Azure Event Hubs alternatives

3 tools to consider instead of Azure Event Hubs, shown against it.

Azure Event Hubs Amazon Kinesis Google Cloud Pub/Sub Confluent
Vendor Microsoft Amazon Web Services Google Confluent, Inc.
Pricing model Usage-based Usage-based Usage-based Usage-based
Free tier No No Yes Yes
Deployment Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud, Self-hosted
Open source No No No No
Best for Azure-native teams needing managed, Kafka-compatible event ingestion at enterprise scale. AWS-native teams needing managed real-time streaming without operating Kafka infrastructure. GCP-native teams needing serverless, low-maintenance event ingestion feeding analytics pipelines. Teams wanting managed Kafka with enterprise features without operating brokers themselves.
Pricing

Billed per throughput unit/hour (Basic, Standard) or per Processing/Capacity Unit-hour (Premium, Dedicated), plus per-million-event ingress charges; exact regional rates are not published as flat figures on the pricing page.

Basic Billed per throughput unit-hour plus per-million ingress events
Standard Billed per throughput unit-hour plus per-million ingress events
Premium Billed per Processing Unit-hour
Dedicated Billed per Capacity Unit-hour, 4-hour minimum

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

On-Demand mode bills per GB written and read plus a per-stream hourly charge; Provisioned mode bills per shard-hour. No free tier is offered.

On-Demand Standard $0.08/GB data-in, $0.040/GB data-out (US East example)
Provisioned $0.015 per shard-hour (example rate)

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Billed per TiB of message throughput delivered, plus per GiB-month for retained message storage; the first 10 GiB of standard throughput per month is free.

Message delivery $40 per TiB
BigQuery / Cloud Storage subscriptions $50 per TiB
Storage $0.27 per GiB-month

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Metered by Elastic Confluent Units for Kafka (eCKU) per hour plus data ingress/egress and storage; Basic tier's first eCKU is free.

Basic First eCKU free, then $0.14/eCKU-hour
Standard $0.75/eCKU-hour (~$385/month typical)
Enterprise $1.75–$2.25/eCKU-hour (~$895/month typical)
Freight $2.25/eCKU-hour, 2 eCKU minimum (~$2,300/month typical)

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features
  • Kafka-compatible endpoint
  • Four tiers from shared to single-tenant capacity
  • Event Hubs Capture to Blob Storage/Data Lake
  • Schema Registry (Standard tier and above)
  • Geo-replication (Premium/Dedicated)
  • Native Azure Stream Analytics and Data Factory integration
  • On-Demand and Provisioned capacity modes
  • Millisecond-latency record ingestion
  • Up to 365-day data retention
  • Enhanced Fan-Out for parallel consumers
  • Native Lambda and Firehose integration
  • Streaming to Apache Iceberg tables
  • Serverless, autoscaling topics and subscriptions
  • Push and pull delivery
  • Exactly-once processing support
  • Message ordering keys
  • Direct BigQuery and Cloud Storage subscriptions
  • Global availability and replication
  • Fully managed, elastically scaled Kafka
  • Schema Registry
  • 120+ managed connectors
  • ksqlDB and Flink-based stream processing
  • Multiple cluster types by throughput/durability need
  • Cross-region and multi-cloud replication

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