Amazon SNS vs Twilio
Discover how Amazon SNS compares to Twilio, 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.
Suitable for:
- Push notifications
- Apps with high message throughput
- Event-heavy apps
Not suitable for:
- Timed message delivery
- Ordered messages
- Precise retry control
Pros:
- Easy to use
- Instant message delivery
- Multi-protocol support
- Message filtering
Cons:
- No message persistence
- Limited scalling options
What is 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.
Suitable for:
- Multi-factor authentication
- Customer support
- Alerts & notifications
- Marketing and promotions
- Scalable SMS messaging
Not suitable for:
- Custom integrations
- Realtime presence
- Realtime data sync
- High-volume, low-cost messaging
Pros:
- Easily scalable
- Robust APIs and documentation
- Easily integrate with other tools and services
- Multi-channel support
- Highly reliable
Cons:
- No guranteed message delivery
- No guaranteed message ordering
- Expensive pricing
- Complex to setup
- Steep learning curve
Compare Amazon SNS and Twilio
Let’s compare Amazon SNS and Twilio, 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 Twilio. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for Amazon SNS and on 25 Oct 2024 for Twilio. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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 | Twilio |
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. | Twilio Yes Twilio offers 1-on-1 messaging, group chats, message history, read receipts, typing, and file sharing via its Conversations API. |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Amazon SNS No | Twilio No |
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. | Twilio No Twilio Sync allows realtime updates for synchronized data across users and devices. However, for database-to-UI state sync, Twilio would require third party products. |
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 | Twilio Yes Twilio offers presence functionality through its Conversations SDK, which has a built-in Reachability Indicator feature. 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 | Twilio No |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Amazon SNS No | Twilio Yes Twilio offers message interactions through its Conversations and Messaging Services. It also provides Flex, which supports messaging interactions through web chat, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. |
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 | Twilio Yes Twilio allows you to retrieve and modify message history through its Programmable Messaging API. |
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. | Twilio Yes Twilio offers push notifications through its Twilio Notify API. |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Amazon SNS No | Twilio 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 | Twilio Yes |
| 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. | Twilio Yes Some of (not all) Twilio's services have a free plan. Twilio also offers a free trial. |
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 | Twilio Pay as you go:
|
| Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Amazon SNS
| Twilio
|
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Amazon SNS
| Twilio
|
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. | Twilio
|
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. | Twilio 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. | Twilio Yes Twilio provides observability through insights and monitoring dashboards for voice, messaging, and flex. The dashboards give metrics like time range, delivery status, messaging traffic, errors, responses, etc. |
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:
| Twilio 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. | Twilio
|
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Amazon SNS No | Twilio Yes While Twilio ensures reliable delivery, it typically follows at-least-once or best-effort delivery models. That means messages may be delivered more than once in rare cases, such as during network failures or retry attempts. |
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 | Twilio No Twilio sends SMS messages in the order they are queued, but they are delivered individually. That means that if you send multiple SMS messages to the same user quickly, Twilio cannot guarantee that the messages will arrive in the order you sent them. Read more |
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. | Twilio No Twilio doesn't guarantee exactly-once delivery by default. However, it can implement de-duplication in the receiving service by checking if an event with the same ID has already been received, and discarding duplicates. Read more |
| 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 | Twilio
|
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 | Twilio Yes Twilio has a global edge network of network edges called Twilio Edge Locations, which allows you to control the geographic location where your application's network traffic enters and exits Twilio's platform. |
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. | Twilio Yes Twilio provides multi-region data replication to enhance message durability. |
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 | Twilio Yes Twilio's "Super Network" and hybrid cloud infrastructure reduce the risk of a single point of failure and congestion. The design is built with redundancy and scalability to minimize potential disruptions. |
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. | Twilio 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. | Twilio 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. | Twilio Yes Twilio uses token-based authentication (JWTs) for client-side SDKs like Voice, Conversations, Sync, and Video. |
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. | Twilio Yes Twilio offers SSO authentication for customers with a supported Twilio Editions Package. |
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. | Twilio Yes Twilio manages permissions and operations through its Console and Access Control features. |
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 | Twilio 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). | Twilio Yes Twilio uses TLS 1.2 to encrypt customer data at rest. |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Amazon SNS
| Twilio
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Alternatives to Amazon SNS and Twilio
While both Amazon SNS and Twilio 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 Twilio
Amazon SNS is an AWS service for designed to distribute notifications from applications to subscribers via SMS, email, etc.
Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud-hosted database by Google, allowing developers to build realtime applications for web and mobile.
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. Serving more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform on earth. Businesses trust us to power their critical applications - reliably, securely and at serious scale.
Discover how Amazon SNS and Twilio stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Amazon SNS and Twilio 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
