Amazon MQ vs SQS comparison

Amazon MQ and Amazon SQS are both solutions in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category. Amazon MQ is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.6, while Amazon SQS is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon MQ holds a 3.7% mindshare in MQ, compared to Amazon SQS’s 8.1% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Amazon MQ users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Amazon SQS users who would recommend it.

Amazon MQ

Read 7 Amazon MQ reviews

917 Views
761 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Amazon SQS

Read 30 Amazon SQS reviews

3,317 Views
1,824 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Amazon MQ

Amazon SQS

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

Amazon MQ and Amazon SQS are messaging solutions within AWS, with Amazon SQS often seen as having an advantage due to its simplicity and scalability.

Features: Amazon MQ supports industry-standard protocols for seamless integration with existing applications and offers rich features for complex applications. It is a full-fledged message broker with robust security. Amazon SQS is known for its simplicity and scalability, providing a straightforward API, low-latency message queuing, and easy implementation for serverless architectures. It offers features like FIFO capabilities and integration with AWS services.

Room for Improvement: Amazon MQ could improve its initial setup process to match the simplicity of SQS and enhance its scalability. It may also require better management of operational overhead. Amazon SQS could benefit from enhanced protocol support and additional features for more complex use cases. A richer set of enterprise-level support options and more advanced administrative tools could further strengthen its offering.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon SQS is more straightforward to deploy, requiring minimal setup, and focuses on rapid scalability, making it ideal for quick implementation. Amazon MQ is more complex to set up due to its feature-rich nature but offers detailed documentation and robust support for integrating with existing systems, benefiting projects needing comprehensive messaging features.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon MQ generally has higher setup costs due to its advanced functionality but delivers high ROI for projects requiring comprehensive messaging capabilities. Amazon SQS provides cost-effective pricing with a pay-as-you-go model, resulting in low initial setup costs and positive ROI for services requiring basic queuing capabilities. Its low cost and efficient scaling make it attractive for budget-conscious projects, with options starting at $0.00000040 per query request.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon MQ vs. Amazon SQS Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MQ vs. Amazon SQS

July 2025

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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 MQ

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

6th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Amazon SQS

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of Amazon MQ is 3.7%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon SQS is 8.1%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Featured Reviews

AdnanKhan

Senior System Administrator at Ovrlod

Offers good web hosting capacity and security features, but price needs to be reduced

In terms of Amazon MQ's scalability and throughput capabilities, the tool is mostly accessible, stable, and competent with similar platforms. The tool's web hosting capacity and security features are good. The impact of the solution on process efficiencies depends on the clients. If the traffic is too high for a client, I suggest they go with Azure as it is more scalable and stable, while the support is good. I recommend Azure over Amazon MQ. Starting with Amazon MQ can be a bit tricky, but I know that the product is mature and the support is very good. The integration capabilities of Amazon MQ are flexible. I am not using AI with the tool. I would not recommend Amazon MQ to others. As a service provider, my company usually recommends cheaply priced and reliable solutions to our customers. Azure is one most reliable tool that comes at a good price point. Even Google Cloud is a super solution but for launching Google Cloud, support is not available, so one needs to do it with tutorials which are not completely available in YouTube. I rate the tool a seven and a half out of ten.

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Hari Prakash Pokala

Senior Java Engineer at Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

Valuable AWS services enhance data analysis yet could benefit from flexible data streams

I am using multiple services such as AWS Lambda, S3, EC2, ECS, and the SNS SQS services, along with QuickSight reports and some of the VPC concepts. We have an email notification system integrated with Spring Branch. Once a batch job completes, SNS and SQS trigger events, sending notification…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Amazon MQ is important for being collaborative, allowing for centralized information."

"We have found Amazon MQ to provide scalability, robustness, and security."

"The initial Amazon MQ setup is very easy both when you do it on your own or use the self-managed instance."

"Amazon MQ is a secure solution."

"Amazon MQ is managed by AWS and is easy to use."

"Amazon MQ is a very scalable solution."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its managed service aspect. It's simple to implement and use. It requires minimal effort to maintain business operations."

"Overall, I would rate Amazon SQS as ten out of ten."

"The most valuable features of the solution are AWS Lambda services, ECS, and QuickSight reports, which are beneficial for data analysis."

"The scale it manages is quite impressive."

"We used SQS for the Kapolei system to ensure that certain tasks were executed precisely once. The first-in, first-out (FIFO) capability was a great feature for us. Additionally, its redundancy out of the box meant we didn't have to worry about missing messages. It provided peace of mind and automatically instilled trust, relieving us of any concerns."

"It is stable and scalable."

"Amazon SQS provides faster search through indexing via OpenSearch."

"All Amazon Web Services resources are easy to configure."

"I am able to find out what's going on very easily."

More Amazon SQS pros

Cons

"Amazon MQ isn't a cheap tool."

"Depending on your use cases, Amazon MQ can be cheap or expensive."

"Amazon MQ is a good solution for small and medium-sized enterprises. It's open-source software, which means it's cheaper than its competitors."

"The product should improve its monitoring capabilities. It needs to improve the pricing also."

"If Amazon provided a templating engine, it would be great."

"The solution needs improvement in the back end and security."

"In community support, especially with distributed systems and integration, there is a need for better system organization."

"There is room for improvement by making use of Kafka services to create more flexible data streams."

"For Amazon SQS, in particular, I think AWS Management Console has shortcomings. AWS Management Console should be a better pluggable option to help users with some integrations."

"Be cautious around pay-as-you-use licensing as costs can become expensive."

"I do not think that this solution is easy to use and the documentation of this solution has a lot of problems and can be improved in the next release. Most of the time, the images in the document are from older versions."

"The search should be more user-friendly, allowing me to search for a longer period of time and return results faster."

"There could be improvements in the UI for security and scalability."

"It would be easier to have a dashboard that allows us to see everything and manage everything since we have so many queues."

"It would be beneficial to have the ability to peek at messages currently in Amazon SQS without needing to monitor incoming messages."

More Amazon SQS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As a client or as an end user, I would say that Google Cloud Storage or Google Cloud are cheaper than Amazon MQ."

"Depending on your use cases, Amazon MQ can be cheap or expensive."

"Amazon SQS is quite expensive and is at the highest price point compared to other solutions."

"The pricing of Amazon SQS is reasonable. The first million requests are free every month, and after, it's cost 40 cents for every million requests. There are not any additional fees."

"Amazon SQS offers a generous free tier, beyond which it remains very cost-effective. The cost per million messages is less than a dollar, making it an economical choice."

"It's quite expensive."

"The pricing model is pay-as-you-use. It depends on your usage and configuration."

"Amazon SQS is moderately priced."

"I rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten."

"Compared to the other options and based on what I have heard, Amazon SQS is relatively more expensive, but it is not insanely expensive."

More Amazon SQS pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon MQ?

The tool's most valuable feature is its managed service aspect. It's simple to implement and use. It requires minimal effort to maintain business operations.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon MQ?

The message queue requires an improvement in the message template MQ link. If Amazon provided a templating engine, it would be great.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon MQ?

We are using Amazon MQ for our AI model. It's used for notifications and other services. We have an application for which Amazon MQ acts as a broker.

See all answers

What do you like most about Amazon SQS?

It is stable and scalable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon SQS?

The retention period for messages could be improved. Currently, messages are retained for four or seven days. It would be beneficial if there was a provision to configure and retain messages for lo...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon SQS?

I primarily use Amazon SQS ( /products/amazon-sqs-reviews ) for asynchronous messaging. It is part of our distributed system design, where we use it for asynchronous communication by posting a mess...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs Amazon MQ

Compared 26% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs Amazon MQ

Compared 14% of the time

Apache Kafka vs Amazon MQ

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service vs Amazon MQ

Compared 9% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs Amazon MQ

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon MQ Competitors

Apache Kafka vs Amazon SQS

Compared 19% of the time

Redis vs Amazon SQS

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Amazon SQS

Compared 15% of the time

ActiveMQ vs Amazon SQS

Compared 13% of the time

IBM MQ vs Amazon SQS

Compared 8% of the time

More Amazon SQS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Message Queue (MQ) Software

July 2025

Download Amazon MQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon SQS

August 2025

Download Amazon SQS product report

Overview

Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. Message brokers allow different software systems–often using different programming languages, and on different platforms–to communicate and exchange information. Amazon MQ reduces your operational load by managing the provisioning, setup, and maintenance of ActiveMQ, a popular open-source message broker. Connecting your current applications to Amazon MQ is easy because it uses industry-standard APIs and protocols for messaging, including JMS, NMS, AMQP, STOMP, MQTT, and WebSocket. Using standards means that in most cases, there’s no need to rewrite any messaging code when you migrate to AWS.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message oriented middleware, and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. Get started with SQS in minutes using the AWS console, Command Line Interface or SDK of your choice, and three simple commands.

SQS offers two types of message queues. Standard queues offer maximum throughput, best-effort ordering, and at-least-once delivery. SQS FIFO queues are designed to guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the exact order that they are sent.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

SkipTheDishes, Malmberg, Dealer.com, Bench Accounting

EMS, NASA, BMW, Capital One

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MQ vs. Amazon SQS

July 2025

Free Report: Amazon MQ vs. Amazon SQS

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