What's the Difference Between Amazon Kinesis and Amazon MSK?
Compare Amazon Kinesis and Amazon MSK side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon Kinesis
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Amazon MSK
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Category
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Analytics, Streaming ingestion |
Analytics, Managed Kafka |
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Description
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Collect, process, and analyze real-time streaming data to get timely insights and react quickly. |
Fully managed Apache Kafka service |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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Pay per shard hour + PUT payload units |
Pay per broker hour + storage |
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Free tier
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Yes |
No |
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Expert take
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“Kinesis Data Streams is the AWS-native option for real-time ingestion at scale. Each shard gives you 1 MB/s in and 2 MB/s out. For simpler ETL into S3/Redshift without managing consumers, Data Firehose is zero-administration and auto-scales.” |
“MSK is for teams that need Apache Kafka compatibility with existing tooling (Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, KSQL). MSK Serverless removes broker sizing entirely. If you do not need Kafka-specific APIs and just want to stream data into S3 or Redshift, Kinesis Data Firehose is simpler.” |
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Product page
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When to use Amazon Kinesis or Amazon MSK
Use Amazon Kinesis when:
- Real-time analytics
- Log & event data
- IoT data streams
- Video streams
- Clickstream analysis
Learn more about Amazon Kinesis »
Use Amazon MSK when:
- Event streaming
- Log aggregation
- Metrics collection
- Stream processing
- Event sourcing
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