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What's the Difference Between Amazon Data Firehose and Amazon Kinesis?

Compare Amazon Data Firehose and Amazon Kinesis side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

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Comparisons
Amazon Data Firehose
Amazon Kinesis
Category

Analytics, Streaming

Analytics, Streaming ingestion
Description

Reliably load real-time streaming data into data lakes, warehouses, and analytics services.

Collect, process, and analyze real-time streaming data to get timely insights and react quickly.
Best for
  • Log delivery
  • Streaming ETL
  • Real-time analytics
  • IoT data delivery
  • Real-time analytics
  • Log & event data
  • IoT data streams
  • Video streams
  • Clickstream analysis
Key features
  • Automatic scaling
  • Data transformation
  • Format conversion
  • Compression
  • Multiple destinations
  • Data Streams
  • Data Firehose
  • Data Analytics
  • Video Streams
  • Serverless scaling
Pricing model

Pay per GB of data ingested

Pay per shard hour + PUT payload units
Free tier

No

Yes
Expert take

“Firehose is the zero-admin way to load streaming data into S3, Redshift, or OpenSearch. It handles batching, compression, and encryption without writing consumer code.”
— Didier Durand, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“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.”
— Oleksii Bebych, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]
Product page

Learn more about Amazon Data Firehose »

Learn more about Amazon Kinesis »

When to use Amazon Data Firehose or Amazon Kinesis

Use Amazon Data Firehose when:

  • Log delivery
  • Streaming ETL
  • Real-time analytics
  • IoT data delivery

Learn more about Amazon Data Firehose »

Use Amazon Kinesis when:

  • Real-time analytics
  • Log & event data
  • IoT data streams
  • Video streams
  • Clickstream analysis

Learn more about Amazon Kinesis »

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