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Amazon MQ vs SQS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Amazon MQ
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon SQS
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of Amazon MQ is 3.9%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon SQS is 5.8%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon SQS5.8%
Amazon MQ3.9%
Other90.3%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

RamilCerrada - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution architect at SM Supermalls
Has provided consistent functionality across on-premise and cloud while simplifying cloud integration
I have experience with on-premise setups using ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, but with regards to AWS, I use it via cloud only. There's a free tier with Amazon MQ based on their website, which is a six-month free trial of a single instance, allowing per month usage of either ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ, five gig of Amazon EFS storage, and for ActiveMQ, it's 20 gig of Amazon EBS storage for RabbitMQ. I did not purchase Amazon MQ through AWS Marketplace. Amazon MQ has published information about having 650 hours of free trial usage. This can be found via the AWS website by searching for AWS MQ. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Amazon MQ an eight out of ten.
Roberto Costa - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data & AI Engineer at Imprint
Facilitates seamless queue creation and management for efficient application decoupling
If you need a messaging service to help decouple your application, Amazon SQS would be a smart choice because it's easy to use and very easy to manage Amazon SQS is a simple service to use. If we compare with other solutions such as RabbitMQ for messaging, Amazon SQS is easier to use and easier…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The initial Amazon MQ setup is very easy both when you do it on your own or use the self-managed instance."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its managed service aspect. It's simple to implement and use. It requires minimal effort to maintain business operations."
"Amazon MQ is a very scalable solution."
"Amazon MQ is a secure solution."
"Since we utilize AWS, it's easy to integrate Amazon MQ and work with other third-party software, as they have standard communications via API or native language."
"Amazon MQ is managed by AWS and is easy to use."
"We have found Amazon MQ to provide scalability, robustness, and security."
"Amazon MQ is important for being collaborative, allowing for centralized information."
"It is stable and scalable."
"Overall, I would rate Amazon SQS as ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature for me is the variety of queues offered, such as the standard and FIFO queues, providing reliable communication."
"For people who don't want any infrastructure and managing overhead, I recommend Amazon SQS."
"This is a free-to-use solution for somebody who wants to do 1 million requests, and this is sufficient for any application at a small organization."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to decouple components, which is beneficial because our architecture usually has different components and the communication aspect of components is crucial."
"SQS is very stable, and it has lots of features."
"Amazon SQS provides faster search through indexing via OpenSearch."
 

Cons

"Amazon MQ is a good solution for small and medium-sized enterprises. It's open-source software, which means it's cheaper than its competitors."
"Depending on your use cases, Amazon MQ can be cheap or expensive."
"Amazon MQ isn't a cheap tool."
"Monitoring capabilities are not yet fully developed, since it's a message broker service, so it focuses more on the health of Apache."
"On a scale of one to 10, one being the best and 10 being the worst, I would give Amazon MQ an eight for overall performance."
"The product should improve its monitoring capabilities. It needs to improve the pricing also."
"The solution needs improvement in the back end and security."
"If Amazon provided a templating engine, it would be great."
"Support could be improved."
"The tool needs improvement in user-friendliness and discoverability."
"The current visibility timeout of five minutes is okay. However, I'd like to explore the possibility of extending it for specific use cases."
"The retention period for messages could be improved. Currently, messages are retained for four or seven days."
"There is room for improvement in handling large-scale data."
"There could be improvements in the UI for security and scalability."
"Amazon SQS is costly. I think there could be improvements in how it facilitates comparisons between different AWS products. A calculator would be helpful. The calculator for Kafka is based on factors like throughput or storage used in the last month. In contrast, the calculator for Amazon SQS is based on the number of transactions processed. These different approaches make it challenging to compare them directly. I suggest AWS provide a straightforward calculator where I can input one aspect, and it calculates costs for multiple solutions."
"I do not think that this solution is easy to use and the documentation of this solution has a lot of problems and can be improved in the next release. Most of the time, the images in the document are from older versions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Depending on your use cases, Amazon MQ can be cheap or expensive."
"As a client or as an end user, I would say that Google Cloud Storage or Google Cloud are cheaper than Amazon MQ."
"Amazon SQS is more affordable compared to other solutions."
"It's quite expensive."
"The pricing model is pay-as-you-use. It depends on your usage and configuration."
"I rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten."
"Amazon SQS offers a generous free tier, beyond which it remains very cost-effective. The cost per million messages is less than a dollar, making it an economical choice."
"Amazon SQS is quite expensive and is at the highest price point compared to other solutions."
"Compared to EC2 and other services, Amazon SQS' pricing is cheaper."
"Compared to the other options and based on what I have heard, Amazon SQS is relatively more expensive, but it is not insanely expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon MQ?
Amazon MQ needs to have data collected on performance to analyze trends for improvement. Additionally, some tools can suggest how to improve performance in terms of speed, time, and processing, whi...
What is your primary use case for Amazon MQ?
I have some experience working with Amazon MQ.
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon MQ?
I have experience with on-premise setups using ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, but with regards to AWS, I use it via cloud only. There's a free tier with Amazon MQ based on their website, which is a six-mon...
What needs improvement with Amazon SQS?
There is nothing I can remember that I would want as new features for Amazon SQS.
What is your primary use case for Amazon SQS?
If you need a messaging service to help decouple your application, Amazon SQS would be a smart choice because it's easy to use and very easy to manage.
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon SQS?
I would recommend Amazon SQS to other people. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution a 10.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SkipTheDishes, Malmberg, Dealer.com, Bench Accounting
EMS, NASA, BMW, Capital One
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MQ vs. Amazon SQS and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.