Amazon Kinesis vs. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Kinesis
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Kinesis is a streaming analytics suite for data intake from video or other disparate sources and applying analytics for machine learning (ML) and business intelligence.
$0.01
per GB data ingested / consumed
Amazon SNS
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Web Services offers the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) which provides pub/sub messaging and push notifications to iOS and Android devices. It is meant to operate in a microservices architecture and which can support event-driven contingencies and support the decoupling of applications.
$0.01
per 1 million
Pricing
Amazon KinesisAmazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Editions & Modules
Amazon Kinesis Video Streams
$0.00850
per GB data ingested / consumed
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
$0.04
per hour per stream
Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics
$0.11
per hour
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
tiered pricing starting at $0.029
per month first 500 TB ingested
API Requests & Payload Data
$0.01
per 1 million
API Requests
$0.50
per 1 million requests
Notification Deliveries
$0.50
per million notifications
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon KinesisAmazon SNS
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon KinesisAmazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon KinesisAmazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Streaming Analytics
Comparison of Streaming Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Kinesis
8.3
2 Ratings
3% above category average
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
-
Ratings
Real-Time Data Analysis10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources9.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Low Latency9.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Integrated Development Tools9.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Data wrangling and preparation10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Linear Scale-Out6.12 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Enrichment5.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon KinesisAmazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Small Businesses
IBM Streams
IBM Streams
Score 9.0 out of 10
AWS IoT Core
AWS IoT Core
Score 7.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Confluent
Confluent
Score 7.4 out of 10
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Spotfire Streaming
Spotfire Streaming
Score 8.1 out of 10
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon KinesisAmazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(3 ratings)
9.3
(24 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(11 ratings)
Support Rating
7.1
(2 ratings)
8.4
(14 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon KinesisAmazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Amazon Kinesis is a great replacement for Kafka and it works better whenever the components of the solution are AWS based. Best if extended fan-out is not required, but still price-performance ratio is very good for simplifying maintenance.
I would go with a different option if the systems to be connected are legacy, for instance in the case of traditional messaging clients.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
The Amazon SNS service is well suited to support event notifications, monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates, and mobile applications that generates or consumes notifications. It can be used to relay time-critical events to mobile applications and devices. It provides significant advantages to developers who build mobile applications that rely on real-time events. It is not well suited for hybrid cross platform mobile application frameworks at this juncture. An optimal version to meet the needs of a cross platform mobile developer is needed as generally the frameworks are not meant to manage real-time events. It is also not suited for cases where the queue management needs improvement or requires special workflows/tooling.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Processing huge loads of data
  • Integrating well with IoT Platform on Amazon
  • Integration with overall AWS Ecosystem
  • Scalability
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • Built in for quicker setup within AWS ecosystem.
  • Trusted as you control the users and configuration via IAM and easy access controls.
  • Can be sent to S3 simple storage or for long term storage if required.
  • Can be used in many regions, same configs.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Not a queue system, so little visibility into "backlog" if there is any
  • Confusing terminology to make sure events aren't missed
  • Sometimes didn't seem to trigger Lambda functions, or dropped events when a lot came in
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • At times you receive access denied errors which are annoying.
  • Rarely do you receive internal failure errors where you can't access the information. It is rare but it does happen.
  • You are required to add an MWS Authentication Token every so often. I wish it would pull that information automatically for you so you don't have to go searching for it.
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
It is useful for applications developed using event driven architecture. It helps in tracking and logging the events in a very timely and efficient manner. The dashboards are a little difficult to implement. But overall it is very easy to integrate with other AWS services like Lambda, API GW, S3 and DynamoDB. The permissions to access should be resolved before using it.
Read full review
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
The documentation was confusing and lacked examples. The streams suddenly stopped working with no explanation and there was no information in the logs. All these were more difficult when dealing with enhanced fan-out. In fact, we were about to abort the usage of Kinesis due to a misunderstanding with enhanced fan-out.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
Amazon Simple Notification Sevices (SNS) support depends on your usage pattern and definitely on your support plan as an enterprise with AWS. Before reaching out to support you should read their documentation, as they have mentioned almost all the common issues and their solutions there. However, for specific issues, they generally respond in 1-2 business days.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
The main benefit was around set up - incredibly easy to just start using Kinesis. Kinesis is a real-time data processing platform, while Kafka is more of a message queue system. If you only need a message queue from a limited source, Kafka may do the job. More complex use cases, with low latency, higher volume of data, real time decisions and integration with multiple sources and destination at a decent price, Kinesis is better.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
Amazon’s SNS is incredibly easy to set up compared to the
more powerful, but complex, Kafka flavours.

SNS’s core advantages are –

· no setup/no maintenance

· either a queue (SQS) or a topic (SNS)

· various limitations (on size, how long a message lives, etc)

· limited throughput: you can do batch and concurrent requests, but still
achieving high throughputs would be expensive

· SNS has notifications for email, SMS, SQS, HTTP built-in.

· no "message stream" concept Overall, it would be the best choice to get into the concepts of Pub/Sub concepts as although it has limitations it can provide significant capabilities and solutions
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Caused us to need to re-engineer some basic re-try logic
  • Caused us to drop some content without knowing it
  • Made monitoring much more difficult
  • We eventually switched back to SQS because Kinesis is not the same as a Queue system
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) saved us a lot of extra coding time by providing straightforward functionality we needed in our ad campaign automation tool.
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) allows us to maintain a consistent, serverless model within our applications.
Read full review
ScreenShots