should Know About
Amazon Kinesis is a massively scalable, cloud-based analytics service which is designed for real-time applications.

Apache Kafka Reviews

Best ETL Tools: A Curated List
Debezium is an open-source Change Data Capture (CDC) tool that originated from RedHat. It leverages Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect to enable real-time data replication from databases. Debezium was partly inspired by Martin Kleppmann’s "Turning the Database Inside Out" concept, which emphasized the power of the CDC for modern data pipelines.
Source: estuary.dev
Best message queue for cloud-native apps
If you take the time to sort out the history of message queues, you will find a very interesting phenomenon. Most of the currently popular message queues were born around 2010. For example, Apache Kafka was born at LinkedIn in 2010, Derek Collison developed Nats in 2010, and Apache Pulsar was born at Yahoo in 2012. What is the reason for this?
Source: docs.vanus.ai
Are Free, Open-Source Message Queues Right For You?
Apache Kafka is a highly scalable and robust messaging queue system designed by LinkedIn and donated to the Apache Software Foundation. It's ideal for real-time data streaming and processing, providing high throughput for publishing and subscribing to records or messages. Kafka is typically used in scenarios that require real-time analytics and monitoring, IoT applications,...
Source: blog.iron.io
10 Best Open Source ETL Tools for Data Integration
It is difficult to anticipate the exact demand for open-source tools in 2023 because it depends on various factors and emerging trends. However, open-source solutions such as Kubernetes for container orchestration, TensorFlow for machine learning, Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming, and Prometheus for monitoring and observability are expected to grow in prominence in...
Source: testsigma.com
11 Best FREE Open-Source ETL Tools in 2024
Apache Kafka is an Open-Source Data Streaming Tool written in Scala and Java. It publishes and subscribes to a stream of records in a fault-tolerant manner and provides a unified, high-throughput, and low-latency platform to manage data.
Source: hevodata.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Kafka should be more popular than Amazon Kinesis. It has been mentiond 142 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Amazon Kinesis mentions (26)

  • FINTECH SCALABILITY
    Real-Time Processing — With Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB, fintech firms can analyze transactions instantly, identify fraud before it happens. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Top 7 Kafka Alternatives For Real-Time Data Processing
    Amazon Kinesis is a fully managed real-time data streaming service by AWS, designed for large-scale data ingestion and processing. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • AWS Operational issue – Multiple services in us-east-1
    Https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/ > Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a serverless streaming data service that simplifies the capture, processing, and storage of data streams at any scale. I'd never heard of that one. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • Event-Driven Architecture on AWS
    Event Consumers: Services that actively listen for events and respond accordingly. These consumers can be easily implemented using microservices, AWS Lambda or Amazon Kinesis (for ingesting, processing, and analyzing streaming data in real-time). - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • AWS DEV OPS Professional Exam short notes
    When you see Amazon Kinesis as an option, this becomes the ideal option to process data in real time. Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost effectively process streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
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Apache Kafka mentions (142)

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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon Kinesis and Apache Kafka, you can also consider the following products

Apache Flink - Flink is a streaming dataflow engine that provides data distribution, communication, and fault tolerance for distributed computations.

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

Confluent - Confluent offers a real-time data platform built around Apache Kafka.

Apache ActiveMQ - Apache ActiveMQ is an open source messaging and integration patterns server.

Spark Streaming - Spark Streaming makes it easy to build scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications.

StatCounter - StatCounter is a simple but powerful real-time web analytics service that helps you track, analyse and understand your visitors so you can make good decisions to become more successful online.