In my experience, Kinesis&#x27; performance makes it a nonstarter for low-latency systems and use cases with many consumers. Shards are limited to 5 reads&#x2F;sec, so consumers are heavily throttled. Producers also have significant put latency. Kafka&#x27;s latency and throughput are OOM better but of course come with the operational overhead. Depends on what your needs are, but Kafka is a better choice for &quot;real-time&quot; systems.