Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS

Overview

What is Amazon SNS?

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…

Read more
Recent Reviews

AWS SNS delivers

7 out of 10
November 08, 2020
Incentivized
We use it as part of our mobile learning app to send transactional messages to learners to start a module. It allows us to reach learners …
Continue reading

I love Amazon SNS.

10 out of 10
September 22, 2020
Incentivized
Amazon SNS is being used to deliver notifications to users. We started with custom software where users could subscribe to certain topics …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

API Requests & Payload Data

$0.01

Cloud
per 1 million

API Requests

$0.50

Cloud
per 1 million requests

Notification Deliveries

$0.50

Cloud
per million notifications

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Return to navigation

Product Details

Amazon SNS Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 8.5.

The most common users of Amazon SNS are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(49)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-24 of 24)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SNS to send out emails and text notifications. The majority of our uses are to send out One Time Passwords through our online application process. SNS is an inexpensive and safe way to send out a high volume of these codes. SNS was also very straightforward to implement.
  • Sending Text messages
  • Ensuring test message compliance with 10 digit numbers.
  • Notifying us when certain providers are down.
It is well suited for transactional messages like OTPs. It's probably not well suited for a two-way messaging thread.
Manu Gupta | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The Amazon SNS service provides support to a wide variety of needs including critical events notification, monitoring hybrid mobile applications both on ios and android, time-sensitive information updates. We are in the process of scaling our projects to include Amazon SNS in business workflow systems to relay events among apps, move data between data stores or update records in billing systems.
The product is very useful in managing key event notifications. We also plan to use it for our customers to update them about our new features and critical outages. The scope of our use case is both for managing AWS backend events within the organizational workflows and also for notifications to our customers.
  • Event updates and notifications concerning validation, approval are immediately delivered to relevant system components as well as end-users.
  • Move data between data stores or update records in billing systems
  • SNS is very useful in workflow systems to relay events among distributed applications
  • Event notification, monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates in billing and ledgering systems.
  • Very useful to developers who build applications that rely on real-time events.
  • Interoperability with other cloud vendors and shared hosting systems
  • Better support and integration with low code/no code platforms to enable developers to integrate faster
  • Ease of developer experience especially in managing real time database events for hybrid mobile and tablet apps
  • Availability of plugins for open source cross platform developer tools like ionic framework.
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a very versatile tool useful for both small and large-scale Amazon estates. Our first use case was for applications monitoring and system alerts based on notifications triggered by predefined thresholds. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) sent these notifications to specific users via email. It was great for our initial foray into DevOps way back in 2010. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is now a lot better and can be used for a variety of use cases – one that we now use very widely is fanout where we use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) to replicate Production data into staging and training environments for AI/ML model training.
  • Messaging
  • Ease of use
  • Pricing
  • Troubleshooting
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is incredible for setting up monitoring and alerting for your AWS estate when you are starting out. However, it has now grown significantly and is a feature complete messaging platform that can operate securely at scale. We use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) now significantly for clickstream analytics and training AI/ML models via fanout - a method to replicate Production data and send it directly into staging environments where new ML models can get trained.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I used to use AWS SNS for sending text messages for transactional messages. Now I use SNS for sending alerts from our dashboards. SNS is very versatile and there are a lot of features you can use as well as benefits of setting up the subscriptions from the back end. We use Terragrunt to easily upload all our data
  • Easy GUI to use
  • Integration with automation
  • Integration with third party platforms
  • Daily reports
  • Ability to have subscriptions and topics
  • Ability to connect to third party applications
  • Errors are hard to debug
  • Lack of verbose errors
I think that SNS is very well suited if you need to send emails or text messages in response to events. Whether you use lambda or Grafana or other alerting platforms where you can have an event trigger a message to go out to your team. I also have used SNS as a marketing platform tool where we simply use it to send text messages based on event-driven actions and also for batch messages
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for many purposes : Mainly to do monitoring and alerting. For instance we use it to send alerts via Microsoft Teams using Webhooks. For others scenarios we use it to send messages to some specific APIs we have.
  • Very easy to setup
  • Scale very well
  • Covers a wide range of protocols and services
  • It would be useful to have more information regarding the origin of a message (ie its source)
  • It would be nice to configure HTTP-related stuff (such as header) when interacting with a HTTP target
Very useful when you need to setup http webhooks for some alerting or build more complex architectures using services like Lambda. The product will scale pretty well !
November 08, 2020

AWS SNS delivers

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it as part of our mobile learning app to send transactional messages to learners to start a module. It allows us to reach learners without an email address and reduces user friction of needing to remember a login and password, or 'not getting round' to the email notification to begin their learning.
  • Relatively simple to integrate in-app.
  • Fuss-free for user once implemented.
  • Pay-per-use
  • No clear indication that transactional messages are sent as multiple SMSs (increased cost).
  • No 'dashboard' to easily see metrics at a glance or deep-dive if more info required.
Great for transactional messaging. Easy-enough to integrate. Seamless to run. Would love for SNS to also support OTT messaging platforms to reduce cost to us, and provide greater flexibility for our learners.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have used Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for creating applications which make use of events. With help of SNS it is easy to track events with their timestamp when they originated and how they were used. It is very essential and it makes it easy to use as SNS can help in logging the inbound and outbound events.
  • Improved Logging
  • Easy to use
  • Helps to keep track of events
  • Pricing
  • If permissions are not configured properly it will give access denied
  • Dashboards are difficult to implement
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is well suited for applications built on event driven architecture. It makes it easy to log and track events in real time from the source to the destination. The permissions should be configured properly in order to use SNS else while implementing you can come across Access Denied errors. The dashboards are difficult to maintain to track the utilization.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon SNS to push notifications to customers for previously searched hotels through email and messages.
  • Scheduling and sending messages is very easy
  • Subscription and One-on-One option
  • Booked Hotel Details are sent very fast
  • First time setup can take a lot of time.
  • Sometimes there is high latency in sending messages, leading to less impact against expected.
We have been able to implement Amazon SNS very easily for our push notifications and solve our purpose pretty well. Scheduling various bursts is also very easy and works like a charm. We are not facing any issue with the product.
September 22, 2020

I love Amazon SNS.

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon SNS is being used to deliver notifications to users. We started with custom software where users could subscribe to certain topics and get information in a timely manner. It solved the problem of trying to keep track of everything that is going on around using different forms of communication. This way, we centralized it.
  • Easy to use
  • Easy to set up
  • Easy to integrate
  • We didn't really find a place where it wasn't useful.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is well suited where you want to allow the user to subscribe to a topic and unsubscribe at their own will and they can choose how information is delivered to them.
Bob Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The main use for Amazon Simple Notification Service within our organization is to allow our different products communicate in a subscription based communication paradigm. We are able to share state information across servers in a notification style which reduces the number of consecutive pulls or checking a common resource to allow our infrastructure to scale at need.
  • View and manage topics.
  • Allow product inter-communication.
  • Easy to get up and running.
  • Bridge between different technologies/stacks used.
  • Reporting available is good, but there are always room to grow.
  • Analytics on message origin would be beneficial.
  • Message size limit increase.
Push notifications of events occurring are the best scenario where Amazon Simple Notification Service is used within our stack. But because it can be integrated with different products, it does bridge the gap between different communication platforms we use. Though sometimes there are more elegant ways to accomplish this, SNS sometimes is the quickest way to move forward because we are already using it.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used by the application. We use it mostly to send SMS to our users!
  • SMS
  • Push Notifications
  • Simple API
  • Push Notifications due to multiple providers
It is useful when you want to send a message directly to a phone number, or a message to multiple phone numbers at once by subscribing those phone numbers to a topic and sending your message to the topic.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is being used to send SMS notifications to specific employees within the organization in case of any event via an alert management system. Amazon SNS is being used by the Central System monitoring Team to get a timely notification on their mobile devices about any issue in the system. Before using SNS, we have to make a call to each employee manually to notify them about the issue in case we need to inform them during out of office hours.
  • Notification delivery to different geographies via multiple providers.
  • Cost effective as compared to other vendors.
  • You can track delivery of notifications as well.
  • Can provide a more advanced user intuitive system to be used for notification delivery.
  • Language options could be extended.
  • Within transaction messages further classification option should be given.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is best suited for scenarios where you need to programmatically manage the notifications based on rules or conditions. You can also interface it easily with any existing system and enable them to send notifications out to the user. If you do not have a need for programmatic management of your notifications and need a simple notification handler like marketing campaigns, then you can look for other options that are more user friendly.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is basically used as a filtration system by some of our clients that sell on Amazon. The system allows them to subscribe to specific types of Amazon messages that are applicable to them and then sends them notifications for those relatable messages. It helps save them time by cutting through all of the unnecessary, unapplicable information and gets them what they need in a quick and easy process.
  • Filtration of information.
  • Streamlines messages and important information.
  • Order information notification typically for clients sold products.
  • 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.
It is a good system for getting information efficiently whether it is about orders or listing failures or updates. The service is designed to help streamline the process and allow you to get the necessary information quickly without having to go search for it on your end. I would recommend it to individuals that are selling on Amazon for sure.
Rob Domenico | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the simple notification services extensively for team in Client Service to Development and Operations, as events are collected and metrics evaluated across the entire VPC. Amazon simple notification is primarily used with the DevOps staff for managing activity by cloudwatch events, to be sent via configured topics for SNS to all department members.
  • 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.
  • Add more console support for better graphical support.
  • Can be hard to configure and may take many test example to even out alerts.
  • Limitation on how many relays so may need external sms or other provider to save a bit more.
Great on its own or in conjunction with other tools that integrate and allow grouping for better message distribution. It can be run programmatically via API, making it fully configurable to help drive your alerts in your custom application for machine to machine messaging (a nice bonus to this service that is fully managed).
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon SNS is used to communicate simple notifications across different scenarios, using emails and SMS. It addresses the problem of notifying different states for example in cloud instances, so we don't need to check each one manually. Also, it is very easy to integrate into your workflow, as it communicates fluently with other AWS Services.
  • Simple
  • Easy
  • Good Integration
  • Hard to debug
  • Email format
  • Weak dashboard
  • Proprietary API
Amazon SNS is suitable for every application, but you need to have in mind that the notifications you create should be useful for the receiver. I mean, you can create thousands of notifications, but if the reader is overwhelmed, none of them will be useful. So you need to measure the average volume that a person is ready to solve.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My team is using SNS as a way to pass messages back and forth between our billing systems and end user products. We send account/subscription messages on create and update and our products send usage messages that we subscribe to via SQS and process usage into our billing system.
  • SNS is extremely reliable.
  • SNS with SQS provides a safe place for messages in the event our services are ever down.
  • SNS is easy to configure and subscribe to.
  • For our use cases SNS completely fills our needs.
It works well for us because we have a number of different groups that are interested in updates and we don't want to be in charge of sending individual messages via API's or separate queues to each of those groups. They subscribe and filter to get the messages that they are interested in and it is extremely reliable.
February 06, 2020

Easy Reliable and Secure

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is used across the organization. We are using for APNS and topic subscription. It is also used as a centralized messaging system in our organization to send SMS, Emails, Push Notifications, etc.
  • Simple to use
  • Easy to integrate
  • AWS integration difficult for naive users
  • Not Open Source
Our customers that use AWS cloud services, it was easy for us to integrate Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). For the customers who use another cloud platform, it was difficult for us to integrate and manage with it.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) within several serverless applications to create and manage both human-read and service-read notifications as a part of our internal automation workflows. One of these applications uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) notifications to notify a dashboard interface when there are status changes in a queue process that places ad campaign listings on different platforms. Success and failure messages can be triggered and display in realtime.
  • Integrates with Lambda and SQS to allow for sophisticated serverless applications.
  • It can be used to support any combination of email, push, or even SMS notifications.
  • E-mail and SMS notifications aren't all that customizable, meaning this won't be a good solution for consumer-facing notifications.
  • The opt-in process for e-mail and SMS notifications is cumbersome.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) can be a powerful tool in a serverless toolbox. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is best suited for handling service-to-service notifications between different applications or steps in an existing serverless workflow. If you're using AWS services to handle different parts of your existing serverless application or workflow and you need a tool to facilitate reliable notifications, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) will handle that task very well.
Apurv Doshi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SNS to send notifications across services to communicate with each other. We use SNS across all the departments which are consuming AWS. We solve multiple problems through SNS as mentioned below:
  1. To notify the stack holder when build and deployment is completed.
  2. To check and report environment health.
  3. Call consumers when all async producers finish their jobs.
  4. To send Push notifications.
  • It is extremely easy and powerful service to send message across different Amazon services. To create the topic, subscriber and post notification is just natural. It requires almost zero learning curve.
  • It is a managed services. So there is no need to worry about scaling. It can work with extreme heavy volume easily without taking any special care.
  • It allows 256KB for published notification. Also this is divided into 4 chunks of 64 KB. Each 64KB chunk is considered as 1 request and full payload with 256KN is considered as 4 requests. This keeps your bill lower.
  • It does not have sufficient debug options. The only way is to subscribe for email to receive errors.
  • It is difficult to format email. To support dynamic formatting, developer needs to write extra code which can be simplified.
When your entire infrastructure is part of Amazon ecosystem, this service will act as a common thread for communication. It provides simple pubsub way to make sure real time notification. It is extremely easy to send notifications via SMS, email and Push Notifications. When async processes are running and you want to notify some other services, this service becomes first choice by default.
The only scenario where SNS is little less appropriate is heavy data volume. Sometimes you may get delayed notification.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used within our team(Mobile/Iot Development) to notify us developers in case anything within our AWS account needs attention. The primary target of most of our notifications is an email to the developers, whereas sometimes we do trigger Lambda functions using SNS.
  • Multiple mediums for notifications like email, HTTP, Lambda etc
  • Easy to set up the pub sub model
  • Debugging is difficult
It is best suited for sending notifications based on events in the AWS realm. It can be used to alert the developers in case of undesirable activity as well as be used as a medium for sending notifications to production applications
May 13, 2019

Really simple

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Almost on all projects where we use AWS services, we use Amazon SNS. It helps us to respond faster for some APIs, or for processes that do not need to be asynchronous.
  • Easy to integrate with other AWS solutions.
  • Relatively easy setup.
  • Better UI design.
On our project, Vacation Tracker, we have Webhook from Stripe, which calls AWS Lambda and needs us to respond in 10 seconds. If we need to create a PDF Invoice, we need more than 10 seconds. In this case, we use Amazon SNS to call another Lambda, which creates a PDF invoice. This SNS response is very fast and we can respond to Stripe in 10 seconds.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The engineering and data teams at my organization use Amazon SNS for two purposes. The first is to create simple notifications for non-emergency alerts. It is easy to configure a CloudWatch alarm, create an SNS topic, and subscribe some email addresses to the topic. The second purpose is to use topics and pub/sub messaging to decouple micro-services. AWS Lambda has an SNS trigger; it is easy to build functions and invoke them when events are published.
  • The AWS Lambda SNS trigger is great. Subscribing multiple Lambda functions to an SNS topic is a nice way to decouple features.
  • SNS is fully-managed. Our team is too small to manage our own pub/sub infrastructure.
  • Subscribing email endpoints to SNS topics and integrating topics with CloudWatch alerts is very easy; we create more non-emergency notifications than we would without SNS.
  • The SNS Console has not been updated in a long time, and it was confusing to begin with.
  • Testing systems that use SNS end-to-end can be tricky; LocalStack somewhat ameliorates this problem.
  • Debugging is difficult.
Amazon SNS is great for at least two use-cases: building cheap, non-emergency alerts, and decoupling services with pub/sub messaging. SNS is great for creating email notifications in minutes for alerts that are not worthy of PagerDuty. Subscribing multiple AWS Lambda functions to a topic is a great way to decouple features.
Dylan Cauwels | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon SNS is an incredibly useful service. In my previous organizations, we used it as an easy way to get a notification service set up with our users without having to manage any servers or additional resources. The messages are incredibly inexpensive and cost close to nothing. I only know that it was being used in my sector for sure, however, I am confident that it was being used all across the organization as well. It was the only available service that could solve our email/SMS notification needs with available scaling, cost savings, and ease of use for our employees and customers.
  • Super simple setup and deployment. You can have a new service set up within minutes and in a serverless environment as well
  • Well documented and incredibly easy to use. There are available APIs in almost every relevant language and are all well documented by AWS. Getting any team up to date on their new Notification architecture shouldn't take longer than a day.
  • Being managed by AWS themselves makes the service highly available in every possible way. Your SNS deployment is almost guaranteed to never go down without you ever lifting a finger to make it so.
  • The AWS website UI could use some definite improvement. The website itself is very clunky and hard to navigate and always seems to have the wrong information in the wrong places. It is a monstrous task trying to make a website as complicated as AWS look simple and easy to navigate but even with some minor improvements it would become much more user and beginner friendly.
  • Troubleshooting can be very difficult when encountering an issue with SNS and often many AWS services. By having all of your infrastructure in the cloud, it makes troubleshooting networking problems quite complicated. On top of this, aws provides little return information when a message fails to send, leaving a lot of guesswork to be done on your part to fix the issue.
It is well suited for generic push notification requirements. It can be quickly created and modified to best suit your application at any given moment. However for any notification service that needs to be highly customizable for a specific deployment should be implemented through a competing or custom built service run on company servers.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon SNS is being used by my organization for all push notification services for both iOS and Android. We have been using it for all marketing-related push notifications as well as trigger-based push notifications in order to inform our users of promotions we're running or information about their upcoming bus trip they have planned.
  • Allows you to send test push notification messages from console easily
  • Straightforward integration into the codebase
  • Easy integration/easy to maintain if already part of AWS ecosystem
  • Testing on different environments was a challenge to setup. Unclear how it's really supposed to work.
  • Mobile device tokens get disabled easily during testing making the push notification testing process fail silently.
  • SMS Delivery setup procedures not as straightforward.
If you and your team are adamant about having a product that lives under the Amazon Web Service umbrella, I can see how SNS would be a good choice for you. However, I do feel that post-integration, there was some regret due to the complexity we were experiencing during testing. We would have been better suited long-term going with a different product.
Return to navigation