Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) vs. RabbitMQ

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon SQS
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Provides the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), a managed message queue service which supports the safe decoupling and distribution of different components in a cloud infrastructure and cloud applications.
$0
per GB
RabbitMQ
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
RabbitMQ, an open source message broker, is part of Pivotal Software, a VMware company acquired in 2019, and supports message queue, multiple messaging protocols, and more. RabbitMQ is available open source, however VMware also offers a range of commercial services for RabbitMQ; these are available as part of the Pivotal App Suite.N/A
Pricing
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)RabbitMQ
Editions & Modules
All Data Transfer In
$0.00
per GB
Standard Queue
$0.00000004
per request
FIFO Queue
$0.00000005
per request
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon SQSRabbitMQ
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)RabbitMQ
Considered Both Products
Amazon SQS
Chose Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
The reason for the choice is due to maintenance needs and HIPPA compliance, as well as the great options under the AWS ecosystem, with very useful configurable parameters.
RabbitMQ
Chose RabbitMQ
It is very easy to use as it has a simple function to connect and use RabbitMQ.
It is having Fast Learning curve, Any newbies can learn it in a week or month. It is having proper documentation, we are able to find all the details about its functionality and usage of it.
The …
Chose RabbitMQ
For basic use cases, SQS is way easy to deploy and maintain compared to RabbitMQ. RabbitMQ can cover a lot more use-cases but actually, we did not face specific scenarios that make it necessary to come back to RabbitMQ.
Top Pros
Top Cons
TrustRadius Insights
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)RabbitMQ
Highlights

TrustRadius
Research Team Insight
Published

Amazon SQS and RabbitMQ are both message queue software that allow for asynchronous communication between IT systems.  Amazon SQS is a pseudo queue that ensures messages are delivered from one system to another, though not necessarily in an ordered manner.  In contrast, RabbitMQ is a traditional message broker where messages are delivered in a first in, first out order, ensuring that messages are read in the same order they are sent. Both tools are popular with businesses of all sizes. 

Features

Amazon SQS and RabbitMQ both serve as message queues, but they also have some standout features that set them apart from each other. 

One advantage of Amazon SQS is that it has built in compliance features, so businesses that need to comply with HIPAA, for example, will have little difficulty with Amazon SQS.  Scalability and availability are also generally nonissues with Amazon SQS since it is built into AWS.  Amazon SQS also boasts high reliability and security, so businesses using AWS can rely on Amazon SQS to secure and deliver messages with a high level of consistency.  All in all, Amazon SQS is a strong, low effort choice for businesses using AWS.

RabbitMQ provides FIFO queues in all regions, so for businesses where message order is essential, RabbitMQ is a strong choice.  Additionally, RabbitMQ is open-source, lightweight, and flexible.  Businesses will almost always be able to fit RabbitMQ into their IT infrastructure whether they want to deploy it on premise or on the cloud.  For businesses looking for a lightweight, high speed message broker, RabbitMQ is a great solution. 

Limitations

Amazon SQS and RabbitMQ both help systems communicate with each other, but they also have some limitations that are important to consider.

Amazon SQS only offers FIFO queues in certain regions, so if your business isn’t in one of those regions and message order is important, other options should be considered.  Additionally, Amazon SQS is inflexible in its implementation, it is a cloud tool that works well with AWS.  For businesses looking for a more customizable, or on premise implementation, RabbitMQ may be preferred.

RabbitMQ is lightweight and high speed, but it doesn’t offer easy scalability compared to Amazon SQS, where scalability is built into AWS.  Additionally, while RabbitMQ is capable of many different types of implementations, it is more difficult to set up compared to Amazon SQS, so businesses with limited technical resources may need support.  Additionally, RabbitMQ doesn’t include features for meeting compliance standards out of the box.  For businesses that want a simple to implement, cloud based message queue, Amazon SQS may be a better choice. 

Pricing

Amazon SQS pricing scales automatically depending on the number of requests made.  The first million requests per month are free, after which every million requests costs $0.40.

RabbitMQ is an open-source software, meaning the source code is available online for free. Vendors offer support for RabbitMQ, ranging from implementation to ongoing maintenance. Quotes are available from the vendor for RabbitMQ support. 

Best Alternatives
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)RabbitMQ
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 out of 10
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 out of 10
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)RabbitMQ
Likelihood to Recommend
7.1
(7 ratings)
9.4
(11 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(2 ratings)
6.5
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)RabbitMQ
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
If you are looking to build something that just requires a simple queue service (as the name implies) this is great for it. You might look elsewhere though if you get into more complicated needs. This is also very well suited if you are already using other services with AWS and intend to fully build whatever you are building in AWS. If you are looking for a mixed environment -- SQS is not for you
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Open Source
It is highly recommended that if you have microservices architecture and if you want to solve 2 phase commit issue, you should use RabbitMQ for communication between microservices. It is a quick and reliable mode of communication between microservices. It is also helpful if you want to implement a job and worker mechanism. You can push the jobs into RabbitMQ and that will be sent to the consumer. It is highly reliable so you won't miss any jobs and you can also implement a retry of jobs with the dead letter queue feature. It will be also helpful in time-consuming API. You can put time-consuming items into a queue so they will be processed later and your API will be quick.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • It provides an always-available serverless queue for workflows or mission-critical processes.
  • Is extremely low cost and overall costs to our environments have been negligible.
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Open Source
  • What RabbitMQ does well is what it's advertised to do. It is good at providing lots of high volume, high availability queue. We've seen it handle upwards of 10 million messages in its queues, spread out over 200 queues before its publish/consume rates dipped. So yeah, it can definitely handle a lot of messages and a lot of queues. Depending on the size of the machine RabbitMQ is running on, I'm sure it can handle more.
  • Decent number of plugins! Want a plugin that gives you an interface to view all the queues and see their publish/consume rates? Yes, there's one for that. Want a plugin to "shovel" messages from one queue to another in an emergency? Check. Want a plugin that does extra logging for all the messages received? Got you covered!
  • Lots of configuration possibilities. We've tuned over 100 settings over the past year to get the performance and reliability just right. This could be a downside though--it's pretty confusing and some settings were hard to understand.
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Almost all of the functionality has been covered by SQS, but they could improve the throughput time.
  • Also, they could provide built-in Cloud Watch, so that we can easily configure it without any external efforts.
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Open Source
  • It breaks communication if we don't acknowledge early. In some cases our work items are time consuming that will take a time and in that scenario we are getting errors that RabbitMQ broke the channel. It will be good if RabbitMQ provides two acknowledgements, one is for that it has been received at client side and second ack is client is completed the processing part.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Open Source
RabbitMQ is very usable if you are a programmer or DevOps engineer. You can setup and configure a messaging system without any programmatic knowledge either through an admin console plugin or through a command-line interface. It's very easy to spin up additional consumers when volume is heavy and it's very easy to manage those consumers either through automated scripting or through their admin console. Because it's language agnostic it integrates with any system supporting AMQP.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
Online blogging and documentation for SQS is great. There are many examples of implementing it and if you look hard enough, more than likely there are examples that meet the exact case with which you are working
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Open Source
RabbitMQ is more software than service so there's no real customer service to speak of unless you go with a provider such as CloudAMQP. So I'll just speak on CloudAMQP. Their customer support is only okay: they only do it over email. They frequently gloss over our support tickets and half answer them without delving deeply or investigating our issues. Their response times are pretty reasonable though.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
The most comparable products are RabbitMQ, and perhaps ActiveMQ. Until recently, AWS did not offer a managed ActiveMQ product. Running RabbitMQ will never be to my team's competitive advantage; we wanted a managed service.
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Open Source
RabbitMQ has a few advantages over Azure Service Bus 1) RMQ handles substantially larger files - ASB tops out at 100MB, we use RabbitMQfor files over 200MB 2) RabbitMQ can be easily setup on prem - Azure Service Bus is cloud only 3) RabbitMQ exchanges are easier to configure over ASB subscriptions ASB has a few advantages too 1) Cloud based - just a few mouse clicks and you're up and running
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Positive impact - time allocation towards different features
  • Negative impact - too many resources dedicated towards debugging
  • Positive impact - less manual labor during testing
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Open Source
  • Earlier we had a problem with missing work items with our own implementation but later using RabbitMQ is solved a problem. Now our job processing mechanism is highly reliable.
  • We also had a problem with scaling, processing 1k work items per second. RabbitMQ helped us to scale well with increasing work items.
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