# Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) Reviews **Vendor:** Amazon Web Services (AWS) **Category:** [Event Stream Processing Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/event-stream-processing) **Average Rating:** 4.0/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 22 ## About Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is an AWS streaming data service that manages Apache Kafka infrastructure and operations, making it easy for developers and DevOps managers to run Apache Kafka applications and Kafka Connect connectors on AWS, without the need to become experts in operating Apache Kafka. Amazon MSK operates, maintains, and scales Apache Kafka clusters, provides enterprise-grade security features out of the box, and has built-in AWS integrations that accelerate development of streaming data applications. To get started, you can migrate existing Apache Kafka workloads and Kafka Connect connectors into Amazon MSK, or with a few clicks, you can build new ones from scratch. There are no data transfer charges for in-cluster traffic, and no commitments or upfront payments required. You only pay for the resources that you use. ## Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **simplicity of management** with Amazon MSK, as it streamlines operations and integrates seamlessly with AWS. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **maintenance ease** of Amazon MSK, as it simplifies managing Kafka and integrates well with AWS. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **management ease** of Amazon MSK, as it simplifies Kafka operations and integrates seamlessly with AWS. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **reliability** of Amazon MSK, enjoying effortless management of Kafka with seamless AWS integration. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **scalability** of Amazon MSK, which simplifies management and integration with AWS services. (1 reviews) - Scaling (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **cost prohibitive** for small workloads, making it less suitable for early-stage projects. (1 reviews) - Users find the **high cost** prohibitive for small workloads, along with a lack of flexibility compared to self-managed Kafka. (1 reviews) - Users find **limited control** with Amazon MSK, feeling it lacks flexibility compared to self-managed Kafka solutions. (1 reviews) ## Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) Reviews ### 1. Takes the Pain Out of Kafka Management with Seamless AWS Integration **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Amaro F. | Senior Product Owner, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** What I like most about Amazon MSK is how it takes the pain out of managing Kafka. It handles scaling, maintenance, and availability for you, and works smoothly with the rest of AWS. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** The main downside is the cost, especially for smaller workloads or early-stage projects. It can also feel less flexible than self-managed Kafka in some scenarios. **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Amazon MSK solved the problem of reliably processing and streaming large volumes of real-time data without the complexity of managing Kafka infrastructure. For the U2Go app, this means we handled events and integrations at scale with high availability and low latency, while relying on AWS to manage scaling, maintenance, and security. ### 2. Unlocking Seamless Data Streaming: Comprehensive Review of Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abhijith B. | DevOps Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 15, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Amazon MSK has streamlined our Kafka operations with its seamless management, scalability, and tight integration with the AWS ecosystem. Have high security measures. While there's a learning curve, the comprehensive documentation mitigates it. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** While Amazon MSK offers significant advantages, some time we face a learning curve, potential cost considerations, service limitations, integration complexities, occasional performance issues, and limited availability in certain regions as drawbacks. **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Amazon MSK solves challenges related to Apache Kafka management, scalability, integration with AWS, security, and high availability. The benefits are it having simplified infrastructure management, seamless scalability, enhanced integration, robust security features, and improved reliability. And ultimately allowing users to focus more on applications and data processing. ### 3. reliable, scalable, and hassle-free Kafka service is the best **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Domenico V. | Project manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** That is reliable and hassle free for all the users **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Pricing and training that does not come with the sofware **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Setting up and configuring an Apache Kafka cluster can be complex and time-consuming.Amazon MSK offers a simplified and automated deployment process, reducing the time and effort required to get a Kafka cluster up and running. ### 4. Best data streeming tool to run application with AWS flavour **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** It gave peace of mind and ease of use and implementation in upstreaming the domains and clusters. Deployment procedure is excellent where minimal or no code changes are required. As we know, the customer support is excellent from amazon. We have integrated it with lamda services and the number of fetures also insain. thanks AWS for providing one stop solutions so that the frequncy of use is increasing. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** As Apache is open source, AWS should go with agresssive pricing across the availability zones. **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mainly source code deployment updates and redeployment fixes. ### 5. MSK - Eliminate operational overhead **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Raj K. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Many things. It eliminates operation overhead, no code change required to do this and it scales cluster capacity automatically. Also, easy to deploy secure, complaint and production ready application using native AWS integration with low cost. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** As of now haven't found anything so would like to skip this section **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Stream analytics ### 6. Streaming Kafka with AWS reliability and security **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** AWS MSK takes away all the worries for managing and scaling Kafka Clusters and makes it effortless to build the platform on the go. Being part of AWS suite makes support and deployment hassle free and easy to monitor in case of downtime. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** As it is easy to scale it up and down, the cost can go out of hands if not monitored and handled correctly **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Amazon MSK has helped us in building realtime dashboards and alert monitoring systems for internal and external use across the organization ### 7. It is a very convenient solution. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Investment Management | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Functionality, professional service, a wide selection of features, and ease of integration. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Basically nothing, everything is working correctly **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** The Kafka platform offers a message broker function that works similarly to a message queue. ### 8. Kafka is very fast and secure messaging que rather than others **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** MUHAMMAD W. | Senior Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 14, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** It's easy to manageable producers and consumers, we can handle every topic with a lot of producers, and it's a very fast broker. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Nothing yet but some little bit dead log conditions managing is very tough as compared to others. **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** The microservices concept efficiently manages multiple services. ### 9. AMAZON MSK review by Sunny **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Oluwasunny A. | Head Of Human Resources **Reviewed Date:** August 31, 2021 ### 10. Best Managed service for data streaming **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 13, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** optimized, distributed data storage for effective processing and ingestion of streaming data **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** nothing to dislike but it requires some learning compared to radis **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Streaming service for java based application ### 11. It build real time streaming data pipelines and applications that adapt to data streams **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Airlines/Aviation | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 11, 2021 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** It will effectively store streams of records in the order. Process streams of records in real time. It publish and subscribe to streams of records. Scalable, Fast & durable. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Since I am beginner in this flatform I didn't faced any issues. **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using this to build real-time streaming data pipelines and applications that adapt to the data streams. To combines messaging, storage, and stream processing. ### 12. Review about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Engr Aijaz Ali K. | Project Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 25, 2020 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** This is a fully managed service that enables to built and run of an application & to process streaming data, the best feature of this application is it's AWS CLI which is the best one, I can use the AWS Command-line interface or the APIs in the SDK to create or delete an Amazon MSK cluster. THIS IS THE BEST ONE. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** zookeeper-nodes is an open-source some times disturb too much so I dislike this and also following limits in these features are not good 1-Up to 90 brokers per account and 30 brokers per cluster 2- a minimum of 1 GiB of storage per broker 3-Up to 100 configurations per account 4-A maximum of 16384 GiB of storage per broker these features are limited, if you need high than this you must make a request & wait for approval, it could take time to approve, this feature can be solved **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK):** I highly recommended the Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) for the best features in it with the best & cheap price **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** with Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka is solving my problems like - AWS Management Console - The workarounds for solving this issue without upgrading the cluster - Scaling Up Broker Storage - Amazon Kinesis Data Streams - Consumer group stuck in PreparingRebalance state - Disk space is running low - Number of partitions per broker ### 13. Amazon is one of the great merchant that provide quality system. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mharis C. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 05, 2020 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** so far Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kakka (Amazon MSK) is very speedy and no problem with logs at all. With great customer service or after-sales. The best part of this business is customer service and after-sales. They are very knowledgeable and they really know what they are doing. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Nothing so far because the company is so helpful to clients like us. Why you say something if the product itself is almost perfect even the customer service is outstanding. Like before I figured out that there's a problem they already know that there is and they will contact you directly. No need for you to call. They will figure it out first before you will. I hope all the company will be like this. Because this is faster and better compare to the last system that we used. I"m happy with them so car everything is so good and I don't have my kind of complaint the customer service or after-sales us very good because they have a designated team who will directly contact you and will make sure that you get what you really deserve out of this software. another good thing I got is they don't just offer because they can but they offer because that's what you really need. They assessed carefully our business to make sure that which of the system will match our process. They even provide designated people who will finish the project smoothly. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK):** Yes if you want a streamline customer service who knows how to resolve the issue as faster and better compare to the last system that we used. I"m happy with them so car everything is so good and I don't have my kind of complaint the customer service or after-sales us very good because they have a designated team who will directly contact you and will make sure that you get what you really deserve out of this software. another good thing I got is they don't just offer because they can but they offer because that's what you really need. They assessed carefully our business to make sure that which of the system will match our process. They even provide designated people who will finish the project smoothly. **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps us with streaming capabilities and real-time building streaming data pipelines. I hope will provide more information and training so at least we can do it on our own. Because this is faster and better compare to the last system that we used. ### 14. Amazon MSK - for those that never need to scale **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2021 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** It's availability and ease of deploy was what I would expect from a managed service. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** We couldn't scale vertically without doing a data migration ourselves to the new cluster and we couldn't scale out either. For a managed service we rely on in production, this made no sense so we moved providers. **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Distributed event driven microservices. Messaging between them. ### 15. Manages services for you. **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Krishan K. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 12, 2020 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Amazon mask manages services for you like configure clusters (if one cluster fail or stop working immediately control transfer to another cluster), storage management (manages space for your application on EC2 ). **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** You have to pay more for amazon MSK services, **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK):** It manages all clusters for you. **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** If you not using amazon MSK you have to configure cluster and storage management of Kafka on your own but when you used MSK it will manage all services for you. You do not have to focus on storage and cluster management. After using MSK your focus completely on the development not on managing complex clusters. ### 16. Why Amazon MSK **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 30, 2020 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Quick and easy setup, plus it is secured. I was able to set up in less than 30 mins and was deployed in our VPC. Can be monitored via CloudWatch **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Monitoring metrics have some extra charges, which can be a slight downside, but comparatively, but the overall cost felt cheaper. **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Traditionally Apache Kafka requires resources to set up and manage, but with AWS MSK, we have realized it is much simpler and cost-efficient because it's easy to set up. ### 17. AWS kafka **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 20, 2020 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Its compatible with Kafka its elastic has ZooKeeper managed for you **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Almost like every AWS tool the UI needs some work. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK):** To be honest i don't have enough experience to make recommendations. I like that Amazon has started doing this and has addressed the pain of managing Kafka clusters. If one needs to do this quickly I would say use Amazon MSK than starting from scratch **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Streams with a guaranty of uniqueness as deduping becomes problematic in other tools. ### 18. Excellent **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Robert J. | Apple Solutions Consultant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2020 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Very simple and easy to use and build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. With Amazon MSK, you can use native Apache Kafka APIs to populate data lakes, stream changes to and from databases, and power machine learning and analytics applications. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Nothing really. The smallest problem I have is I get errors at times. Gets annoying but I just go through it **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Amazon MSK has made a lot of great impact on my work it's crazy! ### 19. Review for Amazon Managed Kafka **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohamed Z. | Manager HR, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 20, 2020 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Best open source application for build and run for streaming data **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Nothing for now will update it in future **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK):** Migrate and run your existing apache Kafka applications on AWS for best experience **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Monitoring a cluster of data and clusters health ### 20. My Reviw for Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka, thus far **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in E-Learning | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2019 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** In as little as 30 minutes, one is able you get a multi-AZ Kafka cluster, fully replicated! Plus tons of data storage. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** At this early stage, security features are lacking, but again, it being a new product, I am sure Amazon won't let us down in the very near future. **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** At this point, I am still learning, trying to teach myself how these types of software function and how they can streamline my clients' businesses as I become a consultant, hopefully for Amazon and/or one of its subsidiaries. ### 21. Safe and simple **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 16, 2019 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** I pretty love anything that Amazon has to offer , the amazon managed streaming is ok, compared to all the other streaming services available. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** Not so much as a dislike, just nothing caught my eye about investing more into the one over others. **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** When it comes to business, the Amazon streaming is convenient because it helps to save money from using cable tv, etc. ### 22. Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK) **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Wireless | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2019 **What do you like best about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** It's not bad its just I would rather use some of its stronger competitors and I feel that there is some stuff they need to work on. **What do you dislike about Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)?** An example they need to keep the client satisfaction and usability easy to access **What problems is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Not alot ## Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) Discussions - [How does AWS MSK work?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-does-aws-msk-work) - [Does AWS MSK support Kafka streams?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/does-aws-msk-support-kafka-streams) - [What is managed streaming for Apache Kafka?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-managed-streaming-for-apache-kafka) - [What are the broader platform for Apache Kafka?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/35218-what-are-the-broader-platform-for-apache-kafka) - 1 upvote - [What is the best product software you can offer to us or other service to improve our customer service? Is there any additional tips or advice you can offer to us? What are the best system?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/31377-what-is-the-best-product-software-you-can-offer-to-us-or-other-service-to-improve-our-customer-service-is-there-any-additional-tips-or-advice-you-can-offer-to-us-what-are-the-best-system) - 1 upvote - [View Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-managed-streaming-for-apache-kafka-amazon-msk/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-16+06%3A18%3A12+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=a88c5fe0-e207-4514-9c44-2eac46c679d0&secure%5Btoken%5D=eb4b7aa9753f6091bf232a9817a9daef52f300f1a3a78af40d87faf8771d2465&format=llm_user) ## Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) Features **Data** - Data Processing - Data Sources - Integration - Real-Time Processing **Analytics** - Reporting & Analytics **Building Reports** - Data Transformation - Data Modeling - WYSIWYG Report Design - Integration APIs **Platform** - Mobile User Support - Customization - User, Role, and Access Management - Internationalization - Sandbox / Test Environments - Performance and Reliability - Breadth of Partner Applications ## Top Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) Alternatives - [Confluent](https://www.g2.com/products/confluent/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (111 reviews) - [Aiven for Apache Kafka](https://www.g2.com/products/aiven-for-apache-kafka/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (244 reviews) - [Tealium Customer Data Hub](https://www.g2.com/products/tealium-customer-data-hub/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (440 reviews)