Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, or Amazon EventBridge?
Understand the differences and pick the one that's right for you
|
Purpose |
Understand the differences between Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and EventBridge and determine which service is the best fit for your needs. |
|
Last updated |
November, 2025 |
|
Covered services |
Introduction
This decision guide helps you to choose the best AWS service for message handling, event-driven architectures, and decoupling components for your application. AWS offers three key services for these purposes:
-
Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that enables decoupling and scaling of microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
-
Amazon SNS is a fully managed publish-subscribe (pub/sub) messaging model that delivers messages to subscribed endpoints such as HTTP/HTTPS endpoints, email addresses, SMS, Amazon SQS queues, and AWS Lambda functions.
-
Amazon EventBridge(formerly known as CloudWatch Events) is a fully managed event bus service for event-driven architectures that can send and receive event data from a variety of sources including Lambda functions, Amazon SQS queues, Amazon SNS topics, and integrated SaaS applications.
All three of these services facilitate communication between decoupled components, but differ in underlying architecture, use cases, and capabilities.
The following table compares these services at a high level.
| Category | Amazon SQS | Amazon SNS | EventBridge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Communication model | Pull-based (consumers poll messages from the queue) | Push-based (subscribers receive messages when published) | Event-driven (rules match events and route to targets) |
| Persistence | Messages persist until consumed or expired | Messages do not persist; delivered in real-time to subscribers | Events do not persist; processed in real-time |
| Delivery guarantees | At-least-once delivery | At-least-once delivery for HTTP/S, exactly-once for Lambda and Amazon SQS | At-least-once delivery |
| Message ordering | FIFO (First-In-First-Out) queues ensure strict ordering | Amazon SNS FIFO topics guarantee order | No ordering guarantees |
| Message filtering | Amazon SQS can’t decide consumer based on message. Use Amazon SNS message filtering with Amazon SQS to achieve. | Message filtering using subscription filter policies based on message metadata and for FIFO topics, message content | Complex event pattern matching and content-based filtering |
| Supported subscribers | Pull-based consumers (such as Amazon EC2 or Lambda) | HTTP/S endpoints, email, SMS, mobile push, Lambda, Amazon SQS | AWS services, Lambda, API destinations, event buses in other AWS accounts |
| Typical use cases | Decoupling microservices, buffering requests, processing tasks asynchronously | Fanout notifications, pub/sub messaging, mobile push notifications | Event-driven architectures, real-time stream processing, cross-account event sharing |
| Integration with other AWS services | Lambda, CloudWatch, AWS KMS, IAM | Lambda, Amazon SQS, Mobile Push, AWS KMS, IAM | Lambda, Step Functions, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Kinesis, SageMaker AI, CloudWatch, IAM |
Details on the differences
The following tabbed sections compare Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and EventBridge in eight key areas.
Use
