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Amazon SNS vs IBM MQ comparison

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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
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 November 2026, in the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) category, the mindshare of Amazon SNS is 5.4%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 16.2%, down from 21.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ16.2%
Amazon SNS5.4%
Other78.4%
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.
Srinivas Krishnamsetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, At Tiaa Senior Technical Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Asynchronous messaging has streamlined workflow triggers and supports reliable session rollbacks
The best features IBM MQ offers are the topic and subscription, as well as the IBM MQ session and message rollbacks, especially for JMS integration. IBM MQ serves as the underlying foundation for our JMS messages. IBM MQ has positively impacted my organization by enabling asynchronous processing, which means we do not need to wait for any responses from our downstream systems.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"It's a simple communication service that allows us to communicate with customers."
"Since moving to SNS push notifications, we have had a lot better coverage."
"Stability has been good for us. It is quite high."
"Amazon SNS has SMS notifications as well. Most of the other solutions have only email notifications."
"The initial setup of Amazon SNS was easy."
"We use this solution because the integration between the features is excellent."
"We have found the key feature of this solution to be the simplicity of sending out notifications."
"I think the whole product is useful. Their database and all is very good, and the product is fine. The fact that it ensures message delivery is probably the most important thing. I also like that you're able to trace and track everything. If it doesn't arrive at the destination, it will go back to the queue, and no message will be lost."
"It is quite stable."
"IBM is still adding some features and coding some other systems on the security end. However, it has the most security features I've seen in a communication solution. Security is the most important thing for our purposes."
"The biggest advantage about us using messaging is that we can connect to most of the financial customers across the globe securely and data is always sent only once, asynchronously as well as synchronously."
"IBM MQ is more reliable and secure than other software."
"This solution offers good performance as well as scalability and stability."
"The most valuable feature is the Queue Manager, which lies in the middle between our application and our core banking server."
"I like the MQ's simplicity and rock-solid stability. I've never experienced a failure in two decades caused by the product itself. It has only failed due to human error."
 

Cons

"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."
"The tool needs to have direct integration with AvPro."
"Messages should flow through a gateway without the need for a mediator."
"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 needs to be more documentation on the integration with different platforms."
"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 believe Amazon SNS could be improved because when you integrate it, you also need SQS, so it is a two-service job."
"IBM HQ's scalability isn't the best."
"The user interface might be an area with room for improvement, but we use MQ Explorer and that helps solve a lot of our problems there."
"You should be able to increase the message size. It should be dynamic. Each queue has a limitation of 5,000."
"Scaling out MQ is possible, but it's not as easy as some other products."
"We have used the technical support, but we are more concerned about the response time."
"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."
"It could provide more monitoring tools and some improvement to the UI. I would also like to see more throughput in future versions."
"Presenting and maybe having some different options for different user experiences based on the administrative duties that you have to do as an app manager or configure the server or security would be an improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon SNS is cheap and I would rate it a three out of ten. The pricing is usage-based."
"The pricing is very cheap."
"Their pricing is competitive. I would rate the cost four out of five."
"The solution has no up-front costs because you pay based on the number of messages you publish."
"One can use the tool for free."
"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."
"IBM MQ is an expensive solution compared to other solutions. However, if you pay less you will not receive the same experience or features."
"Use the new and lightweight version (Liberty) to lower licensing costs. It is also easier to upgrade/maintain."
"You have to license per application installation and if you expand vertically or horizontally, you will be paying for more licenses. The licenses are approximately $10,000 to $15,000 a license, it can get expensive quite quickly."
"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."
"Small-scale companies may not want to buy IBM MQ because of its high cost."
"There is a different platform price between Windows, z/OS, and iSeries."
"We have a special contract with IBM MQ that give us a certain price."
"The price is high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Real Estate/Law Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon SNS?
I believe Amazon SNS could be improved because when you integrate it, you also need SQS, so it is a two-service job. It does not provide filtering or advanced routing, there is no ordering guarante...
What is your primary use case for Amazon SNS?
My main use case for Amazon SNS is that we use it for a messaging service with a publish-subscribe model to send messages to multiple subscribers.A specific example of how I use Amazon SNS for the ...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon SNS?
The features I find valuable in Amazon SNS are messaging, real-time notifications, and the ability to create an event-driven architecture. I give this product a rating of 8 out of 10.
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: November 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.