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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.

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Comparisons
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon MSK
Category

Analytics, Streaming ingestion

Analytics, Managed Kafka
Description

Collect, process, and analyze real-time streaming data to get timely insights and react quickly.

Fully managed Apache Kafka service
Best for
  • Real-time analytics
  • Log & event data
  • IoT data streams
  • Video streams
  • Clickstream analysis
  • Event streaming
  • Log aggregation
  • Metrics collection
  • Stream processing
  • Event sourcing
Key features
  • Data Streams
  • Data Firehose
  • Data Analytics
  • Video Streams
  • Serverless scaling
  • Apache Kafka compatible
  • MSK Serverless
  • MSK Connect
  • Tiered storage
  • Multi-AZ
Pricing model

Pay per shard hour + PUT payload units

Pay per broker hour + storage
Free tier

Yes

No
Expert take

“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]

“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.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]
Product page

Learn more about Amazon Kinesis »

Learn more about Amazon MSK »

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

Learn more about Amazon MSK »

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