Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) vs. PagerDuty

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
PagerDuty
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
PagerDuty is an IT alert and incident management application from the company of the same name in San Francisco.
$25
per month per user
Pricing
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)PagerDuty
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
Professional
$25
per month per user
Business
$49
per month per user
Digital Operations
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon SNSPagerDuty
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details16% discount for annual pricing. AIOps Add-On available for $499 for 10k events per month. Add-On Runbook Automation for Incident Response available at $71 per user / per month.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)PagerDuty
Considered Both Products
Amazon SNS
Chose Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Many products, including PagerDuty, can be used to notify stakeholders when alarms are triggered. SNS is only suitable for non-emergency email alerts, and integration with CloudWatch is its only advantage. If you want to be notified of an issue by email, SNS can be configured …
Chose Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Amazon Simple Notification Service and PagerDuty have been used by various organizations. Amazon SNS is ideal if you're within an AWS environment. PagerDuty is used when we are working outside of Amazon Web Services. Though PagerDuty is more expensive than Amazon SNS they do …
Chose Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
SNS helps in integrating with other AWS components which are used in development such as Lambda, APIGW, S3 and DynamoDb easily. If used with third party software like PagerDuty, it makes the development and integration more complex. It is used mostly for publishing and …
Chose Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
The main reason we chose Amazon SNS is for easy integration with all the workflows in AWS. The other alternatives can be (and really are) best in specific points, but the main strength of SNS is that is one service of AWS, so we don't need to complicate things in our …
PagerDuty

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)PagerDuty
Small Businesses
AWS IoT Core
AWS IoT Core
Score 7.6 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 out of 10
Freshservice
Freshservice
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 out of 10
Freshservice
Freshservice
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)PagerDuty
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(24 ratings)
8.7
(138 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(6 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(11 ratings)
7.3
(4 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(14 ratings)
9.0
(85 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)PagerDuty
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.
Read full review
PagerDuty
I've used ICM in the past which has been a very Microsoft product with everything thrown into a blender. So, PD implementation is a breath of fresh air with focused pages to achieve the end goal. If the goal is to collaborate on issues across the organization, PD might not be the best solution but within specific teams, PD excels at it.
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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.
Read full review
PagerDuty
  • Alerting notifications is its best attribute; it will continue to make contact until the alert is acknowledged by a user.
  • The calendar view provides valuable information regarding who is on call by the team and their full contact information.
  • The application also lets you initiate a tech bridge meeting instantly and notifies all on-call users.
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.
Read full review
PagerDuty
  • When getting a phone call, PagerDuty doesn't seem to allow acknowledgments of alerts through the phone, which it says it does. I constantly receive a message that it was updated by another person - when in reality, it wasn't.
  • Smarter notifications. If an alert was snoozed for a time, when it comes back, it sends out another alert. It should, I think, send a message asking if the alert is still an issue and give the option to close.
  • Make schedule changes more intuitive.
  • One button to acknowledge and close an alert.
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
PagerDuty
They have been rock solid for us thus far and are not very expensive and to be honest no time to evaluate other software at this point.
Read full review
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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PagerDuty
The UI is more complex than I would like. Part of the challenge is that most users use PagerDuty infrequently; I don't remember how I changed a policy last time. Another part of the challenge is that some users expect alerting to be a trivial feature, and are reluctant to invest any time in reading the documentation.
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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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PagerDuty
PagerDuty is reliable and easy to set up. It gives an effective way to notify the team about critical incidents which results in a faster turnaround time on issues. users can customize their alerts rules based on their preferences. Overall it's effective and easy to use which adds great business value.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
PagerDuty
When I setup notifications to PD thru the Python API I was impressed with the ease with which I could set up the software/service.
Read full review
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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PagerDuty
I have not use the 2 technologies for as long as I have used PagerDuty but in my opinion PagerDuty makes things a lot easier. The other tools got the job done and got alerts out but PagerDuty just seemed to make the setup for on-call alert schedules and integrations easier than the others. This isn't to say the others are difficult, just that PagerDuty was slightly better. I also have noticed that more tools have options to integrate to PagerDuty over the other tools.
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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.
Read full review
PagerDuty
  • Allow our service to be available 24/7 with minimal downtime, improving customer experience
  • Monitor incidents and allow us to customize/schedule alert notifications, making engineers' jobs easier and preventing turnover
  • Prevent SEVs that could deteriorate, bring down our service, and cost us millions of dollars from loss in bookings
Read full review
ScreenShots

PagerDuty Screenshots

Screenshot of Similar Incidents [Apple iPad], Open Incidents [iPhone 8], On-Call Schedule Menu [Apple Watch])Screenshot of the Machine Learning with Technical Service Dependencies, used to better understand related incidents.Screenshot of a glimpse of service health and team performance via PagerDuty’s Intelligent Dashboards.