What is Amazon SNS?
AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fully managed notification service that uses the Pub/Sub model to provide message delivery from publishers to subscribers.
6 alternatives to Amazon SNS to consider
We’ll now look at alternatives to Amazon SNS - competing technologies that allow you to build realtime experiences for end-users.
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a real-time messaging service. Pub/Sub is used for asynchronous messaging between different systems, and services, within your applications. It enables developers to build robust and scalable real-time applications.
Azure Service Bus
Azure Service Bus provides reliable cloud messaging between applications and services, supporting both queueing and publish/subscribe messaging models.
OneSignal
OneSignal is a platform that delivers push notifications, in-app messages, and emails. It offers tools for targeting, automation, and analytics to help businesses manage and optimize their communication with users.
Beamer
Beamer is a customer engagement platform for user onboarding, measuring and tracking customer usage, collecting user feedback, and sending notifications.
Twilio
Twilio is a cloud platform that enables developers to build real-time communications features for their applications. It provides APIs for voice, SMS, video, WhatsApp, and other messaging services.
Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet, serving more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform. Our product suite places composable realtime in the hands of developers. Simple APIs, use case specific SDKs and pre-built integrations, enables the creation of a host of live experiences - including live updates, chat, collaboration, notifications and fan engagement - with no infrastructure to build.
Key Ably features and capabilities
- Ably is underpinned by a globally-distributed network of datacenters and edge acceleration points of presence.
- Ably‘s SDKs provide a consistent and idiomatic API across a variety of supported platforms.
- Connect with pre-built integrations for Webhooks, Lambdas, databases, cloud services, observability tools and stream processors.
- Build the ultimate realtime app with our feature rich suite of products - Pub/Sub and notifications, Chat, LiveObjects, LiveSync, and Spaces.
- Guaranteed message ordering and delivery.
- Global fault tolerance and a 99.999% uptime SLA.
- 6.5ms round trip message delivery latency.
- Elastic scalability to handle millions of concurrent clients.
- Consumption-based, per-minute-billing, built for scale. Ably not only enables you to make the most of your budget, but also enjoy greater flexibility, faster build times and a quicker ROI.
Disclaimer: The information on the alternatives presented here was based on documentation and resources freely available online and was last updated on 10 Jul 2026. Be sure to double-check everything before you make any decisions. If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please let us know.
Try Ably for free to discover the benefits for yourself
Ably has built reliable realtime infrastructure so you don’t have to. On our free plan you benefit from:
- 6M monthly messages
- 200 concurrent channels
- 200 concurrent connections
