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Amazon MQ vs Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Amazon MQ

aws.amazon.com

Google Cloud Pub/Sub

cloud.google.com

Side by side

FigureAmazon MQGoogle Cloud Pub/Sub
Price fromFree$40/mo
Free planYesYes
Free trial—Yes
Open source——
WebYesYes
APIYesYes
Plans published24
Spec score · Message Broker Software8.0 (#17)8.2 (#11)
Spec score · Message Queue (MQ) Software8.0 (#14)8.1 (#13)
SecurityAmazon MQ encrypts data at rest with AWS KMS and uses TLS for connections between brokers; the documentation says TLS 1.3 is not available for RabbitMQ brokers.Pub/Sub offers fine-grained access controls, end-to-end encryption, and HIPAA compliance.

Plans

Amazon MQ

  • AWS Free TierFree
  • Pay-as-you-goPrice not published

Amazon MQ pricing →

Google Cloud Pub/Sub

  • Free usage allowanceFree
  • Pay-as-you-go throughput$40 a month
  • Free monthly tierFree
  • Pay-as-you-go$40 a month

Google Cloud Pub/Sub pricing →

In their own words

Amazon MQ

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.

Visit aws.amazon.com

Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a cloud messaging service for asynchronous communication between services that produce messages and those that process them. It is intended for service-to-service use, including streaming analytics, data integration, middleware, and parallel task queues, rather than direct communication with end users or IoT clients. Communication typically has latency around 100 milliseconds. Synchronous cross-zone replication and per-message receipt tracking provide at-least-once delivery; Dataflow supports exactly-once processing of Pub/Sub streams. There are no shards or partitions, and provisioning scales automatically after quota is set. Message controls include seek and replay, dead letter topics, and attribute-based filtering. Pub/Sub offers fine-grained access controls, end-to-end encryption, and HIPAA compliance. It supports REST and gRPC APIs and client libraries for seven languages; API keys are not supported for authentication. The maximum message size is 10 MB. The free monthly tier is free for the first 10 GB of data per month. Pay-as-you-go is $40 a month beyond 10 GB, with throughput listed at $40 per TB and storage at $0.27 per GiB-month.

Visit cloud.google.com