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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)
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 August 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 16.3%, down from 26.5% 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 SNS5.3%
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.
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

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Since moving to SNS push notifications, we have had a lot better coverage."
"Amazon SNS has SMS notifications as well. Most of the other solutions have only email notifications."
"We use it for all our integration cases, including the integration of core applications within our company and external solutions from our partners."
"Go for MQ. It will solve your problems for interconnectivity and just whatever you need to do; scalability wherever you need to go."
"IBM MQ is a stable solution, it is used mainframe computers and it is secure."
"It has definitely brought a lot of benefit into our organization, especially when you talk about applications talking to each other."
"Technical support is quite helpful."
"The most valuable feature of IBM MQ is transaction processing."
"The solution is stable."
"The MQ protocol is widely used across multiple applications and it's so simple for connectivity."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"Messages should flow through a gateway without the need for a mediator."
"In terms of improvement, I would like to have better customer support for SNS. We can then manage it very easily."
"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 expect Amazon SNS to provide some capabilities to allow the configuration process to be done in a single script."
"We would like the integration with third party applications to be improved within this solution."
"I wanted to upgrade Windows Server. It's not that easy to move."
"IBM MQ can be improved by having a feature where a message can be rolled back, especially if I want to go back to a particular message."
"IBM MQ's pricing is higher than its competitors'."
"With the previous versions, it was just that we were a version behind on what the version of Maximo and everything we were using, so it was causing a few little glitches and buggy issues."
"They have provided a Liberty Profile in the Web Console for administration, and that could be further enhanced. It is not fit for use by an enterprise. They have to get rid of their WebSphere process and develop a front-end on Node.js or the like."
"IBM MQ could streamline its complexity to be more like Kafka without the channel complexities of clusters, making it more straightforward."
"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."
"It would be nice to have AI features and an updated graphical user interface."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution has no up-front costs because you pay based on the number of messages you publish."
"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."
"IBM MQ is an expensive solution compared to other solutions. However, if you pay less you will not receive the same experience or features."
"In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side."
"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."
"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."
"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price a seven. The product is expensive."
"The fee for this solution is on the higher end of the scale."
"IBM MQ has a flexible license model based on the Processor Value Unit (PVU) and I recommend it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
17%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Retailer
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

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: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.