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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)
5th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
13
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 June 2026, in the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) category, the mindshare of Amazon SNS is 4.8%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 16.3%, down from 28.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ16.3%
Amazon SNS4.8%
Other78.9%
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
 

Featured Reviews

VK
Technical Trainer at DIEMS Chh.Sambhajinagar
Event-driven alerts have automated incident response and support real-time campus workflows
Amazon SNS helps with microservices decoupling and SaaS scalability in our projects. When Lambda triggers, a proper notification is provided to the faculty or student, which is generated automatically due to the Lambda function. Amazon SNS has many features, including message filtering, multi-protocol support, security and compliance, and global reach. Beyond Lambda triggers and microservices communication, Amazon SNS shines with all these features. It is not just a notification tool; it is a versatile backbone for an event-driven system. Amazon SNS has impacted our organization positively due to all the notifications. For example, when a student uploads a file to Amazon S3, Amazon SNS immediately publishes an event that triggers a Lambda function, which scans the file for security, processes metadata, or even sends a notification to faculty. This automation ensures real-time processing without manual intervention, and it is something emphasized in training sessions as a practical DevOps workflow.
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

"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 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 most valuable feature of Amazon SNS is speed. It's really fast."
"We see ROI because we use the features that help us and make our product work better."
"The initial setup of Amazon SNS was easy."
"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."
"Stability has been good for us. It is quite high."
"Technically, it has made our lives a lot easier."
"Clustering is one of its most valuable features."
"The technical support has been pretty good; every time I've used it, they were knowledgeable and responsive, and I'm quite happy with their level of service."
"From a company's productivity perspective, we see a lot of benefits."
"It's an incredibly reliable, stable product for us."
"There are some parts of the business side that couldn't be done without it; it's an integral part."
"If you're looking for a traditional queuing system, IBM MQ is the right choice because of the stability and the performance."
"We have found the security and monitoring capabilities of the product most valuable."
 

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."
"We would like the integration with third party applications to be improved within this solution."
"Amazon SNS is strong, but there are a few areas where it could be improved."
"There needs to be more documentation on the integration with different platforms."
"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."
"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."
"The scalability is the one area where IBM has fallen behind. As much as it is used, there is a limit to the number of people who are skilled in MQ. That is definitely an issue. Places have kept their MQ-skilled people and other places have really struggled to get MQ skills. It's not a widely-known skillset."
"The tool is expensive."
"The main issue we are having with the solution is due to the connection dropouts which have been going on for a long time now."
"I believe the stability of the product has decreased since we began using it initially."
"We have used the technical support, but we are more concerned about the response time."
"The migration from different versions can be very different and difficult."
"Some of the new features that their competitors are coming out with, like AMQ with transformation of messages, better security, and even scalability at the microservices level, are areas where MQ is not quite there yet."
"The barrier to success is basically the engine behind the collection of the data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"One can use the tool for free."
"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."
"This solution requires a license and we have purchased an enterprise license."
"I think IBM needs to look at its pricing. The prices of IBM products should be simple. The old way of pricing should now be moving on to the cloud to be pay as you go, a plan-based kind of pricing."
"IBM's licensing model seems more reasonable than some competitors. They charge based on usage, which is good."
"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."
"The fee for this solution is on the higher end of the scale."
"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."
"The licensing fees are paid quarterly and they are expensive."
"Most of our customers are quite happy with the solution but they have an issue with the cost. They want to move to cheaper solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Retailer
9%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

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...
 

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: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.