Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) vs. OneSignal

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
OneSignal
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
OneSignal’s omnichannel customer engagement platform offers push notifications, email, in-app messages, and SMS. OneSignal’s automated customer Journeys and one-off campaigns allow users to create messaging strategies that convert, inform, and retain audiences, with little to no coding required for setup.
$9
per month
Pricing
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)OneSignal
Editions & Modules
API Requests & Payload Data
$0.01
per 1 million
API Requests
$0.50
per 1 million requests
Notification Deliveries
$0.50
per million notifications
Growth
9+
per month
Professional
999+
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon SNSOneSignal
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)OneSignal
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)OneSignal
Small Businesses
AWS IoT Core
AWS IoT Core
Score 7.7 out of 10
Vbout
Vbout
Score 9.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.5 out of 10
PFL Direct Mail Platform
PFL Direct Mail Platform
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.5 out of 10
PFL Direct Mail Platform
PFL Direct Mail Platform
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)OneSignal
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(24 ratings)
10.0
(9 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(11 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(14 ratings)
7.1
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)OneSignal
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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OneSignal
I think One Signal is very well suited for mobile app owners who want to be in touch with their user base more easily by sending push notifications and in-app messages. I'm not sure how well that works for SMS messaging as I haven't yet tried it. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it if your in-apps are very rare.
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Pros
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.
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OneSignal
  • Send instant notifications without any delay.
  • Provide all the necessary features for testing.
  • Highly cost effective.
  • Great system to handle huge volume.
  • Great customer support.
Read full review
Cons
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.
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OneSignal
  • Is still in development: we know OneSignal is still in development and sometimes it takes longer to create or fulfill certain features.
  • Payment: payment menu is not at the glance, [and] is just difficult sometimes to find -it is a minor issue.
  • Send to certain custom segments through specific OneSignal IDs; you can do it though API doing a GET call with tools like Postman. If this can be done from OneSignal it would be great.
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Usability
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.
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OneSignal
I give an 8 in this question mainly for 2 reasons: the products even if they look like complete and are highly customizable and usable, they are still missing some logical features. For example, send messages to a list of users - now days you can do it with postman and get calls. A second example is App messaging that is still in development and has many opportunities.
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Support Rating
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.
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OneSignal
Their customer support has been top-notch. They are able to assist you in getting through any problems that you may have and respond in a very timely manner. I've dealt with them on 4-5 instances over the years and my issues were always resolved within a matter of a few business days.
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Alternatives Considered
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
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OneSignal
In my opinion, OneSignal documentation / API is more friendly [than] Firebase. Maybe because Firebase is already "too big," but OneSignal is focused on one solution that giving our notification through to our customer. In that case, OneSignal is chosen by our company. Several years after that, Firebase announced it supported [the] iOs platform too but our company already using OneSignal to our notification provider.
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Return on Investment
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.
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OneSignal
  • OneSignal has allowed us to grow number of subscribers in a short time.
  • We are able to send our news and offers easily and instantly.
  • We have become able to drive more website traffic and increase in sales.
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