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

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

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Comparisons
Amazon SNS
Amazon SQS
Category

Application Integration, Pub/sub notifications

Application Integration, Messaging queues
Description

Pub/sub, SMS, email, and mobile push notifications

Managed message queues
Best for
  • Application alerts
  • Push notifications
  • SMS messaging
  • Email notifications
  • Fan-out patterns
  • Microservices decoupling
  • Work queues
  • Batch processing
  • Event buffering
Key features
  • Topic-based pub/sub
  • Message filtering
  • FIFO topics
  • SMS & email delivery
  • Mobile push
  • Standard & FIFO queues
  • Dead-letter queues
  • Server-side encryption
  • Long polling
  • Message timers
Pricing model

Pay per million publishes + deliveries

Pay per million requests
Free tier

Yes

Yes
Expert take

“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]

“Standard queues give you nearly unlimited throughput with at-least-once delivery. FIFO queues guarantee exactly-once processing and strict ordering but cap at 3,000 messages/second with batching. Pick Standard for throughput, FIFO for correctness.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]
Product page

Learn more about Amazon SNS »

Learn more about Amazon SQS »

When to use Amazon SNS or Amazon SQS

Use Amazon SNS when:

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

Learn more about Amazon SNS »

Use Amazon SQS when:

  • Microservices decoupling
  • Work queues
  • Batch processing
  • Event buffering

Learn more about Amazon SQS »

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