Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon Redshift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Kinesis
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Kinesis is a streaming analytics suite for data intake from video or other disparate sources and applying analytics for machine learning (ML) and business intelligence.
$0.01
per GB data ingested / consumed
Amazon Redshift
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.
$0.24
per GB per month
Pricing
Amazon KinesisAmazon Redshift
Editions & Modules
Amazon Kinesis Video Streams
$0.00850
per GB data ingested / consumed
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
$0.04
per hour per stream
Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics
$0.11
per hour
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
tiered pricing starting at $0.029
per month first 500 TB ingested
Redshift Managed Storage
$0.24
per GB per month
Current Generation
$0.25 - $13.04
per hour
Previous Generation
$0.25 - $4.08
per hour
Redshift Spectrum
$5.00
per terabyte of data scanned
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon KinesisAmazon Redshift
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon KinesisAmazon Redshift
Considered Both Products
Amazon Kinesis
Chose Amazon Kinesis
Kinesis is oriented to streaming in a scalable way large volumes of information in real-time. Glue is more an ETL so it is not well suited for real-time applications while Beanstalk is more a simple container platform. Lambda could do the job but it would require a lot of …
Chose Amazon Kinesis
The main benefit was around set up - incredibly easy to just start using Kinesis. Kinesis is a real-time data processing platform, while Kafka is more of a message queue system. If you only need a message queue from a limited source, Kafka may do the job. More complex use …
Chose Amazon Kinesis
Actually we didn't select Kinesis, we were forced into using it because SQS wasn't yet supported by Lambda. Unlike Kinesis, SQS supports both FIFO and standard queues which let us control order of events processed, as well as handle retry logic, failover logic, and set up …
Amazon Redshift
Chose Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshifts has fewer features but at the same time, you also have some gains once it is running on AWS Cloud and it is really easy to set up. Besides that, in our case, it is a bit cheaper and we don't really need the extra features that you can find on Snowflake. Another …
Chose Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift, BigQuery, and Snowflake are all fully managed data warehouse services that are designed to handle large volumes of structured data and support business intelligence and analytics efforts. However, Amazon Redshift has the upper hand with its cost-effective …
Chose Amazon Redshift
Biggest advantage of Amazon Redshift is it's part of the aws ecosystem. When tuned well it is also very cheap compared to something like snowflake. And compared to spark or databricks, Amazon Redshift is a solid warehouse that's well suited for tabular data. We use it for user …
Chose Amazon Redshift
We evaluated [Amazon] Redshift vs BigQuery vs Amazon EMR, back in 2014.
Back then BigQuery cost was slightly higher than that of [Amazon] Redshift price structure.
Amazon EMR, needs lots more management (Admin tasks) and EMR is designed to be ephemeral and not designed to be a …
Chose Amazon Redshift
Redshift is better cost wise and also since the whole ecosystem is set in AWS, it is wise to use redshift
Chose Amazon Redshift
Redshift leapfrogged Hive back when Hive was trying to figure out how to implement indexes, providing a more stable, standardized (postgres), easy to use (any postgres client), easier to administer, and scalable solution for querying server logs and raw usage data.

Now, …
Chose Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is one of the fastest service offerings available in the market now. Plus you get an advantage of using a cutting edge compute service offering from AWS. Other technologies are fast but not as good as Amazon Redshift, I would say. Our business is interested in …
Chose Amazon Redshift
1. Redshift has better compression (automated) consuming less space then competitors
2. Automated Vacuum Delete for having consistent performance
3. AWS introduced ra3 node types for simple separation of compute and storage
Chose Amazon Redshift
Its definitely an improvement on all fronts for our business needs. Again, our MySQL server was really slow and we needed a more efficient solution. It was a major upgrade, but it is much more expensive than an in house server. It was expected but I'd say that lots of headaches …
Chose Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift supports multiple data formats including multiple structured data formats. And it is easy to implement a cluster if you do not have knowledge of data lake solution. Also when you do not need a lot of resources, you can just scale down so you do not have to spend …
Chose Amazon Redshift
The best advantage for us was the easy way to integrate our current solution in AWS to Amazon Redshift.
Chose Amazon Redshift
Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL and Snowflake
Chose Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift has a better UI, hands down. And it is easy to integrate with bigger tools like Talend. It has many issues when it comes to understanding the architect perspective like Toad, which has a better UI for architect data together. However, that is because we are not …
Chose Amazon Redshift
We like Snowflake for its separation of computing and storage and also the separation of data warehouse different users. We replaced Redshift with Snowflake. However, Snowflake is great for its pay for performance kind of methodology.
Chose Amazon Redshift
Azure SQL Database was discarded because of a less attractive licensing, costs, plus its integrates poorly with many of the Azure offerings as say Azure Data Factory - it is not a true ETL yet. Also, the rest of the tools used were of Open Source type and it did not look like a …
Chose Amazon Redshift
The main reason we chose Redshift was because of the cost-effectiveness of running and maintaining the warehouse.
Chose Amazon Redshift
It works on the cloud and we use the platform Dbeaver which is very unique and easy to maintain. There are very limited tools of this kind but the security issues are pretty high within those tools.
Chose Amazon Redshift
As our applications are hosted on AWS service, Redshift is the best option for us. Also, it provide a near to real-time performance on limited datasets and less complex queries. High availability is the major concern for any growing business and AWS is the best option for this. …
Chose Amazon Redshift
We are currently on Redshift, because it was out before Snowflake. However, Snowflake looks promising. It's the new shiny toy that gives options that Redshift does not provide for. The big thing is that storage and compute can be scaled separately, whereas you cannot do that in …
Chose Amazon Redshift
Most of our stack is on AWS, so while Snowflake and BigQuery was a viable option from a performance perspective, it was easier to integrate with RedShift. We considered hosting SQL Server on AWS or using Amazon RDS (Postgres or MySQL), however, the self-service aspect of …
Chose Amazon Redshift
Snowflake supports semi-structured data types and provided solutions to manage/process the semi-structured data. It supported sharing data between the different accounts and makes it easy in the scale and scale down process. Snowflake doesn't limit users on the database.
Chose Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is much easier to set up and start using. It interacts well with the PostgreSQL client (psql) and shares certain basic data dictionary, and people familiar with PostgreSQL feel right at home. The cluster is part of AWS services offering, and it works well with …
Chose Amazon Redshift
Some organizations use PostgreSQL as an OLAP store. PostgreSQL offers a modern SQL dialect, data types, and features that Redshift lacks. RDS is a great managed PostgreSQL product. However, PostgreSQL is a poor choice for a data warehouse. It's row-oriented storage requires …
Features
Amazon KinesisAmazon Redshift
Streaming Analytics
Comparison of Streaming Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Kinesis
8.3
Ratings
6% above category average
Amazon Redshift
-
Ratings
Real-Time Data Analysis10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Low Latency9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Integrated Development Tools9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data wrangling and preparation10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Linear Scale-Out6.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Enrichment5.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon KinesisAmazon Redshift
Small Businesses
IBM Streams (discontinued)
IBM Streams (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Tealium Customer Data Hub
Tealium Customer Data Hub
Score 8.5 out of 10
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Spotfire Streaming
Spotfire Streaming
Score 5.1 out of 10
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon KinesisAmazon Redshift
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.1
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon KinesisAmazon Redshift
Likelihood to Recommend
Perfect for real-time data processing and streaming. Also, there's no need for any specific setup - you just start using it immediately and it easily integrates with the rest of AWS capabilities (like Redshift), although integration with Lambda could be better. You can make your overall analytics landscape way simpler with Kineses even if you have non-Amazon solutions like Tableau. It all integrates really well!
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If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)
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Pros
  • Integrating with other Amazon services
  • Scaling requests
  • Totally serverless platform
  • Simple management
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  • Redshift is fully managed. Small teams do not have the resources to maintain a cluster. CloudWatch metrics are provided out-of-the-box, and it is easy to configure alarms.
  • Redshift's console allows you to easily inspect and manage queries, and manage the performance of the cluster.
  • Redshift is ubiquitous; many products (e.g., ETL services) integrate with it out-of-the-box.
  • Writing .csvs to S3 and querying them through Redshift Spectrum is convenient.
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Cons
  • Improve integration with AWS Lambda
  • Some duplicate records coming from the stream
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  • It could benefit from adding data integrity and programming tools common to other database management systems.
  • Amazon Redshift is based on PostgreSQL 8.0.2. That version of PostgreSQL was released in December 2006. While PostgreSQL was much improved since then, the new features were not implemented in Redshift. Many basic features are missing from it.
  • Primary keys can be declared but not enforced. Referential integrity (foreign keys) can be declared but not enforced. UNIQUE and CHECK constraints are not supported and cannot be declared.
  • IDENTITY can be declared on a column, and Redshift will put unique values into it. However: IDENTITY values in the newly inserted rows won’t be incremental or sequential. To implement a sequential number, you need to write your own custom code.
  • There are no stored procedures in Redshift. We are writing SQL script files, and then parsing and running them one statement at a time from a Python program. This also enabled us to implement execution-time error logging.
  • In SQL scripts, to check for the row count of affected rows, a complicated join query against some system tables or views has to be executed.
  • Data Control Language (DCL) does not exist. No statements like IF, WHILE, DO, RAISERROR, etc.
  • On performance of views… Views do not “pass-through” a query parameter which is a potential problem for performance.
  • When selecting against a view with the WHERE clause outside of the view, the inner query of the view will be executed first without consideration for the WHERE clause, and only then the WHERE clause will be applied.
  • Certain clauses of SQL work many times faster than other clauses. So be careful and test your statements for performance earlier rather than later, especially if working with a large data set.
  • There was a situation when DELETE FROM JOIN was unacceptably slow. Replacing JOIN with the USING clause made DELETE instantaneous.
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Usability
No answers on this topic
Overall it serves all our aspects of data management like data cleaning, data manipulation, and data reporting on the cloud platform. We can create stored procedures and triggers in it very easily as all the options are self suggested in it. We can easily attach the results of ARS to the other tools as well for drawing the statistical results.
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Support Rating
The documentation was confusing and lacked examples. The streams suddenly stopped working with no explanation and there was no information in the logs. All these were more difficult when dealing with enhanced fan-out. In fact, we were about to abort the usage of Kinesis due to a misunderstanding with enhanced fan-out.
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The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support
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Alternatives Considered
Kinesis is oriented to streaming in a scalable way large volumes of information in real-time. Glue is more an ETL so it is not well suited for real-time applications while Beanstalk is more a simple container platform. Lambda could do the job but it would require a lot of programming to accomplish the same as Kinesis. In fact, our solution employed the four elements for different tasks but using Kinesis as the message bus.
Read full review
We evaluated [Amazon] Redshift vs BigQuery vs Amazon EMR, back in 2014. Back then BigQuery cost was slightly higher than that of [Amazon] Redshift price structure. Amazon EMR, needs lots more management (Admin tasks) and EMR is designed to be ephemeral and not designed to be a data store. [Amazon] Redshift was ideal with the price structure, performance and ROI[.]
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Caused us to need to re-engineer some basic re-try logic
  • Caused us to drop some content without knowing it
  • Made monitoring much more difficult
  • We eventually switched back to SQS because Kinesis is not the same as a Queue system
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  • It allows for an almost seamless integration of our data which can then be used by other departments for analytical purposes.
  • No in house resources are needed for keeping the data alive and performing backup/migration tasks of the data in its end state.
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ScreenShots