Laminar vs Managed Services

10x lower cost. No vendor lock-in. Open table formats. Your data stays in your cloud.

Why Self-Hosted Beats Managed

10x Lower Cost

No per-GB processing fees. No egress charges. Just compute and storage.

No Lock-In

Open formats (Iceberg, Parquet). Query with any engine. Move clouds anytime.

Data Sovereignty

Your data never leaves your infrastructure. Full control over security.

Multi-Cloud

Deploy on AWS, GCP, Azure, or on-prem. Same experience everywhere.

Cost Comparison

See how costs stack up for a typical 100M events/day workload with 30-day retention.

Monthly Cost

100M events/day, 30-day retention

Confluent Cloud8.5K$
Databricks6.0K$
Kinesis + Glue4.0K$
Dataflow3.5K$
Laminar800.0$

Lower is better

Cost per GB Ingested

Including storage and compute

2.5$
Datadog
2.0$
Splunk
0.4$
New Relic
0.3$
Elastic
0.0$
Laminar

Lower is better

What's Included in Managed Service Costs

Hidden costs you pay:

  • Data egress fees when querying or exporting
  • Per-GB processing charges
  • Connector licensing fees
  • Premium support charges

Laminar: predictable costs

  • Fixed compute costs based on worker count
  • Standard S3/GCS storage pricing
  • No egress fees within your VPC
  • Support included in license

Service-by-Service Breakdown

Confluent Cloud

Managed Kafka with ksqlDB for stream processing

Limitations vs Laminar:

  • High egress costs for data leaving Confluent
  • Vendor lock-in with proprietary connectors
  • Complex pricing model
  • Data stored in Confluent-managed infrastructure

Amazon Kinesis Firehose

AWS managed service for loading streaming data

Limitations vs Laminar:

  • Limited transformation capabilities
  • No SQL support for processing
  • AWS-only, no multi-cloud
  • Minutes of latency to S3

Google Dataflow

GCP managed Apache Beam runner

Limitations vs Laminar:

  • GCP-only deployment
  • Complex Beam programming model
  • High compute costs for streaming
  • Minutes of latency typical

Databricks Streaming

Spark Structured Streaming on Databricks

Limitations vs Laminar:

  • Expensive DBU-based pricing
  • Micro-batch latency (seconds to minutes)
  • Requires Databricks platform
  • Complex for simple ingestion tasks

Feature Comparison

How Laminar compares to managed streaming and ingestion services

FeatureLaminarRecommendedConfluent CloudKinesis FirehoseDataflowDatabricks
Open table format output
No vendor lock-in
Data stays in your cloud
Built-in compaction
Full SQL support
Aggregations before sink
Sub-second latency
Native CDC support
Transparent pricing
Self-hosted option
No egress fees
Pay per use
Supported
Partial
Not supported

ROI Calculator

Estimate your savings by switching to Laminar

Your Workload

1M1B
7 days1 year
Daily data volume95 GB
Total storage3K GB

Estimated annual savings

$85K

99% reduction

Monthly Cost Comparison

datadog$7K/mo
Laminar$86/mo
Monthly savings+$7K

No credit card required

Assumptions: Average event size of 1KB. Costs include compute, storage, and data transfer. Actual costs may vary based on your specific workload and configuration. Contact us for a detailed cost analysis.

When to Use Each

Choose Managed Services if:

  • You have zero ops capacity
  • Cost is not a primary concern
  • Vendor lock-in is acceptable
  • Already heavily invested in one cloud

Choose Laminar if:

  • Cost optimization is important
  • Want data in open formats (Iceberg)
  • Need multi-cloud or hybrid deployment
  • Data sovereignty is a requirement
  • Want to avoid vendor lock-in
  • Have Kubernetes experience

Migration Support

Moving from a managed service? We provide migration assistance to help you transition your pipelines with minimal downtime.

Ready to Process Real-Time Data?

Get started with Laminar in under 5 minutes

Trusted by data teams for mission-critical streaming workloads