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What's the Difference Between Amazon MQ and Amazon SQS?

Compare Amazon MQ and Amazon SQS side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

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Comparisons
Amazon MQ
Amazon SQS
Category

Application Integration, Messaging queues

Application Integration, Messaging queues

Description

Managed message broker service

Managed message queues

Best for
  • Application migration
  • Hybrid messaging
  • Enterprise integration
  • Legacy app modernization
  • Microservices decoupling
  • Work queues
  • Batch processing
  • Event buffering
Key features
  • ActiveMQ & RabbitMQ
  • Multi-AZ
  • Network of brokers
  • LDAP authentication
  • JMS/AMQP/MQTT/STOMP
  • Standard & FIFO queues
  • Dead-letter queues
  • Server-side encryption
  • Long polling
  • Message timers
Pricing model

Pay per broker instance hour + storage

Pay per million requests

Free tier

Yes

Yes

Expert take

“Amazon MQ is for teams migrating existing applications that use standard protocols (JMS, AMQP, MQTT, STOMP). It is a drop-in replacement for on-premises ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ brokers. For new applications without protocol constraints, SQS and SNS are simpler and more cost-effective.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“Standard queues give you nearly unlimited throughput with at-least-once delivery. FIFO queues guarantee exactly-once processing and strict ordering but cap at 3,000 messages/second with batching. Pick Standard for throughput, FIFO for correctness.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

Product page

When to use Amazon MQ or Amazon SQS

Use Amazon MQ when:

  • Application migration
  • Hybrid messaging
  • Enterprise integration
  • Legacy app modernization

Learn more about Amazon MQ »

Use Amazon SQS when:

  • Microservices decoupling
  • Work queues
  • Batch processing
  • Event buffering

Learn more about Amazon SQS »

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