Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ Comparison

Amazon SNS

IBM MQ

Amazon SNS

Read 3 Amazon SNS reviews.

1,292 views|1,250 comparisons

IBM MQ

Read 30 IBM MQ reviews.

30,258 views|22,252 comparisons

Most Helpful Review

Ahsan Ali

Senior Software Engineer at etura

Provides reliable service, enables easy engagement of our users, and supports all devices

It enables easy engagement of our users with our product. We often track users' interest to find out how they have been performing with our app or... Read more »

Sunil Sahoo

Manager at a financial services firm

We don't lose messages in transit and we can store messages and forward them when required

People have started using the likes of Kafka, Spark and other new messaging technologies. But when you take the likes of banks into consideration,... Read more »

Free Report: Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: January 2021.

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Quotes From Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros
"The mobile push notifications are the most valuable. Previously, we used to use Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) for this functionality. It is a Google service for sending push notifications. Android did not have a good service for sending push notifications, but now, Amazon SNS integrates with FCM. Under the road, it is actually using FCM, but we can see all the metrics on our AW service itself, which makes it a lot easier instead of using a third-party service for this particular functionality.""Stability has been good for us. It is quite high.""Push notifications are the most valuable. I have mostly used push notifications for my system. Amazon SNS supports all devices for push notification services. It supports iOS, Android, and Windows notifications. It provides reliable push notification services. We have queues, and we can track which notifications have failed or had some issues. We can then figure out the issue. We can also debug the issue because of which our push notification didn't reach the end users." More Amazon SNS Pros »	"The most valuable features are the point to point messaging and the MQ API.""The high availability and session recovery are the most valuable features because we need the solution live all day.""It is stable, reliable, and scalable.""Whenever payments are happening, such as incoming payments to the bank, we need to notify the customer. With MQ we can actually do that asynchronously. We don't want to notify the customer for each and every payment but, rather, more like once a day. That kind of thing can be enabled with the help of MQ.""It's highly scalable. It provides various ways to establish high availability and workloads. E.g., you can spread workloads inside of your clusters.""IBM MQ is the right choice because of the stability and the performance. And from the support perspective, it's enough to have a really small team.""The MQ protocol is widely used across multiple applications and it's so simple for connectivity.""What is quite useful is the asynchronous function which means we don't lose everything in the bank. Although we use a lot of things synchronously, asynch is the best thing so that no banking information is ever lost, even when the network goes down and comes up." More IBM MQ Pros »
Cons
"A major issue with AWS as a whole is that it has a lot of services that do the same thing, and people get confused about which one to use in which scenario. Previously, we used to use SNS for connecting microservices. SNS has around six types of subscribers. We can subscribe to Lambda, HTTP, HTTPS, SMS, email, and push notifications. We used to use HTTP endpoints and Lambda for connecting to microservice systems. Now we have something called EventBridge, which actually does that for you. For connecting to services, we should just use EventBridge rather than SQS, SNS. I hear a lot of complaints from people wherein they do not understand when to use EventBridge and when to use SQS, SNS. They can remove these features so that it doesn't confuse users about when to use SQS, SNS, or EventBridge.""In terms of improvement, I would like to have better customer support for SNS. We can then manage it very easily.""I recently worked with Firebase, and it provides an option to create a marketing campaign with a title and a specific image to inform our audience about something. We just design the campaign and then use the push notifications. It would be good if Amazon also adds a similar feature." More Amazon SNS Cons »	"I would like to see faster monitoring tools for this solution.""If they could come up with monitoring dashboards that would be good. We are using external monitoring tools, apart from our IBM MQ, to monitor IBM MQ. If we could get monitoring tools or dashboards to keep everything simple for the user to understand, that would be good.""I would like to see it integrate with the newer ways of messaging, such as Kafka. They might say that you have IBM Integration Bus to do that stuff, but it would be great if MQ could, out-of-the-box, listen to public Kafka.""They could integrate monitoring into the solution, a bit more than they do now. Currently, they have opened the REST API so you can get statistic and accounting information and details from MQ and build your own monitoring, if you want. IBM can improve the solution in this direction.""What could be improved is the high-availability. The way MQ works is that it separates the high-availability from the workload balance. The scalability should be easier. If something happens so that the messages are not available on each node, scalability is only possible for the workload balance.""The scalability is the one area where IBM has fallen behind. As much as it is used, there is a limit to the number of people who are skilled in MQ. That is definitely an issue. Places have kept their MQ-skilled people and other places have really struggled to get MQ skills. It's not a widely-known skillset.""In terms of volume, it is not able to handle a huge volume. We also have limitations of queues related to IBM MQ. We often need to handle a very big volume, but currently we do have limitations. If those kinds of limitations could be relaxed, it would help us to work better.""You should be able to increase the message size. It should be dynamic. Each queue has a limitation of 5,000." More IBM MQ Cons »

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of push notifications and everything is quite fair. If you are using FCM under the hood, it is completely free. When you are using push notification on SMS, it is just a nominal price that you need to pay. SMS services are a lot more costly. It is because we don't have proper providers in India. That's why it gets a lot more costly in terms of SMS. This is the reason why we don't use SMS services from SNS itself. We use other third-party services like SMS Horizon. We use a third-party service for email services. It is almost free. It is just around $1 a month. Configuring Lambda is also quite cheap. You only pay for the Lambda usage. You don't pay for SNS itself.""It is the cheapest solution in the market. It is on a monthly basis. After a month, you are build based on your usage. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees."

More Amazon SNS Pricing and Cost Advice »

"The price is high.""There is a different platform price between Windows, z/OS, and iSeries.""IBM products, in general, have high licensing costs and support costs are too high.""Most of our customers are quite happy with the solution but they have an issue with the cost. They want to move to cheaper solutions.""It is a very expensive product compared to the open source products in the market.""It would be a 10 out of 10 if it wasn't so expensive.""It's a very expensive product.""IBM MQ is expensive and they charge based on the CPU."

More IBM MQ Pricing and Cost Advice »

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Questions from the Community
Ask a question Earn 20 points	What is MQ software? Top Answer: Hi As someone with 45+ years of experience in the Transaction and Message Processing world, I have seen many "MQ" solutions that have come into the market place. From my perspective, while each… more » What do you like most about IBM MQ? Top Answer: The most valuable feature is the stability. It's perfect in this way. Read all 29 answers What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM MQ? Top Answer: Whatever the price is, it's worth it. Read all 16 answers
Ranking
3rd out of 16 in Message Oriented Middleware Views 1,292 Comparisons 1,250 Reviews 3 Average Words per Review 832 Rating 9.3	1st out of 16 in Message Oriented Middleware Views 30,258 Comparisons 22,252 Reviews 28 Average Words per Review 539 Rating 8.3
Popular Comparisons
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Also Known As
	WebSphere MQ
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Amazon	IBM
Overview
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a highly available, durable, secure, fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables you to decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Amazon SNS provides topics for high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging. Using Amazon SNS topics, your publisher systems can fan out messages to a large number of subscriber endpoints for parallel processing, including Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions, and HTTP/S webhooks. Additionally, SNS can be used to fan out notifications to end users using mobile push, SMS, and email. You can get started with Amazon SNS in minutes by using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS Software Development Kit (SDK).	IBM MQ provides the universal messaging backbone for service-oriented architecture (SOA) connectivity. It connects virtually any commercial IT system, whether on premise, in the cloud, or a mixture. For more than 20 years IBM has led the market in messaging middleware and more than 10,000 businesses across all geographies and industries rely on IBM MQ. Visit for your trial here.
Offer
Learn more about Amazon SNS Learn More	Learn more about IBM MQ Learn More
Sample Customers
PlayOn! Sports, NASA, Change Healthcare, FCBarcelona	Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Top Industries
VISITORS READING REVIEWS Media Company27% Computer Software Company21% Comms Service Provider16% Retailer5%	REVIEWERS Financial Services Firm36% Retailer13% Insurance Company12% Transportation Company7% VISITORS READING REVIEWS Computer Software Company34% Comms Service Provider15% Financial Services Firm13% Media Company6%
Company Size
No Data Available	REVIEWERS Small Business5% Midsize Enterprise9% Large Enterprise85% VISITORS READING REVIEWS Small Business6% Midsize Enterprise5% Large Enterprise89%

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