No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Amazon SNS vs IBM MQ comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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 November 2026, in the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) category, the mindshare of Amazon SNS is 5.4%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 16.2%, down from 21.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ16.2%
Amazon SNS5.4%
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.
Srinivas Krishnamsetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, At Tiaa Senior Technical Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Asynchronous messaging has streamlined workflow triggers and supports reliable session rollbacks
The best features IBM MQ offers are the topic and subscription, as well as the IBM MQ session and message rollbacks, especially for JMS integration. IBM MQ serves as the underlying foundation for our JMS messages. IBM MQ has positively impacted my organization by enabling asynchronous processing, which means we do not need to wait for any responses from our downstream systems.

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."
"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."
"It's a simple communication service that allows us to communicate with customers."
"We see ROI because we use the features that help us and make our product work better."
"Stability has been good for us. It is quite high."
"Amazon SNS has SMS notifications as well. Most of the other solutions have only email notifications."
"We use this solution because the integration between the features is excellent."
"Messages easily flow from publisher or application to subscriber."
"It is easy to create a new queue, and the queue manager connecting to the remote queue works smoothly once the IP and port are included."
"It doesn't lose transactions, it's fast, and it runs on every platform."
"Combined with IBM MQ, this product is our primary data store."
"The solution offers very good features, including listener channels, remote queues, and transmit queues."
"The usability of the solution is very good."
"The solution is easy to understand and even medium developers can easily start using it."
"Overall, I am very happy with this product and my only complaint is that the price is high."
"The best features of IBM MQ were stability and straightforward application functionality; it has vendor support, which was a significant advantage, and in case of any production issues, we definitely get vendor support, whereas with Kafka and others, we have to rely on open community and our research."
 

Cons

"I believe Amazon SNS could be improved because when you integrate it, you also need SQS, so it is a two-service job."
"In terms of improvement, I would like to have better customer support for SNS. We can then manage it very easily."
"Messages should flow through a gateway without the need for a mediator."
"There needs to be more documentation on the integration with different platforms."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The memory management is very poor and it consumes too much memory."
"We have used technical support. Not for the solution, but for problems or issues. I would say that they are okay. If you want me to rate between one to ten, I would rate them four."
"The initial setup is difficult. Creating your own cluster is difficult. Working with cluster repositories is difficult. Issue management with IBM MQ is difficult."
"To implement such an IBM solution, a company has to pay a lot in term of licensing and consultancy."
"They could integrate monitoring into the solution, a bit more than they do now."
"The price is high."
"The installation of product upgrades and patches is very difficult. It requires the use of the IBM Installation Manager (IM)."
"IBM HQ's scalability isn't the best."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon SNS is cheap and I would rate it a three out of ten. The pricing is usage-based."
"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 pricing is very cheap."
"The solution has no up-front costs because you pay based on the number of messages you publish."
"Their pricing is competitive. I would rate the cost four out of five."
"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."
"One can use the tool for free."
"Small-scale companies may not want to buy IBM MQ because of its high cost."
"We have a special contract with IBM MQ that give us a certain price."
"It's a very expensive product."
"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."
"There is a different platform price between Windows, z/OS, and iSeries."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, and we are on an annual subscription."
"It is a very expensive product compared to the open source products in the market."
"Use the new and lightweight version (Liberty) to lower licensing costs. It is also easier to upgrade/maintain."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) solutions are best for your needs.
920,939 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Real Estate/Law Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise2
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: November 2026.
920,939 professionals have used our research since 2012.