Amazon SNS vs IBM MQ comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM are both solutions in the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6, while IBM is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.5. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 5.6% mindshare in MOM, compared to IBM’s 23.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Amazon SNS

Read 11 Amazon SNS reviews

535 Views
535 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM MQ

Read 172 IBM MQ reviews

6,471 Views
1,229 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Amazon SNS

IBM MQ

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon SNS and IBM MQ based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ

September 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 870,697 peers since 2012

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

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

172

Ranking in other categories

Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Queue (MQ) Software (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) category, the mindshare of Amazon SNS is 5.6%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 23.3%, down from 27.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM MQ	23.3%
Amazon SNS	5.6%
Other	71.1%

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)

Featured Reviews

Bireshwar Adhikary

Senior Consultant at ATOS

The best service available with easy message flow and a pay-as-you-go model

Messages easily flow from publisher or application to subscriber. You can also flow messages from publisher to SNS with an https-like mediator. Amazon SQS is there, so message queue services are also there. The message transports to the service provider such as Redshift, the SQ bucket, Teams, Splunk, or any other message service. The solution has no up-front costs. Messages flow much more quickly than in the past. They used to run a bit late after being published.

Read full review

David Pizinger

Enterprise Technical Leader at Kyndryl

Has faced unexpected VM restarts but continues to deliver messages reliably

I'm not sure if we've utilized IBM MQ's high availability. Our MQ VMs are set up in clusters, and I think our queue managers are set up in pairs. However, I don't know if we actually use any specific high availability features of IBM MQ that are out of the box. We have it architected with high availability because we use F5 load balancers, and everything about our architecture is highly available. I haven't personally used the management tools with IBM MQ, but we do have them, and our middleware folks leverage them. I can't really comment on them because I don't use them myself. I don't think the management tools help optimize message flows, and I'm not really aware of how they help in this. I'm not familiar with dynamic routing for IBM MQ.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The integration between the features is excellent."

"It's a simple communication service that allows us to communicate with customers."

"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."

"Push notifications are the most valuable. I have mostly used push notifications for my system. Amazon SNS supports all devices for push notification services. It supports iOS, Android, and Windows notifications. It provides reliable push notification services. We have queues, and we can track which notifications have failed or had some issues. We can then figure out the issue. We can also debug the issue because of which our push notification didn't reach the end users."

"Stability has been good for us. It is quite high."

"The mobile push notifications are the most valuable. Previously, we used to use Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) for this functionality. It is a Google service for sending push notifications. Android did not have a good service for sending push notifications, but now, Amazon SNS integrates with FCM. Under the road, it is actually using FCM, but we can see all the metrics on our AW service itself, which makes it a lot easier instead of using a third-party service for this particular functionality."

"Messages easily flow from publisher or application to subscriber."

"We have found the key feature of this solution to be the simplicity of sending out notifications."

More Amazon SNS pros

"IBM MQ processes many thousands of messages in a second, which is efficient for handling high transaction volumes."

"The solution is very stable."

"Support for JMS 2.0, because we develop solutions compatible with Java EE7."

"The system integration is good."

"This initial setup is not complex at all. Deploying it was very easy."

"The best thing about IBM MQ solution is that it's guaranteed delivery and it's fast."

"Encryption and the fact that we have not had any data loss issues so far have been very valuable features. IBM MQ is well encrypted so that we are well within our compliance and regulatory requirements, so that is a plus point as well."

"I appreciate the level of control we have over queue managers, queues, and the messaging itself. That provides good security. So, the control and scalability of messaging are important to me."

More IBM MQ pros

Cons

"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 tool needs to have direct integration with AvPro."

"Messages should flow through a gateway without the need for a mediator."

"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 expect Amazon SNS to provide some capabilities to allow the configuration process to be done in a single script."

"A major issue with AWS as a whole is that it has a lot of services that do the same thing, and people get confused about which one to use in which scenario. Previously, we used to use SNS for connecting microservices. SNS has around six types of subscribers. We can subscribe to Lambda, HTTP, HTTPS, SMS, email, and push notifications. We used to use HTTP endpoints and Lambda for connecting to microservice systems. Now we have something called EventBridge, which actually does that for you. For connecting to services, we should just use EventBridge rather than SQS, SNS. I hear a lot of complaints from people wherein they do not understand when to use EventBridge and when to use SQS, SNS. They can remove these features so that it doesn't confuse users about when to use SQS, SNS, or EventBridge."

"In terms of improvement, I would like to have better customer support for SNS. We can then manage it very easily."

"There needs to be more documentation on the integration with different platforms."

More Amazon SNS cons

"Everything in the solution could be simplified a little. We have trouble with the configuration and cost which is mostly an internal issue, but nevertheless, the errors do come up when there are configuration changes across a specific version. We have slightly different versions, which may have slightly different configurations which cause issues."

"If they could have some front-end monitoring tool that could be easily available for the team to use, that could be great."

"The clustering capabilities have provided some difficulties when it comes to resiliency. This has been a challenge for managing the environment."

"There are things within the actual product itself that can be improved, such as limitations on message length, size, etc. There is no standardized message length outside of IBM. Each of the implementations of the MQ series or support of that functionality varies between various suppliers, and because of that, it is very difficult to move from one to the other. We have IBM MQ, but we couldn't use it because the platform that was speaking to MQ didn't support the message length that was standard within IBM MQ. So, we had to use a different product to do exactly the same thing. So, perhaps, there could be more flexibility in the standards around the message queue. If we had been able to increase the message queue size within the IBM MQ implementation, we wouldn't have had to go over to another competing product because the system that was using MQ messaging required the ability to hold messages that were far larger than the IBM MQ standard. So, there could be a bit more flexibility in the structuring. It has as such nothing to do with the IBM implementation of MQ. It is just that the standard that is being put out onto the market doesn't actually stipulate those types of things."

"It could provide more monitoring tools and some improvement to the UI. I would also like to see more throughput in future versions."

"Scaling is difficult with IBM MQ."

"I don’t like legacy view of MQ."

"With IBM products, there's less marketing. If they do more demos and more seminars on their products, it will be very useful. On a given day. I get seminar invites for many vendors and products, but for IBM, I may get an invite once or twice a year."

More IBM MQ cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Their pricing is competitive. I would rate the cost four out of five."

"The pricing is very cheap."

"One can use the tool for free."

"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."

"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."

"The solution has no up-front costs because you pay based on the number of messages you publish."

"IBM MQ is an expensive solution compared to other solutions. However, if you pay less you will not receive the same experience or features."

"Licensing for this software is on a yearly basis. The standard fee includes the maintenance and updates that are released periodically."

"It is a licensed product. As compared to an open-source solution, such as RabbitMQ, it is obviously costly. If you're using IBM Message Broker, which is a licensed product, IBM MQ is included in the same license. You don't have to pay separately for IBM MQ. The license cost of IBM MQ is lesser than IBM Message Broker."

"There is a different platform price between Windows, z/OS, and iSeries."

"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."

"The fee for this solution is on the higher end of the scale."

"The price of IBM MQ could improve by being less expensive."

More IBM MQ pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

870,697 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

35%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	19
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	146

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Real-Time Innovations DDS vs Amazon SNS

Compared 25% of the time

Amazon EventBridge vs Amazon SNS

Compared 25% of the time

TIBCO Enterprise Message Service vs Amazon SNS

Compared 20% of the time

More Amazon SNS Competitors

ActiveMQ vs IBM MQ

Compared 38% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs IBM MQ

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs IBM MQ

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Kafka vs IBM MQ

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs IBM MQ

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM MQ Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon SNS

October 2025

Download Amazon SNS product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM MQ

October 2025

Download IBM MQ product report

Also Known As

No data available

WebSphere MQ

Overview

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a highly available, durable, secure, fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables you to decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Amazon SNS provides topics for high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging. Using Amazon SNS topics, your publisher systems can fan out messages to a large number of subscriber endpoints for parallel processing, including Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions, and HTTP/S webhooks. Additionally, SNS can be used to fan out notifications to end users using mobile push, SMS, and email.

You can get started with Amazon SNS in minutes by using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS Software Development Kit (SDK).

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

IBM MQ is a middleware product used to send or exchange messages across multiple platforms, including applications, systems, files, and services via MQs (messaging queues). This solution helps simplify the creation of business applications, and also makes them easier to maintain. IBM MQ is security-rich, has high performance, and provides a universal messaging backbone with robust connectivity. In addition, it also integrates easily with existing IT assets by using an SOA (service oriented architecture).

IBM MQ can be deployed:

On-premises
In the cloud
Hybrid cloud

IBM MQ supports the following APIs:

MQI (Message Queue Interface)
REST
.NET
MQTT
JMS
IBM MQ Light

IBM MQ Features

Some of the most powerful IBM MQ features include:

High availability
Stability and scalability
Flexible deployment options
Uniform clusters
Automated and intelligent workload balancing
Broad language, API, and messaging protocol support
Administrative features that simplify messaging management
Open standards development tools
Simple management tools

IBM MQ Benefits

Some of the benefits of using IBM MQ include:

Multi-style messaging: IBM MQ supports simple multi-style messaging, making it easy to connect diverse systems with support for message queuing, transactions, and more.
Reduced risk: With IBM MQ you will never lose a message, and messages are never delivered more than once.
Cloud-native: Because IBM MQ has a minimal infrastructure, it is suitable to be cloud-native, and therefore has the capability to always remain on.
Available anywhere: Using IBM MQ, you have access to secure messaging anywhere, at any time.
Secure: IBM MQ makes sure to keep your data safe by using TLS secured communications, providing access identity management, message-level security, and more measures to protect your information.
Easy for application programmers: To use IBM MQ, application programmers do not need to have any knowledge of communications programming.
Technical support: IBM MQ has a large user community and also provides support 24/7 as needed.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by IBM MQ users who are currently using the solution.

PeerSpot user Sunil S., a manager at a financial services firm, explains that they never lose messages are never lost in transit, mentioning that he can store messages and forward them as required: "Whenever payments are happening, such as incoming payments to the bank, we need to notify the customer. With MQ we can actually do that asynchronously. We don't want to notify the customer for each and every payment but, rather, more like once a day. That kind of thing can be enabled with the help of MQ."

Another PeerSpot reviewer, Luis L. who is a solutions director at Thesys Technologies, says that IBM MQ is a valuable solution and is "A stable and reliable software that offers good integration between different systems."

The head of operations at a financial services firm notes that "I have found the solution to be very robust. It has a strong reputation, is easy to use, simple to configure in our enterprise software, and supports all the protocols that we use."

In addition, a Software Engineer at a financial services firm praises the security benefits of it and states that “it has the most security features I've seen in a communication solution. Security is the most important thing for our purposes."

IBM

Sample Customers

PlayOn! Sports, NASA, Change Healthcare, FCBarcelona

Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation

Buyer's Guide

Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ

September 2025

Free Report: Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

870,697 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Amazon SNS vs. IBM MQ report.

See our list of best Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) vendors.

We monitor all Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.