Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) versus Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

05 Mar 2026

Learn how Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) differs from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.

	Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events)	Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Scaling	not disclosed (default soft limit depends on region; e.g., 10,000 msg/sec in eu-west-1)	1 MB or 1000 msg/sec per shard; up to 500 shards; you need to manually add/remove shards
Max. message size	256 KB	1 MB
Persistence	archiving is possible	up to 365 days
Replication	Multi-AZ	Multi-AZ
Order guarantee	no	within a shard
Delivery guarantee	at least once	at least once
Pricing	per message	per shard hour
Protocols	AWS Rest API	AWS Rest API
AWS Integrations	Lambda, SQS, SNS, and many more	Lambda
License	AWS only	AWS only
Encryption at rest	yes	yes
Encryption in transit	yes	yes

Further reading