No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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)
5th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
12
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 May 2026, in the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) category, the mindshare of Amazon SNS is 4.9%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 16.5%, down from 28.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ16.5%
Amazon SNS4.9%
Other78.6%
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
 

Featured Reviews

HarshalJethwa - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Operations Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Event-driven messaging has improved real-time notifications and incident response
In my experience, the best features Amazon SNS offers include the ability to create an event-driven architecture and services, as well as real-time notifications.When I mention real-time capabilities and integration with other AWS services, specific integrations or real-time features that stand out most to me are S3 bucket events including creating a bucket, creating an object, updating an object, modifying an object, and deleting an object. Additionally, with CloudWatch alarms, when I get an alarm on CloudWatch, it will notify me via email using Amazon SNS. The same applies to application events. Amazon SNS has impacted my organization positively because using it, we are able to create an event-driven architecture and send notifications for events or incidents. Amazon SNS has helped my team respond faster, improved reliability, and saved time. Specifically, because of it, we are able to identify events as soon as possible. It saves our time and we can also process them as soon as possible.
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

"We have found the key feature of this solution to be the simplicity of sending out notifications."
"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."
"Amazon SNS has SMS notifications as well. Most of the other solutions have only email notifications."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon SNS is speed. It's really fast."
"It's a simple communication service that allows us to communicate with customers."
"Amazon SNS has helped my team respond faster, improved reliability, and saved time."
"Since moving to SNS push notifications, we have had a lot better coverage."
"We use this solution because the integration between the features is excellent."
"I've used other solutions, but the most valuable features of this solution are the search capabilities, consolidating the data and searching through the data."
"IBM MQ is a choice to create a relation between the Mainframe and distributed servers, allowing applications running on Linux or Windows to interface with Mainframe applications and enable more development of easier and open applications in a distributed environment."
"Compared to any other product, it's the most robust I've worked with, and it's extremely easy to manage."
"Overall, MQ is good, capability-wise."
"It is easy to use and seamless with our existing technology."
"The solution is very stable."
"It's highly scalable. It provides various ways to establish high availability and workloads. E.g., you can spread workloads inside of your clusters."
"The MQ appliance has very good performance."
 

Cons

"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."
"I expect Amazon SNS to provide some capabilities to allow the configuration process to be done in a single script."
"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."
"There could be more integration with other solutions."
"There needs to be more documentation on the integration with different platforms."
"In terms of improvement, I would like to have better customer support for SNS. We can then manage it very easily."
"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."
"Messages should flow through a gateway without the need for a mediator."
"IBM MQ can scale, but there are some challenges with it."
"The licensing fees should be more cost-effective so that we can better pitch the product to our clients. With the pricing as it is, they tend to move away from IBM products."
"Scaling is difficult with IBM MQ."
"In the next release, I would like for there to be easier monitoring. The UI should be easier for non-technical users to set up appliances and servers."
"I believe there is too much code to be done in order to handle the elements that you develop."
"If we're trying to connect to something in the web or other things, we don't use it, because we feel that REST or other APIs are more easily adaptable to that environment."
"Technical support is average. In terms of efficiency and response time, it's average, comparable to any other vendor."
"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."
 

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."
"Amazon SNS is cheap and I would rate it a three out of ten. The pricing is usage-based."
"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."
"The pricing is very cheap."
"One can use the tool for free."
"It is a very expensive product compared to the open source products in the market."
"Pricing could be better, as with all IBM products. But their performance in production, along with security and scalability, will pay returns in the long run."
"We have a special contract with IBM MQ that give us a certain price."
"Use the new and lightweight version (Liberty) to lower licensing costs. It is also easier to upgrade/maintain."
"It would be a 10 out of 10 if it wasn't so expensive."
"Our costs haven't increased but they also have not improved."
"It is a licensed product. As compared to an open-source solution, such as RabbitMQ, it is obviously costly. If you're using IBM Message Broker, which is a licensed product, IBM MQ is included in the same license. You don't have to pay separately for IBM MQ. The license cost of IBM MQ is lesser than IBM Message Broker."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, and we are on an annual subscription."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) solutions are best for your needs.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.