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What's the Difference Between Amazon MSK and MSK Serverless?

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

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Comparisons
Amazon MSK
MSK Serverless
Category

Analytics, Managed Kafka

Analytics, Serverless Streaming
Description

Fully managed Apache Kafka service

Run Apache Kafka without managing and scaling cluster capacity.
Best for
  • Event streaming
  • Log aggregation
  • Metrics collection
  • Stream processing
  • Event sourcing
  • Event streaming
  • Serverless Kafka
  • Variable workloads
  • Development environments
Key features
  • Apache Kafka compatible
  • MSK Serverless
  • MSK Connect
  • Tiered storage
  • Multi-AZ
  • No capacity planning
  • Auto scaling
  • Kafka compatible
  • IAM authentication
  • Pay-per-use
Pricing model

Pay per broker hour + storage

Pay per cluster hour + partition hour + data
Free tier

No

No
Expert take

“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]

“MSK Serverless auto-scales Kafka cluster capacity based on throughput. You create topics and produce/consume messages without choosing broker types or managing partitions.”
— Oleksii Bebych, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]
Product page

Learn more about Amazon MSK »

Learn more about MSK Serverless »

When to use Amazon MSK or MSK Serverless

Use Amazon MSK when:

  • Event streaming
  • Log aggregation
  • Metrics collection
  • Stream processing
  • Event sourcing

Learn more about Amazon MSK »

Use MSK Serverless when:

  • Event streaming
  • Serverless Kafka
  • Variable workloads
  • Development environments

Learn more about MSK Serverless »

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