Get the NATS vs Amazon Kinesis Data Streams Comparison and Benchmarks

NATS vs Amazon Kinesis TCO & Benchmarking Analysis

Explore how NATS, an edge-native, AI-ready platform for distributed systems, delivers superior functionality at lower costs than Amazon Kinesis—and learn why more engineering teams are choosing NATS.

"NATS delivered cost savings ranging from 59% to an astounding 87% compared to Amazon Kinesis."

Jean-Noël MoyneAuthor, Comparing NATS.io with Amazon Kinesis. Field CTO, Synadia

Developers, architects,
and operators love NATS

NATS is a high-performance, open source connectivity and messaging fabric, enabling global communication between services and data, from cloud to edge.

Developers

Easily build distributed applications with location transparent messaging, streaming, key-value, and object storage APIs. Avoid complexity.

Architects

Scale and span multiple clouds and geographies and extend to the edge with the ability to change this topology on-demand without interrupting existing workloads. Avoid AWS lock-in.

Operators

Get built-in server management, security, and monitoring tooling enabling complete visibility and control over the entire system. Cost-effective and runs anywhere.

Why more engineering teams
are choosing NATS

Discover some of the most common reasons teams select NATS as the backbone of their distributed systems.

Deep Toolbox

NATS is more than basic streaming: it’s subject-based addressing to streams; NATS JetStream persistence layer; in-memory storage for streams or file-based persistence (with optional compression and encryption at rest); and throughput and latency.

Built for the Edge

NATS is designed for the edge plus multi-cloud and multi-geo environments: flexible global deployment; replication between the NATS servers (automatic and administrative); more cross-tenant data exchange flexibility.

Superior Performance

NATS.io offers microsecond-level latency for real-time use cases, versus Kinesis at millisecond-levels. Dynamically scale without predefined partitions, unlike Kinesis shard-based throughput limits.

Persistence & Flexibility

Unlike a Write Ahead Log in Kinesis, NATS JetStream persistence layer is a NoSQL data store with value history, stream limits as constraints, compare-and-set concurrency control and a specific TTL for each message.

Reduced Costs

NATS requires less infrastructure and simplifies operations, resulting in savings of 59% to 87% of Kinesis costs (based on the difference in put and consumer costs).

Arbitrary Topologies

Deploy NATS servers as leaf nodes to extend all the way to the edge and connect back to your cluster or super-cluster in the cloud or in your data centers, unlike a centralized Kinesis, which cannot extend beyond an AWS region.

Get the complete NATS vs Kinesis white paper

Detailed Cost Comparisons - Compute costs (the EC2 instance costs for NATS and the consumer costs in Kinesis), Storage costs (EBS costs for NATS and the put costs in Kinesis), Network costs (replicating the data between three AWS Availability Zones).

Granular Performance Analysis - Evaluate NATS vs Kinesis at different message sizes, throughput levels, and consumption rates - including the use of enhanced fan-out consumers (EFOs).

Sharding Hurts - Learn how Kinesis sharding requirements create extra costs and admin burden that NATS doesn't suffer from.

Architectural and Deployment Differences - How do NATS and Kinesis stack up on durability and fault tolerance, security, and ease of global deployments? It's all covered in the white paper.