Amazon SNS vs Firebase
Discover how Amazon SNS compares to Firebase, 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?
Firebase is a cloud-native backend by Google that allows developers to build mobile and web applications. Firebase services include Firebase Realtime data, Firestore database, authentication, and Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), among others.
Compare Amazon SNS and Firebase
Let’s compare Amazon SNS and Firebase, 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. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for Amazon SNS and on 18 Nov 2024 for Firebase. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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 Partial Firebase does not natively support Pub/Sub messaging. However, this can be implemented with Google's Pub/Sub service. 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 Yes You can build chat capabilities on top of Firebase's Realtime Database. |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Amazon SNS No | Firebase Yes |
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 Yes The Firebase Realtime Database lets you store and sync data between your users in real time. 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 |
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 Partial Firebase 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 Partial Message interactions are not natively supported in Firebase. 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 No |
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 |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Amazon SNS No | Firebase 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 Yes Firebase projects can be managed programmatically using the Firebase Management API. |
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 Yes The Spark plan (free plan) realtime database is limited to 100 simultaneous connections and 1 GB of storage. Read more |
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 Firebase has a free plan and a pay-as-you-go plan:
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Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Amazon SNS
| Firebase
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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
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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
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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 Yes |
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 Yes Using Firebase Performance Monitoring you can 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 Yes Supports:
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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 Firebase Realtime Database is limited to 200,000 simultaneous connections, 1000 Cloud Functions per write (500 for v2 per region), 1 MB event size, and 10 MB/sec data transfer to Cloud Functions. |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Amazon SNS No | Firebase No |
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 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 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 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 Yes Firebase 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 No Multi-region data replication is currently not supported in Firebase Realtime Database, but it is supported in Firestore databases. |
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 No Each Realtime Database instance is tied to a single region chosen at the time of creation. |
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 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 No |
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 |
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 Yes SSO in a Firebase application can be implemented using SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language). Read more |
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 Yes Using Firebase Realtime Database Security Rules you can set who has access to your database. 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 No Data in transit is encrypted using HTTPS in all Firebase services, but this does not include end-to-end encryption. Read more |
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 Partial Some Firebase services are encrypted at rest while others are not. Firebase Realtime Database and Firebase Cloud Messaging are encrypted at rest. Read more |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Amazon SNS
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Alternatives to Amazon SNS and Firebase
While both Amazon SNS and Firebase 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
Supabase Realtime is a globally distributed real-time server network built on PostgreSQL, enabling developers to build applications with real-time data sync.
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 stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Amazon SNS and Firebase on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
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