What's the Difference Between Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS?
Compare Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon SNS
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Amazon SQS
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Category
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Application Integration, Pub/sub notifications |
Application Integration, Messaging queues |
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Description
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Pub/sub, SMS, email, and mobile push notifications |
Managed message queues |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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Pay per million publishes + deliveries |
Pay per million requests |
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Free tier
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Yes |
Yes |
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Expert take
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“SNS is for fan-out: one message published to a topic can be delivered to many subscribers simultaneously (SQS queues, Lambda functions, HTTP endpoints, email, SMS). The SNS+SQS fan-out pattern is the backbone of most event-driven architectures on AWS.” |
“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.” |
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Product page
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When to use Amazon SNS or Amazon SQS
Use Amazon SNS when:
- Application alerts
- Push notifications
- SMS messaging
- Email notifications
- Fan-out patterns
Use Amazon SQS when:
- Microservices decoupling
- Work queues
- Batch processing
- Event buffering
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