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Amazon SNS vs IBM MQ comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 SNS
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
6th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM MQ
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Queue (MQ) Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) category, the mindshare of Amazon SNS is 6.3%, up from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 18.5%, down from 28.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM MQ18.5%
Amazon SNS6.3%
Other75.2%
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
 

Featured Reviews

Bireshwar Adhikary - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at ATOS
The best service available with easy message flow and a pay-as-you-go model
Messages easily flow from publisher or application to subscriber. You can also flow messages from publisher to SNS with an https-like mediator. Amazon SQS is there, so message queue services are also there. The message transports to the service provider such as Redshift, the SQ bucket, Teams, Splunk, or any other message service. The solution has no up-front costs. Messages flow much more quickly than in the past. They used to run a bit late after being published.
MK
SWIFT manager at Raiffeisen Bank Aval
Reliable payment processing is achieved with minimal disruption
Currently, we have some disadvantages; it's a bit difficult to use IBM ID to access support from the IBM site. To get nice support from IBM, we need to use IBM ID, and it's a bit complicated to integrate it with IBM support. Support can be better because sometimes we need explanations for some behaviors of the product, and it's not easy to reach the proper person in IBM support. They could add some new features into IBM MQ to make it better. A graphical user interface in addition to MQ Explorer could be useful, but we are satisfied with MQ Explorer as well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The initial setup of Amazon SNS was easy."
"Amazon SNS has SMS notifications as well. Most of the other solutions have only email notifications."
"It's a simple communication service that allows us to communicate with customers."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon SNS is speed. It's really fast."
"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."
"The best aspect of this solution is its simplicity. We just have to create topics and can have as many subscriptions as we want under any topic we create."
"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."
"The solution allows one to easily configure an IBM MQQueueManager."
"The high availability and session recovery are the most valuable features because we need the solution live all day."
"The best features of IBM MQ were stability and straightforward application functionality; it has vendor support, which was a significant advantage, and in case of any production issues, we definitely get vendor support, whereas with Kafka and others, we have to rely on open community and our research."
"Secure, safe, and very fast."
"I have found that the solution scales well."
"It's ability to scale, it's ability to do guaranteed delivery and it's ability to do point-to-point of what we subscribe are the most valuable features."
"IBM HQ's stability is great - we send six million messages a day, and we're very satisfied with HQ's ability to handle that volume."
"We like IBM MQ for our synchronous communications and transactional applications that require a lot of CPS."
 

Cons

"We would like to have the option when someone leaves the organization or moves to another team, to remove notifications. Currently this needs to be done manually by the company admin."
"In future releases, I want to see if the platforms that SMS can reach. It would be a good way to improve it. More platforms to be able to use it."
"Messages should flow through a gateway without the need for a mediator."
"I expect Amazon SNS to provide some capabilities to allow the configuration process to be done in a single script."
"We would like the integration with third party applications to be improved within this solution."
"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."
"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."
"There could be more integration with other solutions."
"The memory management is very poor and it consumes too much memory."
"It could get a face lift with a modern marketing campaign."
"Everything in the solution could be simplified a little. We have trouble with the configuration and cost which is mostly an internal issue, but nevertheless, the errors do come up when there are configuration changes across a specific version. We have slightly different versions, which may have slightly different configurations which cause issues."
"It is expensive. The cost is high. There should be more improvement in the new age of technologies."
"We need to have a better administration console and better monitoring features. Right now, they are not good and could be a lot better."
"IBM could revamp the interface. The API is huge, but some developers find it limiting because of the cost. They tend to wrap the API course into the JMS, which means they're missing out on some good features. They should work a little bit on the API exposure."
"Scalability is lacking compared to the cloud native products coming into the market."
"With IBM products, there's less marketing. If they do more demos and more seminars on their products, it will be very useful. On a given day. I get seminar invites for many vendors and products, but for IBM, I may get an invite once or twice a year."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"One can use the tool for free."
"The solution has no up-front costs because you pay based on the number of messages you publish."
"Their pricing is competitive. I would rate the cost four out of five."
"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."
"Amazon SNS is cheap and I would rate it a three out of ten. The pricing is usage-based."
"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."
"The pricing is very cheap."
"It is a very expensive product compared to the open source products in the market."
"The solution costs are high, it is going to cost a fair bit for annual operating costs and support."
"IBM is expensive."
"The problem with this product is that it's a little bit expensive."
"Use the new and lightweight version (Liberty) to lower licensing costs. It is also easier to upgrade/maintain."
"To implement such an IBM solution, a company has to pay a lot in term of licensing and consultancy. A pricing model might be a better option."
"The licensing fees are paid quarterly and they are expensive."
"It's super expensive, so ask them if they can consolidate some other licensing costs. But, IBM is IBM, so I guess we'll pay for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

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What is MQ software?
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 pro...
What are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?
Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...
How does IBM MQ compare with VMware RabbitMQ?
IBM MQ has a great reputation behind it, and this solution is very robust with great stability. It is easy to use, simple to configure and integrates well with our enterprise ecosystem and protocol...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
WebSphere MQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PlayOn! Sports, NASA, Change Healthcare, FCBarcelona
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.