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What's the Difference Between Amazon EventBridge and Amazon SNS?

Compare Amazon EventBridge and Amazon SNS side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

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Comparisons
Amazon EventBridge
Amazon SNS
Category

Application Integration, Event bus

Application Integration, Pub/sub notifications
Description

Builds event-driven apps at scale across AWS, SaaS or existing systems

Pub/sub, SMS, email, and mobile push notifications
Best for
  • Event-driven architectures
  • SaaS integration
  • Application integration
  • Audit & monitoring
  • Application alerts
  • Push notifications
  • SMS messaging
  • Email notifications
  • Fan-out patterns
Key features
  • Event buses
  • Schema registry
  • Event replay
  • Pipes
  • Scheduler
  • Topic-based pub/sub
  • Message filtering
  • FIFO topics
  • SMS & email delivery
  • Mobile push
Pricing model

Pay per event published

Pay per million publishes + deliveries
Free tier

Yes

Yes
Expert take

“EventBridge is the evolution of CloudWatch Events with richer filtering, schema discovery, and SaaS integration. Use it when you need content-based routing (filter on event fields) or need to connect to third-party SaaS sources. For simple queue-based decoupling, SQS is lighter weight.”
— Didier Durand, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“SNS is for fan-out: one message published to a topic can be delivered to many subscribers simultaneously (SQS queues, Lambda functions, HTTP endpoints, email, SMS). The SNS+SQS fan-out pattern is the backbone of most event-driven architectures on AWS.”
— Oleksii Bebych, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]
Product page

Learn more about Amazon EventBridge »

Learn more about Amazon SNS »

When to use Amazon EventBridge or Amazon SNS

Use Amazon EventBridge when:

  • Event-driven architectures
  • SaaS integration
  • Application integration
  • Audit & monitoring

Learn more about Amazon EventBridge »

Use Amazon SNS when:

  • Application alerts
  • Push notifications
  • SMS messaging
  • Email notifications
  • Fan-out patterns

Learn more about Amazon SNS »

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