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What's the Difference Between Amazon EventBridge and AWS Step Functions?

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

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Comparisons
Amazon EventBridge
AWS Step Functions
Category

Application Integration, Event bus

Application Integration, Workflow orchestration
Description

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

Visual workflows for distributed applications
Best for
  • Event-driven architectures
  • SaaS integration
  • Application integration
  • Audit & monitoring
  • Workflow orchestration
  • Data processing pipelines
  • ML pipelines
  • IT automation
  • Microservices coordination
Key features
  • Event buses
  • Schema registry
  • Event replay
  • Pipes
  • Scheduler
  • Visual Workflow Studio
  • Standard & Express workflows
  • Error handling
  • Parallel execution
  • 200+ AWS service integrations
Pricing model

Pay per event published

Pay per state transition
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]

“Standard workflows run up to a year with exactly-once execution and are ideal for long-running orchestrations. Express workflows handle high-volume, short-duration event processing at a lower cost with at-least-once semantics. Use Workflow Studio to build visually before writing ASL JSON.”
— Gary McLean, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]
Product page

Learn more about Amazon EventBridge »

Learn more about AWS Step Functions »

When to use Amazon EventBridge or AWS Step Functions

Use Amazon EventBridge when:

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

Learn more about Amazon EventBridge »

Use AWS Step Functions when:

  • Workflow orchestration
  • Data processing pipelines
  • ML pipelines
  • IT automation
  • Microservices coordination

Learn more about AWS Step Functions »

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