Amazon SNS vs PushBots

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.

PushBots provides a dashboard for managing and sending push notifications to mobile applications, with mobile and web push, audience segmentation, analytics, scheduling, and Twitter integration. It offers Android, iOS, and PhoneGap SDKs, along with a REST API and clients for PHP, Python, NodeJS, and dotNET. Listed platforms are Android, iOS, and API. The maker’s GitHub organization also lists a WordPress plugin and a React Native library. PushBots has a free plan and a 14-day trial. The Free plan is described as forever free and includes 1,000 monthly active users. Lite includes 5,000 subscribers, Basic 60,000, Plus 150,000, and Ultimate 300,000; Enterprise is for more than 300,000 subscribers and requires contacting sales. A separate listed subscriber limit is 5,000, so buyers should distinguish that figure from the capacities given for individual plans.