Amazon SNS vs Firebase Cloud Messaging
Discover how Amazon SNS compares to Firebase Cloud Messaging, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
What is Amazon SNS?
AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fully managed notification service thats uses the Pub/Sub model to provide message delivery from publishers to subscribers.
What is Firebase Cloud Messaging?
Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) is a free cross-platform messaging service for sending and receiving messages and notifications across platforms like iOS, Android, and the web via cloud-based infrastructure. It supports both upstream and downstream messaging.
Compare Amazon SNS and Firebase Cloud Messaging
Let’s compare Amazon SNS and Firebase Cloud Messaging, looking at key dimensions such as their core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
Disclaimer:This comparison was created based on documentation and resources freely available online about Amazon SNS and Firebase Cloud Messaging. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for Amazon SNS and on 30 Oct 2024 for Firebase Cloud Messaging. Be sure to double-check everything before you make any decisions. If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.
Core features | |||
Pub/Sub messaging | Reduces communication code complexity, simplifying the process of building highly functional and architecturally complex realtime apps. | Amazon SNS | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) is not a Pub/Sub service. However, you can connect it with Google Cloud Pub/Sub to create more advanced messaging patterns, including asynchronous messaging and scaling. Read more |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Amazon SNS Partial AWS SNS does not have in-built chat capabilities. It's primarily used for message delivery across HTTP/S, email, SMS, and Amazon SQS. You can use AWS Chatbot to enable chat in conjunction with SNS. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial Firebase doesn’t offer a dedicated messaging solution. However, you can build these features using Firebase services such as Realtime Database, Firestore, and Firebase Storage. |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Amazon SNS No | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes FCM does not have built-in collaboration capabilities like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. However, you can build these using Firebase Realtime Database or Firestore. |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Amazon SNS Partial AWS SNS notifies on changes, but does not manage state synchronization directly. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial FCM does not offer state sync capabilities on its own. You can achieve this by connecting it with Firebase Realtime Database or Firestore. Read more |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Amazon SNS No | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial FCM does not provide presence capabilities on its own. To incorporate presence, integrate with Firebase Realtime Database, which natively supports presence. Read more |
Occupancy | High-level metrics about the clients currently connected to a channel make it simple to show things such as connected user count, or display which channels are the most popular. | Amazon SNS No | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial FCM does not have built-in support for occupancy tracking. However, occupancy tracking functionality can be built on top of the Firebase Realtime Database. |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Amazon SNS No | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial Message interactions are not natively supported in FCM. However, you can programmatically build interactions on top of Firebase's Realtime Database. |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Amazon SNS Yes AWS SNS allows topic subscribers to retrieve (or replay) the archived messages back to a subscribed endpoint. This can be done by with the AWS API, SDK, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS Management Console. This functionality is only available for application-to-application (A2A) FIFO topics. Read more | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes FCM provides message delivery reports that can be viewed in the Firebase console. :cta[Read more(https://firebase.google.com/support/guides/cloud-audit-logging/firebase-cloud-messaging#permission-type): |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Amazon SNS Yes AWS SNS specializes in delivering push notifications to mobile devices and other endpoints. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Amazon SNS No | Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Amazon SNS Yes | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes FCM offers programmatic management through its APIs. |
Pricing | |||
Free plan | With a free plan, you can test the service’s functionality and compatibility with your project before committing to a paid plan. | Amazon SNS No AWS SNS does not offer a free tier, but has a pay-as-you-go pricing model. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes FCM is free to use. |
Pricing model | The pricing model should align with your project's expected load, usage patterns, and budget in order to be cost-effective and efficient. | Amazon SNS AWS SNS has a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on usage (number of requests and messages published). Read more | Firebase Cloud Messaging FCM is free to use. |
Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Amazon SNS
| Firebase Cloud Messaging
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Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Amazon SNS
| Firebase Cloud Messaging
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Serverless functions | Enables integration with third-party cloud providers by facilitating the execution of custom code against messages to perform business logic like on-the-fly translation. | Amazon SNS None natively; serverless functions are available through integration with AWS Lambda. | Firebase Cloud Messaging
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Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Amazon SNS Partial Available through Amazon SQS. | Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Amazon SNS Partial AWS SNS provides an integration with Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring usage and metrics. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial FCM does not directly offer built-in observability services, but you can integrate with Firebase Performance Monitoring to monitor your application performance based on location, device, or version. |
CI/CD tools | Makes it possible to provision and configure service infrastructure as part of a CI or CD pipeline, enabling repeatable and reliable deployments. | Amazon SNS Yes Supports:
| Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | Amazon SNS No published metrics are available. | Firebase Cloud Messaging According to FCM, FCM can scale to over 115 billion notifications to more than 400 million users globally. At a recorded peak time, FCM has handled 46 million queries per second (QPS) from its average baseline of 18 million QPS. Read more |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Amazon SNS No | Firebase Cloud Messaging No FCM does not guarantee message delivery without loss or duplication. It operates on a "best effort" model. |
Guaranteed message ordering | Maintains the sequence of messages as they were sent. This is particularly important in apps where the chronological order of messages is essential for meaningful communication. | Amazon SNS No | Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
Exactly-once message delivery | Guarantees that each message is processed exactly once, preventing data inconsistencies that can arise from duplicate processing or missing messages. | Amazon SNS No AWS SNS not support exactly-once delivery semantics out of the box. It ensures at least-once delivery, but does not guarantee exactly-once delivery. | Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
Performance & availability | |||
Uptime Guarantee | An uptime guarantee instills confidence in the reliability of the service and protects your business from the negative impacts of downtime. | Amazon SNS 99.9%. Read more | Firebase Cloud Messaging FCM uptime SLA is unclear. However, Firebase's SLA has a monthly uptime SLA of at least 99.95%. Read more |
Global edge network | By bringing servers (Points of Presence, or PoP) geographically closer to the devices of end users, and routing requests to the nearest PoP, global latency is reduced to a minimum. | Amazon SNS Yes | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes FCM benefits from Google's global edge network. |
Multi-region data replication (message durability) | By replicating data across multiple regions, the risk of data loss or downtime is greatly mitigated since if data is lost or a server fails in one region, the information can be retrieved from another. | Amazon SNS Partial AWS SNS supports message durability through integration with other AWS services for multi-region replication. | Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
No single point of failure or congestion | Having no single point of failure means a system is resilient and can continue to operate even if one part fails. Avoiding a single point of congestion ensures messages flow efficiently across the system and avoids bottlenecks that could lead to performance issues under load. | Amazon SNS Yes | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes FCM's distributed architecture and implementation of load balancing strategies ensure the re-routing of requests and distribution of message traffic evenly across servers, preventing single points of failure and congestion. |
Latency | Low latency is crucial for realtime apps as it ensures swift and efficient data transmissions, providing a smoother and more responsive user experience. | Amazon SNS Unknown. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Unknown. |
Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Amazon SNS Yes AWS SNS uses AWS IAM for managing API key authentication. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Amazon SNS Yes AWS SNS uses the AWS STS (Security Token Service) for token-based authentication. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Amazon SNS Yes AWS SNS supports Single Sign-On (SSO) through AWS IAM and AWS SSO. | Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Amazon SNS Yes AWS SNS permissions and operations can be managed through AWS IAM policies. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial FCM does not implement rules for permissions and operations. Firebase's security features manage permissions and security. Read more |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Amazon SNS Yes | Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | Amazon SNS Yes AWS SNS supports encryption at rest using AWS KMS (Key Management Service). | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes Read more |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Amazon SNS
| Firebase Cloud Messaging
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Alternatives to Amazon SNS and Firebase Cloud Messaging
While both Amazon SNS and Firebase Cloud Messaging are worth considering as options for realtime experiences, they aren’t without their limitations. We suggest evaluating them against the following alternatives to make sure you find the right solution for your needs.
Alternatives to Amazon SNS
Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a scalable messaging service that can be used to send and receive messages from applications or services.
Azure Service Bus is a fully managed message service with message queues and Pub/Sub topics.
OneSignal is a customer engagement platform that offers push notifications, messages, and email sends for businesses to manage communication with their users.
Alternatives to Firebase Cloud Messaging
Amazon SNS is an AWS service for designed to distribute notifications from applications to subscribers via SMS, email, etc.
Pusher is a first-generation pub/sub messaging service that provides bi-directional hosted APIs for adding realtime features to applications.
OneSignal is a customer engagement platform that offers push notifications, messages, and email sends for businesses to manage communication with their users.
Discover how Amazon SNS and Firebase Cloud Messaging stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Amazon SNS and Firebase Cloud Messaging on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
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