Amazon SNS vs IBM MQ comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM are both solutions in the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6, while IBM is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 5.9% mindshare in MOM, compared to IBM’s 17.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Amazon SNS

Read 11 Amazon SNS reviews

587 Views
587 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM MQ

Read 174 IBM MQ reviews

6,590 Views
1,384 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Amazon SNS

IBM MQ

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon SNS and IBM MQ based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ

February 2026

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Helped 881,733 peers since 2012

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

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 February 2026, in the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) category, the mindshare of Amazon SNS is 5.9%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 17.0%, down from 29.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM MQ	17.0%
Amazon SNS	5.9%
Other	77.1%

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)

Featured Reviews

Karthick Selvam

Senior Software Engineer at Saama

A free solution that provides notifications via emails and provides users with great monitoring services

I don't mind if, in the future, Amazon SNS plans to provide any future configuration from AWS at a good price. In the future, there needs to be an update in Amazon SNS. If you are going to initiate Amazon SNS configuration and set up the tool in your organization, the configuration phase is carried out one by one. For example, if I get 50 servers, I have to go through the configuration phase and initiate the Amazon SNS topic, for which you need to provide a proper SNS configuration that could take a lot of time. I expect Amazon SNS to provide some capabilities to allow the configuration process to be done in a single script. Amazon SNS needs to provide a bulk uploading system to users in the future.

Read full review

MykolaKuzmenko

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.

Read full review

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."

"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."

"Amazon SNS has SMS notifications as well. Most of the other solutions have only email notifications."

"The initial setup of Amazon SNS was easy."

"Messages easily flow from publisher or application to subscriber."

"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."

"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."

More Amazon SNS pros

"I haven't seen any issues with respect to the message loss."

"It is quite stable."

"Currently, we are not using many advanced features. We are only using point-to-point MQ. I have previously used features like context-based authentication, SSL authentication, and high availability. These are good and pretty cool features. They make your business reliable. For critical business needs, everyone uses only IBM MQ. It is the first choice because of its reliability. There is a one-send-and-one-delivery feature. It also has a no-message-loss feature, and because of that, only IBM MQ is used in banking or financial sectors."

"The biggest advantage of IBM MQ is its reliability."

"It is very robust and very scalable."

"The solution is very easy to work with."

"The most valuable feature is the interaction within the system."

"The most valuable feature is that it's a very strong integration platform but it is quite a monolithic solution. It's got everything."

More IBM MQ pros

Cons

"There needs to be more documentation on the integration with different platforms."

"The tool needs to have direct integration with AvPro."

"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."

"There could be more integration with other solutions."

"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."

"I expect Amazon SNS to provide some capabilities to allow the configuration process to be done in a single script."

"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."

"Messages should flow through a gateway without the need for a mediator."

More Amazon SNS cons

"IBM MQ's pricing is higher than its competitors'."

"Scaling is difficult with IBM MQ."

"Sometimes, not all messages are consumed in the queues. File transfers need improvement."

"It's hard to put in a nutshell, but it's sort of developed as more of an on-premise solution. It hasn't moved much away from that."

"We are looking at the latest version, and we hope that resilience, high availability, and monitoring will be improved. It can have some more improvements in the heterogeneous messaging feature. The current solution is on-premises, so good integration with public cloud messaging solutions would be useful."

"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."

"It's not always easy for applications to connect to IBM MQ, but I think it's fine in general."

"There are no improvements needed at this time."

More IBM MQ cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"One can use the tool for free."

"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."

"The pricing is very cheap."

"The solution has no up-front costs because you pay based on the number of messages you publish."

"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."

"Their pricing is competitive. I would rate the cost four out of five."

"Amazon SNS is cheap and I would rate it a three out of ten. The pricing is usage-based."

"There is a different platform price between Windows, z/OS, and iSeries."

"The licensing fees are paid quarterly and they are expensive."

"I think it's pretty reasonable, but I'm not so too sure of the current pricing strategy from IBM. We use many bundled services, and most often, we go through a service provided by some other third-party implementation. So, I can't really give an honest opinion about that."

"99.999 percent availability for less than a penny per message over the past 25 years. IBM MQ is the cheapest software in the IBM software portfolio, and it is one of the best."

"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."

"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price a seven. The product is expensive."

"IBM MQ has a flexible license model based on the Processor Value Unit (PVU) and I recommend it."

"IBM MQ is an expensive solution compared to other solutions. However, if you pay less you will not receive the same experience or features."

More IBM MQ pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

29%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Marketing Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	147

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...

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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...

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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...

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Comparisons

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Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs IBM MQ

Compared 5% of the time

Redis vs IBM MQ

Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon SNS

February 2026

Download Amazon SNS product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM MQ

January 2026

Download IBM MQ product report

Also Known As

No data available

WebSphere MQ

Overview

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a highly available, durable, secure, fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables you to decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Amazon SNS provides topics for high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging. Using Amazon SNS topics, your publisher systems can fan out messages to a large number of subscriber endpoints for parallel processing, including Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions, and HTTP/S webhooks. Additionally, SNS can be used to fan out notifications to end users using mobile push, SMS, and email.

You can get started with Amazon SNS in minutes by using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS Software Development Kit (SDK).

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

IBM MQ is a middleware product used to send or exchange messages across multiple platforms, including applications, systems, files, and services via MQs (messaging queues). This solution helps simplify the creation of business applications, and also makes them easier to maintain. IBM MQ is security-rich, has high performance, and provides a universal messaging backbone with robust connectivity. In addition, it also integrates easily with existing IT assets by using an SOA (service oriented architecture).

IBM MQ can be deployed:

On-premises
In the cloud
Hybrid cloud

IBM MQ supports the following APIs:

MQI (Message Queue Interface)
REST
.NET
MQTT
JMS
IBM MQ Light

IBM MQ Features

Some of the most powerful IBM MQ features include:

High availability
Stability and scalability
Flexible deployment options
Uniform clusters
Automated and intelligent workload balancing
Broad language, API, and messaging protocol support
Administrative features that simplify messaging management
Open standards development tools
Simple management tools

IBM MQ Benefits

Some of the benefits of using IBM MQ include:

Multi-style messaging: IBM MQ supports simple multi-style messaging, making it easy to connect diverse systems with support for message queuing, transactions, and more.
Reduced risk: With IBM MQ you will never lose a message, and messages are never delivered more than once.
Cloud-native: Because IBM MQ has a minimal infrastructure, it is suitable to be cloud-native, and therefore has the capability to always remain on.
Available anywhere: Using IBM MQ, you have access to secure messaging anywhere, at any time.
Secure: IBM MQ makes sure to keep your data safe by using TLS secured communications, providing access identity management, message-level security, and more measures to protect your information.
Easy for application programmers: To use IBM MQ, application programmers do not need to have any knowledge of communications programming.
Technical support: IBM MQ has a large user community and also provides support 24/7 as needed.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by IBM MQ users who are currently using the solution.

PeerSpot user Sunil S., a manager at a financial services firm, explains that they never lose messages are never lost in transit, mentioning that he can store messages and forward them as required: "Whenever payments are happening, such as incoming payments to the bank, we need to notify the customer. With MQ we can actually do that asynchronously. We don't want to notify the customer for each and every payment but, rather, more like once a day. That kind of thing can be enabled with the help of MQ."

Another PeerSpot reviewer, Luis L. who is a solutions director at Thesys Technologies, says that IBM MQ is a valuable solution and is "A stable and reliable software that offers good integration between different systems."

The head of operations at a financial services firm notes that "I have found the solution to be very robust. It has a strong reputation, is easy to use, simple to configure in our enterprise software, and supports all the protocols that we use."

In addition, a Software Engineer at a financial services firm praises the security benefits of it and states that “it has the most security features I've seen in a communication solution. Security is the most important thing for our purposes."

IBM

Sample Customers

PlayOn! Sports, NASA, Change Healthcare, FCBarcelona

Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation

Buyer's Guide

Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ

February 2026

Free Report: Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ

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