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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 September 2026, in the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) category, the mindshare of Amazon SNS is 5.3%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 16.0%, down from 24.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ16.0%
Amazon SNS5.3%
Other78.7%
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.
David Pizinger - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Technical Leader at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has faced unexpected VM restarts but continues to deliver messages reliably
I'm not sure if we've utilized IBM MQ's high availability. Our MQ VMs are set up in clusters, and I think our queue managers are set up in pairs. However, I don't know if we actually use any specific high availability features of IBM MQ that are out of the box. We have it architected with high availability because we use F5 load balancers, and everything about our architecture is highly available. I haven't personally used the management tools with IBM MQ, but we do have them, and our middleware folks leverage them. I can't really comment on them because I don't use them myself. I don't think the management tools help optimize message flows, and I'm not really aware of how they help in this. I'm not familiar with dynamic routing for IBM MQ.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Since moving to SNS push notifications, we have had a lot better coverage."
"The initial setup of Amazon SNS was easy."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon SNS is speed. It's really fast."
"We have found the key feature of this solution to be the simplicity of sending out notifications."
"Amazon SNS has SMS notifications as well. Most of the other solutions have only email notifications."
"We see ROI because we use the features that help us and make our product work better."
"Stability has been good for us. It is quite high."
"We use this solution because the integration between the features is excellent."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The best advice I can give is that it provides stability and performance and there's no loss of data."
"I have found that the solution scales well."
"IBM MQ is robust compared to other products in the market and also gives you support from the IBM team, allowing us to connect to the IBM technical team in case of any production fault or errors."
"IBM MQ is a stable solution, it is used mainframe computers and it is secure."
"It's reliable."
"Reliability is the most valuable feature. MQ is used to support critical business applications."
"The usual solution was HTTP requests, and MQ is much better because we get persistent storage and the messages don't get lost if the other party is not online."
 

Cons

"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."
"We would like the integration with third party applications to be improved within this solution."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Messages should flow through a gateway without the need for a mediator."
"There could be more integration with other solutions."
"A better user interface; right now, it's technician dependent, so it's a tech support role."
"Lately, it hasn't been that stable. We're using multi-instance queue managers and we're having a lot of issues with storage and that affects the availability of the queue manager."
"The initial setup is difficult. Creating your own cluster is difficult. Working with cluster repositories is difficult. Issue management with IBM MQ is difficult."
"The worst part is the monitoring or admin, especially in the ACE or Broker."
"I wanted to upgrade Windows Server. It's not that easy to move."
"If we have IBM MQ or one of the applications go down, our entire plant is down. Then sometimes, it's 2-3 hours or something before someone calls us back."
"In some cases, when a file got transferred, it has same name on both sides. That could have something to do with the product or it could have to do with something else."
"To implement such an IBM solution, a company has to pay a lot in term of licensing and consultancy."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"One can use the tool for free."
"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."
"Amazon SNS is cheap and I would rate it a three out of ten. The pricing is usage-based."
"Their pricing is competitive. I would rate the cost four out of five."
"There is real money involved here. As compared to RabbitMQ, IBM MQ is on the higher side in terms of cost."
"This solution requires a license and we have purchased an enterprise license."
"Use the new and lightweight version (Liberty) to lower licensing costs. It is also easier to upgrade/maintain."
"The pricing seems good according to the functionality that the solution provides."
"IBM's licensing model seems more reasonable than some competitors. They charge based on usage, which is good."
"I think the pricing is reasonable, especially with IIB as a part of it."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
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...
 

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: September 2026.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.