Confluent vs Amazon MSK

Confluent Cloud and Amazon MSK are both managed Kafka services, but they differ in scope. Confluent manages the entire Kafka ecosystem (streams, connectors, schemas, governance). MSK manages the Kafka brokers and leaves ecosystem tooling to you.

Scope of Management

Confluent Cloud is a complete platform. It manages Kafka brokers, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect with 200+ pre-built connectors, ksqlDB for stream processing, and Stream Governance for lineage and audit. Everything runs as a service.

Amazon MSK manages Kafka brokers, ZooKeeper (or KRaft), and basic monitoring. For Schema Registry, you can use Glue Schema Registry or self-manage Confluent's. For Kafka Connect, you deploy and manage your own Connect workers.

Multi-Cloud Story

Confluent Cloud runs on AWS, Azure, and GCP with Cluster Linking for cross-cloud data replication. If you need Kafka across multiple clouds, Confluent is the only managed option.

MSK is AWS-only. For multi-cloud, you would need to run self-managed Kafka on other clouds and manage MirrorMaker 2 for replication.

Cost Comparison

MSK pricing is straightforward — broker instance hours plus EBS storage. You pay for the EC2 instances underneath.

Confluent uses CKU (Confluent Kafka Units) pricing that bundles throughput, storage, and partitions. At moderate scale, Confluent can be 2-3x more expensive than MSK. At larger scale, the included tooling may offset the price difference by reducing operational cost.

AWS Integration

MSK integrates natively with AWS IAM for authentication, VPC networking, and services like Lambda event source mappings. Confluent uses API keys and service accounts — functional but not as tightly integrated with AWS.

For system design interviews, choosing between them signals whether you prioritize ecosystem completeness (Confluent) or cloud-native integration (MSK). See our pricing page for cost analysis.