Redpanda Cloud vs. Amazon MSK

Simpler operations, high performance, and responsive support. Learn why companies are choosing Redpanda over Amazon MSK to power mission-critical data streams with confidence.

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Customers that made the switch
HealthEdge
Moov
Aquatic
Vodafone
Seventh Sense
Zafin

Why Redpanda?

Redpanda makes real-time data processing easy. Streamlined architecture, great performance, and developer-friendly tools—all without external dependencies. Build more, spend less, and be agile with the unified platform that simplifies building real-time applications.

Single Binary Architecture
Redpanda’s streamlined, single-binary architecture eliminates the need for multiple specialized components, seamlessly providing native Kafka functionality without the usual complexity.
Exceptional Latency & Scale
With Redpanda, experience 10x lower average latencies and a reduced hardware footprint, delivering the power to scale effortlessly to GB/s throughput.
BYOC Data Sovereignty
Fully managed clusters that run within your VPC. Redpanda's bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) service manages resource provisioning, monitoring, and upgrades, without data and credentials ever leaving your environment
24x7 Expert Support
Enjoy round-the-clock support from dedicated account managers, a direct Slack channel, helpdesk access, and solutions experts always ready to assist.

Key feature breakdown

Redpanda logo
Redpanda Serverless
Redpanda logo
Redpanda BYOC
Amazon MSK
Amazon MSK Serverless
Deploy
Deployment Model
Fully managed
Fully managed
Limited automation for Standard brokers; Express brokers are fully managed, but less customizable
Fully managed
Provisioning Time
Instant (pre-provisioned)
Tens of minutes
Mixed provisioning: Slow for Standard brokers, faster (but more expensive) for Express
Minutes
Operate
Operational Overhead
None
Minimal, fully managed with native Raft implementation (no ZooKeeper or KRaft)
Standard requires ZooKeeper or KRaft, more maintenance
Minimal, fully managed
Maintenance
None
Automated updates, customer-defined maintenance window
Depends: Standard requires manual intervention; Express is automated, but can't control maintenance window
None
SLA
99.9%
99.99%
99.9% uptime, exclusions for Apache Kafka, ZooKeeper, etc
99.9% uptime, similar exclusions
Scale
Scalability
Automatic scaling
BYOC supports multi-GB/s write & read throughput, but in defined service tiers
Broker trade-offs: Manual & slow for Standard with partition sprawl issues; Express is faster but higher price-performance
Automatic scaling
Performance
Better price-performance across 5K max partitions
Low latency, optimized C++ engine; integrated auto partition balancing
Higher latency, JVM-based Kafka; Standard requires Cruise Control for auto partition rebalancing
Limited to 2.4K partitions
Pricing
Pay-go pricing, with $0.10/hour base cost; discounts + expert support  via annual commitment
Higher costs for multi-AZ but reduced in single-AZ; BYOC uses existing discounts and committed spend
Tiered Storage costs 3x more than Redpanda, with higher per-instance costs for Express; discounts for large orgs + no cross-AZ fees
Pay-go pricing with $0.75/hour base cost; support staffed by cloud generalists
Innovate
Data Sovereignty
No control over underlying infrastructure
Full control over infrastructure, BYOC option for compliance on AWS, GCP, Azure
AWS-owned Tiered Storage, MSK not available in GCP or Azure
No control over underlying infrastructure
Roadmap Recap
Uses the same core engine as Redpanda BYOC, but some enterprise features not supported (e.g., AWS PrivateLink)
2024: Apache Iceberg integration, native connectors for Snowpipe Streaming & PostgreSQL CDC, ultra low-latency write caching mode
2024: Express brokers, scale down of Standard brokers, KRaft support
2023: Added Asia regions

Customer success stories

Finance
Zafin

How Zafin swapped in Redpanda and instantly simplified operations to accelerate business agility for its customers.

Software & Technology
Poolside

How poolside freed its team to train LLMs faster and create better AI models thanks to Redpanda BYOC.

Finance
StoneX

Why StoneX moved its trading and risk systems from Apache Kafka® to Redpanda for better performance and lower costs.

WHAT OUR CUSTOMERS SAY

Best-in-class experiences from startups to the enterprise

800M
events per day
Finance

"Redpanda just works. We didn’t need to change our code, and suddenly, our day two operations were dead simple. Redpanda also has a fantastic team that is exemplary of how to provide support."

View Zafin success story
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."

View StoneX success story
$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."

View Alpaca success story
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."

View Lacework success story
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."

View Fortis Games success story

What's new at Redpanda?

Introducing Redpanda Agents: How to Build Private, Auditable AI Agents at Scale

Introducing Redpanda Agents: How to Build Private, Auditable AI Agents at Scale

Build secure, auditable, AI agents with Redpanda’s new connectivity capabilities — purpose-built for the enterprise.

AWS Summit London 2025

AWS Summit London 2025

Join us at the AWS Summit in April. We look forward to seeing you there!

Day 2 Operations with Redpanda

Day 2 Operations with Redpanda

Learn to manage and maintain Redpanda clusters in this hands-on 2-hour session—covering health checks, alerting, broker management, and more with expert guidance.

Free Digital Download

Benchmarking the Best: Redpanda’s Cost Advantage Over Confluent

Download this free report to learn:

  • How Redpanda delivers high-performance streaming at lower costs compared to Confluent, empowering data-driven decisions and AI/ML capabilities
  • Key benchmarks on cost and latency that reveal significant savings and scalability benefits for high-throughput applications
  • Three use cases for real-time streaming, including observability, fraud detection, and AI-driven data processing
McKnight Report Cover: Redpanda vs Confluent Cloud
Download your report:
McKnight Data Streaming Performance Benchmark Report
Download Report
TAKE A DEEP DIVE

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