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Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) vs. Twilio

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Amazon SNS

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/AAmazon 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

    Twilio

    Score7.7 out of 10
    N/ATwilio offers a CPaaS and CCaaS solution, with the combination of its programmable Voice, Video, and Messaging APIs, as well as the Twilio Flex cloud contact center. Additional capabilities include Twilio's Elastic SIP Trunking, as well as API for WhatsApp.

    $0

    per min per participant

    Pricing
    Amazon SNSTwilio
    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
    Programmable Video
    $0.0015
    per min per participant
    WhatsApp Business API
    $0.0042
    Per WhatsApp Template message sent
    WhatsApp Business API
    $0.005
    Per WhatsApp session message
    Elastic SIP Trunking
    $0.007
    Per min for termination
    Programmable Messaging
    $0.0075
    per message sent or received
    Programmable Voice
    $0.0085
    per minute to receive a call
    Programmable Voice
    $0.013
    per min to make a call
    Elastic SIP Trunking
    $0.045
    Per min for origination
    Twilio Conversations
    $0.05
    per active user per month
    Twilio Authy
    $0.09
    per authentication
    Programmable Wireless
    $0.1
    per MB
    Twilio Flex (Contact Center)
    $1
    per active user hour (5000 hours free)
    Programmable Wireless
    $2.00
    per SIM card
    Twilio SendGrid Email API
    $14.95
    per month up to 100k emails. (Up to 40k emails free for 30 days)
    Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns
    $15
    per month for 5,000 contacts and 15,000 emails. Your first 2,000 contacts are free
    Twilio Flex (Contact Center)
    $150
    per named user per month (5000 hours free)
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Amazon SNSTwilio
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
    Additional Details1. Pay-as-you-go pricing: Simple usage-based pricing without contracts. 2. Volume discounts: Discounts trigger as usage grows. 3. Free trial credit that includes full API access.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Amazon SNSTwilio
    Considered Both Products
    Amazon AWS
    No answer on this topic
    Twilio
    Chose Twilio
    Twilio has given us more competitive rates than the other providers.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    20 Answers
    92%
    Would buy again
    66 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    20 Answers
    92%
    Delivers good value for the price
    58 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    20 Answers
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    68 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    13 Answers
    88%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    45 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    19 Answers
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    56 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Amazon SNSTwilio
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Simplify360
    Score7.8 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Confluent
    Score9.1 out of 10
    Customer.io
    Score9.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Google Cloud Pub/Sub
    Score8.8 out of 10
    SAP Service Cloud
    Score8.5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Amazon SNSTwilio
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (25 ratings)
    8.1
    (94 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.5
    (5 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (12 ratings)
    9.5
    (10 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (38 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.4
    (14 ratings)
    5.7
    (16 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.5
    (2 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Professional Services
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Amazon SNSTwilio
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Twilio
    I have tried other competitors. But I always end up going back to Twilio because I feel like it is dependable, easy to use, and, has competitive pricing. The only time I wouldn't recommend Twilio to someone as if they are completely inexperienced about using webhooks or APIs. Because you can't really just sign up and start using Twilio without connecting it to another platform first.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Twilio
    • Easy to see my team in one place, when they log in and out and what call status they are in.
    • Twilio is a simple, user friendly way to log in and out of work activities.
    • Excellent services and support.
    • The omnichannel feature which allows agents to get request from all channels.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Twilio
    • Control panel. Often, navigating through lists is challenging. I want endless scrolling, not pagination.
    • Conversational intelligence service require a Language. I would like it to detect it.
    • We would like to have some credit on clients that chose to use their own Twilio account.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Twilio
    Unless we can get this handled quickly -- less than 1 week -- we will likely switch to another provider who, in my opinion, we'll have to spend close to $3,000 in development time to build a new integration for texting. Our clients need texting and I feel Twilio has failed us miserably.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Twilio
    Twilio has well documented APIs and examples. There are several tutorials, videos and Q&As regarding their services. So, usability is very good. I must say that advanced knowledge of telephony, API/Programming and error-handling is essential to make good use of Twilio. It's not just plug-and-play unless you are integrated with a system that has all of the programming built for it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Twilio
    Twilio executes what it is designed to do: send SMS messages at scale while providing very good deliverability. I believe that Twilio is very good at what we use for adding SMS messages to our comms strategy. We can see those messages get opened and replied to, which is exactly what we are looking to achieve.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Twilio
    I have not had to communicate with Twilio support in the last 3 years but my past experience with them has been very positive. They replied to my previous requests promptly and kept me well informed to resolve my inquiries. With their documentation that's available, I hardly imagine why anyone would need to contact support since it's all there in a concise and easy to understand format. It would probably take you longer to type out a support ticket than to just open their doc websites.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Twilio
    The developer APIs and SDKs are super easy to follow.
    Incentivized
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Twilio
    We evaluated many fundraising-based text-to-give programs and found the subscriptions prohibitively expensive for our small scale and uncertain first few years of development. While we may be willing to invest that kind of money after discovering how things work, we're happy with Twilio now and have no desire to start over.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Twilio
    Being in South Africa, direct local currency support would be nice
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Twilio
    • We found that associates who had the opportunity to respond to a survey about their assigned job were 37% more likely to return to a job site
    • We were able to reduce the number of resources required to manually respond to associates using Twilio Studio, so those resources could have more time to complete other tasks
    • We were able to scale the number of associates who received survey messages at least by a factor of 8 without increasing our resource demand
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Twilio Screenshots

    Screenshot of the “Explore Products” section, which is where to build products.Screenshot of the optional drag-and-drop visual editor and code editor.Screenshot of Flex, which is a programmable Contact Center that puts you in control.