Amazon MQ vs Amazon SNS

Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ. AWS handles broker provisioning, setup, upgrades, operation, maintenance, and failure recovery, while existing broker applications can migrate through standard messaging protocols without rewriting messaging code. Brokers can be launched from the AWS Management Console, CloudFormation, CLI, or API calls. Deployment options include single-instance, replicated-cluster, and active/standby modes, with availability and durability features across Availability Zones. ActiveMQ supports JMS, NMS, AMQP, STOMP, OpenWire, WebSocket, and MQTT, with clients for Java, Node.js, Go, Python, Ruby, and C++. RabbitMQ supports classic, classic mirrored, and quorum queues; quorum queues require RabbitMQ 3.13 or newer. CloudWatch receives broker and queue metrics every minute, and CloudTrail records related API calls. Data at rest uses AWS KMS encryption and broker connections use TLS; TLS 1.3 is unavailable for RabbitMQ brokers. Brokers can run inside an Amazon VPC, with private connections across VPCs and accounts for RabbitMQ. The service supports dead-letter queues, per-queue ordering, and configurable delivery guarantees. It is paid, with an AWS Free Tier plan for eligible new customers for six months; pay-as-you-go broker usage is hourly and storage monthly, with standard transfer fees potentially applying.

Amazon SNS is a managed publish/subscribe service for sending messages between applications and reaching people. It can deliver notifications to application endpoints and send SMS, mobile push, and email. Standard topics support nearly unlimited messages per second with best-effort ordering and deduplication; FIFO topics preserve order and prevent duplicate delivery within five minutes, with limits of 3,000 messages per second or 10 MB per second per topic. Publishers can batch 1 to 10 messages per request, while subscribers can filter notifications. Integrations include AWS event sources and destinations such as SQS, Data Firehose, Lambda, and HTTPS. Each message can contain up to 256 KB; the Extended Client Library can store payloads up to 2 GB in S3 and publish an object reference. SNS retries delivery and supports dead-letter queues. The free tier includes 1 million requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications, and 1,000 email notifications each month. Listed paid rates include $0.50 per month for API requests, $0.06 for HTTP deliveries, and $2.00 for email deliveries; charges depend on usage.