REDPANDA VS AMAZON MSK

Reduce complexity and cost for streaming data in AWS

Redpanda Cloud brings operational simplicity, powerful performance, and cost-efficiency to your Apache Kafka® workloads on AWS. Run all your mission-critical data streams without those migraine-inducing AWS bills!

WHAT'S THE DEAL?

Summary

Not all streaming data services can handle mission-critical workloads. Amazon MSK is one of many services built on Kafka (a legacy infrastructure), making its performance unreliable and expensive for high throughput workloads. Redpanda Cloud is built on a powerful streaming data engine that uses Kafka APIs—but without the cost or complexity—and supports mission-critical, high-performance data streams with up to 10x lower latency and 6x lower total cost of ownership (TCO) versus Kafka.

COMPARE YOUR OPTIONS

Redpanda Cloud vs Amazon MSK

AWS offers a marketplace of options to support your real-time data streams. Two popular choices for fully managed data streaming are Redpanda Cloud and Amazon MSK. When evaluating these services, it’s critical to think about your needs for administration, performance, and reliability.

Capability

Redpanda

Amazon MSK

Details

Fully managed streaming data platform

Redpanda Cloud includes brokers, HTTP proxy, schema registry, and Raft consensus built-in. MSK offers Kafka brokers and ZooKeeper nodes; HTTP proxy and schema registry need to be self-managed.

Fully managed upgrades and patching

Version upgrades and patching are fully managed by Redpanda. MSK provides automatic hardware patches, but version upgrades are self-managed by the customer.

Apache Kafka compatibility

Both solutions offer a native Kafka API, no need to rewrite existing apps.

Integrated user interface

Redpanda Console is a fully integrated user interface, also compatible with Kafka. With MSK, must use 3rd party tools like Redpanda Console.

Flexible Single and Multi-AZ deployments

Redpanda cloud offers Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployment options. MSK offers Multi-AZ only which means complexity even when you don’t require it.

Data and partition balancing

Redpanda Cloud features automatic data and partition balancing, allowing for hands-free ops. With MSK, you need a 3rd party tool (Cruise Control) for partition and data balancing.

Integrated monitoring

Redpanda Cloud offers monitoring available natively via Prometheus. In the case of MSK, monitoring available via CloudWatch (charged separately).

Managed data connectors

With Redpanda Cloud, you get fully managed connectors for popular databases, storage, and analytics tools. MSK offers only self-managed connectors.

Multi-cloud

Redpanda Cloud supports AWS, GCP and Azure.

Capability

Redpanda

Amazon MSK

Details

Up to 10x performance of Kafka

Redpanda Cloud leverages Redpanda platform, which achieves up to 10x lower average latencies vs Apache Kafka. Amazon MSK is based on vanilla Apache Kafka.

Optimized resource efficiency

Redpanda uses 3-6x fewer compute resources than Apache Kafka when running the same workload, allowing for lower cloud spend in Redpanda Cloud. Amazon MSK is based on vanilla Apache Kafka.

Tiered storage

Limited

Redpanda Cloud features tiered storage to support retention limits and compaction for topics. However, with MSK, due to Kafka limitation, compacted topics cannot use tiered storage.

Capability

Redpanda

Amazon MSK

Details

Durability

Redpanda Cloud uses Raft-native replication and is Jepsen-verified to be safe for data. MSK uses Apache Kafka ISR for replication, which can be subject to unsafe leader election and data loss.

SLA

Redpanda Cloud features a 99.99% uptime SLA. MSK features a 99.9% SLA that is also subject to exclusions for ZooKeeper.

Data sovereignty

Redpanda offers BYOC clusters, where data doesn’t leave your VPC, whether in AWS or GCP. In MSK, data doesn’t leave your VPC (limited to AWS)

WHAT OUR CUSTOMERS SAY

Best-in-class experiences from startups to the enterprise

800M

events per day

Finance

"We had a large Kafka environment (800M events per day). I dropped Redpanda in and changed nothing and that's when I was completely sold."

Why Zafin switched from Kafka

5-6x

more efficient

4+TB

logs per day

Finance

"Redpanda was able to handle the same load on far less resources than Kafka required. It was 5 to 6 times more efficient, greatly reducing our hardware costs as well as support and licensing costs."

Discover StoneX's Easy Switch

$1B+

trading per day

100x

faster processing

Finance

"Redpanda helped us grow from the hundreds of millions of dollars in trading per day to billions of dollars."

Alpaca's 100x Faster Order Processing

14.5GB

per second

Cybersecurity

"We have operational agility with Redpanda, meeting stringent SLOs while keeping developers focused on high-value work. Redpanda's tiered storage saves up to 30% on storage costs, easily handling 14.5GB/second."

Discover Lacework's 1,200% Growth

100

million users

100GB/min

throughput

Gaming

"Redpanda rose to the top of our list because we knew its obsessed over performance and reliability at scale. We tested the data platform for up to 100M users with zero performance blips at 100GB/min throughput and peaks of 100K transactions/second."

Ensure Flawless Performance for 100M Users

WHAT'S UNDER THE HOOD?

What does fully managed look like?

With Redpanda Cloud, your cluster operations are fully managed by Redpanda SREs, including upgrades and patching with zero downtime, backup and recovery, data and partition balancing, and 24/7 support. All backed by a 99.99% uptime SLA.

Simplicity

Redpanda Cloud offers a complete streaming data platform in one fully managed service, including brokers, HTTP proxy, and schema registry. That leaves zero external dependencies for you to manage. And it's easy to get going with Redpanda's developer-friendly console, CLI, and API interfaces.

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Performance

Redpanda's streaming data engine was designed to maximize the performance potential of modern infrastructure, resulting in 10x lower average latencies vs. Apache Kafka and Kafka-based services. This is due to innovations like Thread-per-Core architecture, C++ design, and async processing.

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Data Sovereignty

Redpanda's Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) offers a fully managed service, while keeping data in your own VPC environment to satisfy compliance and regulatory requirements. No more tradeoffs on operational agility and data sovereignty. Who says you can't have your cake and eat it too?

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Cost Efficiency

Redpanda Cloud helps reduce your infrastructure spend because its efficient streaming data engine runs on 3x fewer compute resources on average vs Apache Kafka. Redpanda's native S3 storage delivers up to 8-9x savings in long term data retention costs.

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Reliability

Redpanda Cloud offers reliable data streaming at scale with data safety, thanks to its Raft-based replication. It provides enterprise stability with automatic data and partition balancing, fully managed upgrades and patching, and high availability with a 99.99% uptime SLA.

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Integration

Redpanda Cloud offers managed connectors for the most popular data platforms including MongoDB, Snowflake, S3, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and more. Additionally, Redpanda's native Kafka API integrates with the full range of Kafka ecosystem tools.

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LET'S GET YOU STARTED ...

Recommended resources

User Story

See how The Hotels Network leverages Redpanda Cloud to build build a real-time data platform for the hospitality industry.

Migration guide

Redpanda is Kafka API-compatible. See how easy it is to migrate from your current Kafka provider to Redpanda Cloud!

READ

Cloud Connectors

Explore the list of connectors supported out-of-box with Redpanda Cloud. If it talks Kafka, it can connect with Redpanda!

READ

Redpanda docs

Take a deep dive into our architecture, features and APIs.

READ

READY TO START?

Take Redpanda for a spin!

Looking to improve application performance and simplify data pipelines? Give Redpanda a try or get in touch with us to learn more.

Try Redpanda Request pricing

MORE INFORMATION

Redpanda overview Documentation Redpanda University Redpanda vs Kafka