Every category where a model named Amazon MSK for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Streaming platforms	Data platform	6%	4 of 78	18%	33	accepted challenger

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Amazon MSK yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Amazon MSK across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	1	0	0	1
GPT-5.4 mini	0	2	0	0	2
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	0	0	4	4
Perplexity Sonar	1	1	0	0	2
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	2	2	1	5
Mistral Small	0	0	1	0	1
DeepSeek V4 Flash	1	2	1	1	5
Llama 4 Maverick	0	2	0	0	2
Qwen 3.7 Flash	1	2	1	0	4
Kimi K2	1	0	2	0	3
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	1	1	0	2
MiniMax M2.5	0	2	0	0	2

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct14 labelsNone

Paraphrase33 labels2

Comparative11 labelsNone

Budget-constrained11 labels2

Scale-constrained19 labels1

Negative9 labels3not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative97 labels in all, every segment counted; 5 of the 8 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“the safer options are typically Amazon MSK, Aiven for Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud, or self-managed Apache Kafka” Perplexity Sonar · Streaming · negative prompt · first choice

“starting with a fully managed SaaS version of a major stack (like AWS MSK or Confluent)” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Streaming · scale prompt · first choice

“I'd recommend Confluent Cloud (Standard/Enterprise tier) or Amazon MSK” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Streaming · paraphrase prompt · first choice

“Top Recommendation: Confluent Cloud or Amazon MSK” Kimi K2 · Streaming · paraphrase prompt · first choice

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“Cons: Unlike true SaaS, scaling clusters, resizing disks, and rebalancing partitions still require manual intervention.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Streaming · scale prompt · soft negative

“Amazon MSK at $0.11+ per resource... Ongoing fees exceed self-host for small scale” Grok 4.1 Fast · Streaming · budget prompt · soft negative

“Choose AWS MSK only if: ... MSK still requires manual broker sizing and scaling” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Streaming · paraphrase prompt · soft negative

“compared to traditional self-hosted Kafka or managed services like Amazon MSK” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Streaming · budget prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Amazon MSK, over the 97 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Amazon MSK was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Confluent Cloud92 of 9743Not in the top three

Redpanda69 of 9721Not in the top three

Apache Kafka49 of 9711Not in the top three

Azure Event Hubs41 of 970Not in the top three

Google Cloud Pub/Sub40 of 970Not in the top three

Aiven for Apache Kafka38 of 975Not in the top three

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams34 of 970Not in the top three

Apache Pulsar34 of 970Not in the top three

WarpStream16 of 972Not in the top three

NATS JetStream9 of 970Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Amazon MSK. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 73 of the 97 answers that named Amazon MSK and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

confluent.io48

automq.com36

redpanda.com31

devopsschool.com26

guideflow.com26

instaclustr.com26

aws.amazon.com18

inteca.com18

gartner.com17

modern-datatools.com17

263 of the 263 domain citations in answers naming Amazon MSK came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

guideflow.com/blog/event-streaming-software26

devopsschool.com/blog/top-10-event-streaming-platforms-features-pros-cons-comparison24

instaclustr.com/education/apache-kafka/best-managed-apache-kafka-tools-top-5-services-in-220

instaclustr.com/education/apache-kafka/best-managed-apache-kafka-services-top-5-options-in19

gartner.com/reviews/market/event-stream-processing17

instaclustr.com/education/apache-kafka/best-managed-kafka-solutions-top-10-services-in-20217

eltherion.com/blog/event-streaming-architecture-kafka-kinesis-pulsar16

inteca.com/business-insights/top-5-managed-kafka-services-in-202516

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Amazon MSK

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Amazon MSK; a claim can dispute any of them.

AWS MSK 10AWS MSK / MSK Serverless 1AWS Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK) 1Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Kafka) 1MSK 1

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Amazon MSK's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Amazon MSK, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at amazonmsk.com is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.