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Amazon SQS vs OneSignal

Discover how Amazon SQS compares to OneSignal, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.

Amazon SQS logo

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
OneSignal

What is 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.

Suitable for:

  • Customer engagement
  • High volume notifications
  • Multiple mobile and web platforms
  • Campaign analytics
  • In-app messaging

Not suitable for:

  • Fully-featured interactive chat
  • Pub/sub services

Pros:

  • Easy integration
  • In-app messaging
  • Multi-platform support
  • User segmentation
  • Push notifications

Cons:

  • Expensive pricing
  • Limited push notifications
  • Notification delays

Compare Amazon SQS and OneSignal

Let’s compare Amazon SQS and OneSignal, 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 OneSignal. The content was last updated on 16 Aug 2024 for Amazon SQS and on 30 Oct 2024 for OneSignal. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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.

OneSignal

No

OneSignal is not a pub/sub service. It is a multi-channel customer engagement platform providing push notifications, emails, SMS, and in-app messages.

Chat capabilities

Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more.

Amazon SQS

No

OneSignal

No

OneSignal provides in-app messaging for users to send messages but does not offer a full-featured chat capability, such as 1-1 messaging with features like typing indicators, file sharing, and emojis.

Collaboration capabilities

Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking.

Amazon SQS

No

OneSignal

No

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.

OneSignal

No

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.

OneSignal

No

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

OneSignal

No

Message interactions

Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads.

Amazon SQS

No

OneSignal

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.

OneSignal

No

OneSignal does not offer an archive of messages for retrieval. However, it provides notification history, which is different from message history. The notification history focuses on the records of notifications sent.

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.

OneSignal

Yes

OneSignal offers push notifications for both mobile and web platforms.

Message delta compression

Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent.

Amazon SQS

No

OneSignal

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.

OneSignal

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.

OneSignal

Yes

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
OneSignal

OneSignal offers a free plan and a tiered pricing model:

  • Free ($0/month - Free access to all channels, 10,000 emails send/month, unlimited mobile push sends)
  • Growth: $9/month - 20,000 email sends/month + everything in Free
  • Professional: custom pricing
  • Enterprise: custom pricing
Integrations & interoperability
SDKs

Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps.

Amazon SQS
  • C++
  • Go
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • Kotlin
  • .NET
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Rust
  • Swift
OneSignal
  • Server SDKs: C++, Go, Java, Node, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust
  • Cross-platform SDKs: Cordova, Flutter, Unity, Xamarin, React Native
  • Native mobile SDKs: iOS, Amazon FireOS, Android (FCM), Huawei Mobile Services
  • Web SDKs: Angular, React, Rails, WordPress, TypeScript/JavaScript, Vue.js 2/Vue.js 3
Supported realtime protocols

Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements.

Amazon SQS
  • HTTP/HTTPS
  • Amazon SQS Long Polling
OneSignal

None.

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.

OneSignal

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

OneSignal

No

OneSignal provides queuing for messages and notifications but lacks proper streaming and queuing support. OneSignal's Live Activities and Event Webhooks simulate stream-like behavior, though real streaming requires integration with other services.

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.

OneSignal

Yes

OneSignal offers observability features, such as tracking notifications, user engagement metrics, and delivery reports.

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:

  • AWS CodeCommit
  • AWS CodeBuild
  • AWS CodePipeline
  • AWS CodeDeploy
OneSignal

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.

OneSignal

OneSignal can deliver a throughput of over 850,000 notifications per second, which relatively equates to 4 billion push notifications daily. It has also been able to scale its database to 75 terabytes (TB) of stored data across nearly 40 servers.

Read more
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.

OneSignal

No

OneSignal does not guarantee message delivery. It only offers confirmed deliveries. That means it does not handle retries in the event of failures, and the message may not be delivered.

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.

OneSignal

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.

OneSignal

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
OneSignal

Not publicly mentioned.

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

OneSignal

No

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.

OneSignal

No

OneSignal locates its datacenters in the EU, and it's unclear if they support multi-region data replication.

Read more
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.

OneSignal

No

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.

OneSignal

Unknown.

Security & compliance
API key authentication

Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens.

Amazon SQS

Yes

OneSignal

Yes

OneSignal uses user auth API keys for its REST APIs.

Read more
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.

OneSignal

Yes

OneSignal has token-based authentication for email, SMS, and notifications.

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

OneSignal
Rules for permissions and operations

Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels.

Amazon SQS

Yes

OneSignal

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

OneSignal

No

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).

OneSignal

No

Compliance

Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry.

Amazon SQS
  • PCI DSS Level 1 certified
  • HIPAA-eligible
OneSignal
  • SOC 2 Type II
  • HIPAA
  • GDPR
  • CCPA
  • Data Privacy Framework

Alternatives to Amazon SQS and OneSignal

While both Amazon SQS and OneSignal 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

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RabbitMQ is the open-source message broker supporting multiple messaging protocols.

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ActiveMQ is an open-source message broker with support for multiple protocols, offering high availability and scalability for enterprise messaging.

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Apache Kafka is an open-source realtime data streaming platform.

See more alternatives to Amazon SQS

Alternatives to OneSignal

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Braze is a cross-channel marketing service that offers email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging with realtime automation and analytics.

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CleverTap is a customer engagement platform that offers push notifications, SMS, email, calls, in-app, and mobile and web messaging.

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PushEngage is a push notification service for web and mobile.

See more alternatives to OneSignal

Discover how Amazon SQS and OneSignal stack up against Ably

Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Amazon SQS and OneSignal 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