Amazon SQS vs Liveblocks Broadcast
Discover how Amazon SQS compares to Liveblocks Broadcast, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
What is Amazon SQS?
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed messaging queuing service which enables decoupling and scaling of distributed systems. It is secure, reliable, and suitable for handling asynchronous communication between software components, which ensures that messages are not lost and are processed efficiently.
Suitable for:
- Scaling microservices
- Message processing
- Transaction processing
- Job queues
Not suitable for:
- Long message retention
- Large message sizes
Pros:
- Message locking
- Near infinite scalability
- Reliable delivery
- Dead-letter queues
- Reduced overhead
Cons:
- High cost at scale
- Vendor lock-in
- No support for routing
- Short message retention
What is Liveblocks Broadcast?
Liveblocks Broadcast is a real-time communication solution that helps developers embed collaborative experiences into their products.
Suitable for:
- Interactive gaming
- Live streaming
- Collaborative applications
Not suitable for:
- Static content websites
- Non-interactive media
Pros:
- Pre-built components
- Reliable
- Low latency
- Easy integration
- Fully hosted
Cons:
- High cost for paid versions
Compare Amazon SQS and Liveblocks Broadcast
Let’s compare Amazon SQS and Liveblocks Broadcast, 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 SQS and Liveblocks Broadcast. The content was last updated on 16 Aug 2024 for Amazon SQS and on 29 Jul 2024 for Liveblocks Broadcast. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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 SQS No AWS SQS is a queueing system and not a pub/sub messaging system. | Liveblocks Broadcast No Liveblocks Broadcast only offers basic broadcast capabilities. |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Amazon SQS No | Liveblocks Broadcast No Liveblocks does not support comprehensive chat capabilities such as 1-on-1 messaging, group chats, message history, read receipts, typing indicators, file sharing, and emojis. You will need to build this out by integrating with other chat solutions or by using the Liveblocks Realtime API. |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Amazon SQS No | Liveblocks Broadcast Partial Liveblocks supports collaboration features like comments, notifications, and text editor out-of-the-box. For other features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks and component locking, you would need to use Liveblocks Realtime APIs to build them. Read more |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Amazon SQS Partial AWS SQS can be implemented with AWS AppSync which supports real-time data synchronization using GraphQL subscriptions. This allows UI updates to reflect changes in the underlying data store (like DynamoDB or other databases) without the need for polling. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Liveblocks supports state sync capabilities through its Live Storage feature. It is a realtime sync engine thats reflects changes to the frontend instantly. 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 SQS Partial Partially supported, requiring integration with other AWS services. | Liveblocks Broadcast |
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 SQS No | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Liveblocks supports occupancy with its Rooms feature. |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Amazon SQS No | Liveblocks Broadcast No |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Amazon SQS Partial Amazon S3 can be used to archive past messages, while AWS AppSync can facilitate retrieving messages and syncing them with UI updates. However, managing message history may require additional custom development or integration. | Liveblocks Broadcast |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Amazon SQS Partial Amazon SQS can be integrated with AWS SNS to deliver push notifications based on events. | Liveblocks Broadcast No |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Amazon SQS No | Liveblocks Broadcast No |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Amazon SQS Yes AWS provides comprehensive APIs and SDKs for programmatic management of its services. | Liveblocks Broadcast 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 SQS Yes The Amazon SQS Free Tier offers up to 1 million requests per month at no cost for all customers for both standard and FIFO Queues. | Liveblocks Broadcast |
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 SQS AWS SQS has a free tier and pay-as-you-go pricing model based on usage (number of queue requests and data transfer). Read more | Liveblocks Broadcast Liveblocks uses a tiered pricing model:
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| Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Amazon SQS
| Liveblocks Broadcast
|
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Amazon SQS
| Liveblocks Broadcast
|
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 SQS None natively; serverless functions are available through integration with AWS Lambda. | Liveblocks Broadcast None. |
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Amazon SQS Yes | Liveblocks Broadcast No |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Amazon SQS Partial AWS SQS provides an integration with Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring usage and metrics. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Liveblocks includes observability services through its monitoring dashboard, enabling you to track and manage collaborative experiences within your application. The dashboard provides various metrics, such as active users, active rooms, comments, notifications, and data stored. |
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 SQS Yes Supports:
| Liveblocks Broadcast No |
| Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | Amazon SQS No published metrics are available. | Liveblocks Broadcast Unknown. |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Amazon SQS Yes AWS SQS provides robust support for guaranteed message delivery, ensuring that each message is reliably delivered to its intended recipient. | Liveblocks Broadcast 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 SQS Yes For AWS SQS FIFO Queues, messages are delivered in the exact order they are sent, following a strict First-In-First-Out (FIFO) sequence. | Liveblocks Broadcast 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 SQS Yes When using AWS SQS FIFO Queues, messages are delivered exactly once with no duplication. | Liveblocks Broadcast 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 SQS 99.9%. Read more | Liveblocks Broadcast
|
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 SQS Yes | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Liveblocks manages a WebSocket edge network which makes use of uses the Cloudflare Workers global network. Read more |
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 SQS Partial AWS SQS provides high message durability within a single AWS region by replicating messages across multiple Availability Zones. But it does not natively support cross-region replication. For multi-region data replication, you can use additional strategies, such as using AWS services like AWS Lambda or AWS Data Pipeline to replicate messages from SQS queues in one region to SQS queues in another region. | Liveblocks Broadcast 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 SQS Yes Messages in AWS SQS are distributed across various availability zones in a region, ensuring high availability and scalability. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Liveblocks uses their data hosting provider's backup services to reduce risk of data loss under hardware failure. They also monitor services to alert the team of failures affecting users. |
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 SQS Latencies for SendMessage, ReceiveMessage, and DeleteMessage API requests range from tens to low hundreds of milliseconds. | Liveblocks Broadcast Unknown. |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Amazon SQS Yes | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Amazon SQS No AWS SQS does not directly support token-based authentication. Instead, AWS SQS relies on AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for authentication and authorization. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Supported with JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). Two options are available: Access Tokens and ID Tokens. Read more |
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 SQS Yes | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Amazon SQS Yes | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Amazon SQS Yes | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | Amazon SQS Yes AWS SQS supports encryption at rest using AWS KMS (Key Management Service). | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Amazon SQS
| Liveblocks Broadcast
|
Alternatives to Amazon SQS and Liveblocks Broadcast
Whilst both Amazon SQS and Liveblocks Broadcast 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 SQS
RabbitMQ is the open-source message broker supporting multiple messaging protocols.
ActiveMQ is an open-source message broker with support for multiple protocols, offering high availability and scalability for enterprise messaging.
Apache Kafka is an open-source real-time data streaming platform.
Alternatives to Liveblocks Broadcast
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect.
Pusher is a first-generation pub/sub messaging service that provides bi-directional hosted APIs for adding realtime features to applications.
Socket.IO is a library that provides realtime, bi-directional communication between clients and servers. It allows the management of connections, sending and receiving messages, and more.
Discover how Amazon SQS and Liveblocks Broadcast stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Amazon SQS and Liveblocks Broadcast 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
