Amazon MSK versus Amazon MQ

23 Oct 2025

Learn how Amazon MSK differs from Amazon MQ.

	Amazon MSK	Amazon MQ
Scaling	30 brokers per cluster; you need add/remove brokers and reassign partitions manually	80 msg/sec; can be increased with a network of brokers
Max. message size	configurable (default 1 MB)	limited by disk space
Persistence	forever (up to 16384 GiB per broker)	forever (up to 200 GB)
Replication	Multi-AZ (optional)	Multi-AZ (optional)
Order guarantee	within a partition	yes
Delivery guarantee	up to the consumer	exactly once; supports distributed (XA) transactions
Pricing	per broker hour + provisioned storage	per broker hour + used storage
Protocols	Kafka protocol	JMS, AMQP, MQTT, STOMP, OpenWire
AWS Integrations	Lambda	Lambda
License	open source (Apache Kafka)	open source (Apache ActiveMQ)
Encryption at rest	yes	yes
Encryption in transit	yes	yes

Further reading