Data streaming has become critical for modern applications, from powering responsive microservices and real-time analytics to enabling seamless IoT connectivity and AI integrations. Engineers today face tough decisions: balancing cost efficiency, scalability, performance, and ease of management. Amazon Kinesis has long been a popular choice within AWS environments—but is it really the best solution?
In a recent benchmarking study, conducted by our Field CTO Jean-Noël Moyne, we directly compared open-source NATS against Amazon Kinesis. The findings might surprise you—especially if cost efficiency or low latency are priorities.
Bottom line up front:
NATS delivered cost savings ranging from 59% to an astounding 87% compared to AWS Kinesis.
Let’s take a quick look at the highlights and why you should consider NATS as a robust alternative to Amazon Kinesis for your streaming and messaging workloads.
The Streaming Challenge: More Than Just Data Pipes
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is fundamentally a single-purpose tool: it streams data. It's a Write Ahead Log: you can add messages to the head of the stream (without constraints) and messages are dropped from the tail of the stream as time advances, and that’s it.
It handles that core job effectively but leaves additional complexity to other AWS services like SNS, SQS, DynamoDB, or Lambda. This means more moving parts, extra operational overhead, and higher costs as your data grows or as your needs evolve.
NATS, on the other hand, was built as a highly performant multiservice messaging system that does far more than basic streaming. It covers everything from pub/sub and request/reply patterns and, with NATS JetStream, goes beyond the functionalities of a Write Ahead Log to be a proper NoSQL data store (e.g. key-value and persistent object stores). Essentially, NATS gives you all the streaming capabilities you get with Kinesis—but with far greater flexibility and lower operational complexity.
Benchmarking NATS vs Kinesis
Get all the benchmarks
Dramatically Lower Costs at Scale
The benchmark study performed by Jean-Noël focused on detailed cost metrics including compute (EC2 for NATS, Enhanced Fan-Out [EFO] consumer costs for Kinesis), storage (EBS for NATS vs. "put" charges for Kinesis), and network expenses (cross-AZ data transfers). The results were striking:
When streaming volume and the number of consumer applications scale up, Kinesis becomes significantly more expensive than operating a NATS cluster
Depending on message sizes and the scale of your streaming workload, NATS delivered cost savings ranging from 59% to an astounding 87% compared to AWS Kinesis.
Only in the unusual case of using no EFO consumers, is Kinesis cheaper than NATS (any only thenfor the larger message sizes). In the full report, Jean-Noël discusses why the consumers that you get out of the box from NATS are the equivalent of EFO consumers in Kinesis.
Imagine slashing your AWS bill by more than half just by switching your streaming platform. The detailed benchmarks in the full report provide extensive evidence to back this up—worth a closer look if cloud budgets matters to you.
Performance and Latency: Why Milliseconds Matter
Cost isn’t everything, of course. In streaming systems, latency and throughput are critical performance metrics. Especially in the era of edge computing, where end users demand more responsive access to their data and services, millisecond matter. Seemingly small performance hits can quickly add up to a subpar user experience.
According to the benchmarks, NATS consistently outperformed Kinesis across the board. While Amazon Kinesis at best delivers message latencies measured in hundreds of milliseconds (even with Enhanced Fan-Out consumers, latency ranges between 70ms to 500ms), NATS easily achieves single digit millisecond message delivery latency, even under load.
Additionally, NATS removes the complexity associated with Kinesis’ shard limitations, allowing seamless scaling without hitting artificial throughput ceilings or incurring additional costs.
Global Deployment, Made Easy
Another major area where NATS shines is in flexible global deployments. AWS Kinesis is strictly region-bound—forcing you to handle cross-region replication manually, typically via additional AWS services or custom implementations. With NATS, however, global replication and scalability come built-in.
NATS supports simple, automated clustering and "super-clustering" across clouds, data centers, and even edge environments. Want multi-cloud deployment? Need easy extension of messaging to the edge? NATS does this naturally, giving you architectural flexibility Kinesis simply can't match.
Strategic Advantages for Infrastructure and DevOps Teams
Beyond raw cost and performance metrics, adopting NATS significantly reduces operational complexity. No more managing shards or juggling multiple AWS components to achieve common messaging patterns. NATS simplifies scaling, reduces management overhead, and significantly improves flexibility:
Simplified Operations: Automatic clustering and built-in replication mean your team spends less time babysitting infrastructure.
Enhanced Scalability: Grow your message throughput and number of consumer applications easily without worry.
Better Developer Experience: Native support for multiple messaging patterns means developers spend less time integrating separate services and more time building value.
Ready to Dive into the Detailed Data?
Jean-Noël's full benchmarking report goes much, much deeper (like 20+ pages and multiple appendices deeper). It includes detailed cost breakdowns, comprehensive performance metrics across various message sizes, and rigorous comparisons between NATS and Kinesis under realistic workloads.
If you’re responsible for infrastructure costs, streaming architecture, or data platform strategy, this report offers essential insights that can reshape your approach to streaming solutions.
