Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) vs. Twilio

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
Twilio
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Twilio 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 Simple Notification Service (SNS)Twilio
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
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details1. Pay-as-you-go pricing: Simple usage-based pricing means you don’t get locked into big contracts. 2. Volume discounts: Discounts trigger as your usage grows, so you always get a fair price. 3. Start building today with free trial credit and full API access.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)Twilio
Considered Both Products
Amazon SNS

No answer on this topic

Twilio
Chose Twilio
Twilio has given us more competitive rates than the other providers.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)Twilio
Small Businesses
AWS IoT Core
AWS IoT Core
Score 7.7 out of 10
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 out of 10
Bright Pattern Contact Center
Bright Pattern Contact Center
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Score 9.1 out of 10
Conversica
Conversica
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)Twilio
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(24 ratings)
6.6
(70 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(5 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(11 ratings)
9.5
(10 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(15 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 Simple Notification Service (SNS)Twilio
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
Twilio
Twilio excels in customer service applications, enabling automated SMS updates or voice calls for order confirmations and support. It's ideal for implementing two-factor authentication, enhancing security for online services. However, it's less suitable for businesses needing in-depth, custom telephony infrastructure, as it primarily offers standard, API-driven solutions, or for regions with limited internet connectivity, where cloud-based services may be unreliable.
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.
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.
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
Twilio
  • In my opinion, online support is extremely subpar for clients.
  • In my experience, no way to talk with anyone without a $1,500 investment monthly in their service.
  • In my experience, be prepared to wait at least 2-4 days to receive even one response from their support.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Twilio
We have standardized our processes surrounding Twilio. The entire process just works! There is no significant gap that we need to fill. Instead of thinking about Twilio's replacement, we'd rather focus on our customers with Twilio. It meets all our uses-cases currently. We haven't even explored the entire suite of applications to determine what other use cases we may potentially use.
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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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Twilio
Overall the product API is extremely well documented so it is very easy to build a product with their technology. The website is a little bit cumbersome to use as they have greatly expanded the number of products that they have over the years, but the dashboard UI has not been improved much since.
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Performance
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Twilio
The problem tends to be us, the user, rather than Twilio. We don't reach out to support fast enough (spend time struggling), but when we have, they've solved our issue immediately. We are rural, so there are signal issues to accommodate, however, we find that a few staff on a few cellular networks can triangulate where we all have signal to put up a sign.
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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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Twilio
I've never had to contact Authy's support. Of course, that's because Authy is so simple and easy to use that there hasn't been any need to. Authy correctly implements the time-based one-time password (TOTP) protocol, and becomes it conforms to the standard, it easily replaces Google Authenticator for your needs.
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Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Twilio
The developer APIs and SDKs are super easy to follow.
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
Read full review
Twilio
Twilio was referred to me by a business colleague, and I can't be more thankful! Twilio has helped my Facebook page by leaps and bounds, and I haven't even considered trying another chat option for my page. It is easy to set up, and customer service is quick to answer any and all questions you may have. I highly recommend it!
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
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.
Read full review
Twilio
  • Adding in phone numbers onto our onboarding sequence has increased our user activity by about 30%. We believe due to the users being more invested in the application now.
  • On top of that, our first SMS has increased our week 1 retention by about 15%. Pushing users to go on the app more than 2-3 times has been a struggle and SMS seems to be a solid driver in retention.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Twilio Screenshots

Screenshot of To access any of the products in Console, head over to the “Explore Products” section and start building.Screenshot of Whether you prefer to build with a drag-and-drop visual editor or with code, Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns helps you engage your customers through email.Screenshot of Flex is a programmable Contact Center that puts you in control.