StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Notifications
  4. Mobile Push Messaging
  5. Amazon SNS vs Google Cloud Messaging

Amazon SNS vs Google Cloud Messaging

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon SNS
Amazon SNS
Stacks1.4K
Followers1.2K
Votes18
Google Cloud Messaging
Google Cloud Messaging
Stacks88
Followers247
Votes22

Amazon SNS vs Google Cloud Messaging: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Amazon SNS and Google Cloud Messaging

Introduction

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) are cloud-based messaging services that allow developers to send push notifications to mobile devices, as well as to other distributed services.

1. Architecture:

  • Amazon SNS: It follows a publish/subscribe model where developers can publish messages to SNS topics, and subscribers receive those messages.
  • Google Cloud Messaging: It uses an HTTP-based system where developers send messages to specific device IDs or topics, and GCM handles the delivery.

2. Target Platforms and Services:

  • Amazon SNS: It supports push notifications for various platforms including iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, and Windows Phone.
  • Google Cloud Messaging: It primarily focuses on Android and iOS devices, providing rich push notifications and synchronization with Google services.

3. Scalability:

  • Amazon SNS: It offers virtually unlimited scalability, allowing developers to handle any amount of traffic without worrying about infrastructure.
  • Google Cloud Messaging: It also provides scalability and can handle high message loads, but may have some limitations on the number of messages per device in certain scenarios.

4. Features:

  • Amazon SNS: It offers additional features such as message filtering, message attributes, and mobile analytics. It also provides support for SMS and email notifications.
  • Google Cloud Messaging: It focuses on delivering push notifications to mobile devices and does not offer as many additional features as Amazon SNS.

5. Pricing:

  • Amazon SNS: It follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users only pay for the messages they send and any additional features they use.
  • Google Cloud Messaging: It also follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, but the charges may vary based on the number of messages and additional services used.

6. Integration with Other Cloud Services:

  • Amazon SNS: It integrates well with other Amazon Web Services such as AWS Lambda, AWS IoT, and AWS CloudFormation, enabling developers to build complex applications.
  • Google Cloud Messaging: It integrates with other Google Cloud services such as Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), Google Analytics, and Firebase Authentication, providing a seamless development experience within the Google Cloud ecosystem.

In summary, while both Amazon SNS and Google Cloud Messaging provide push notification services, they differ in their architecture, target platforms, scalability, features, pricing, and integration options. Developers can choose the one that aligns better with their specific requirements and ecosystem.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Amazon SNS, Google Cloud Messaging

Manish
Manish

Lead Consultant at Knoldus Software LLp

Oct 24, 2020

Needs adviceonAmazon SNSAmazon SNSAmazon PinpointAmazon Pinpoint

Instead of Amazon SNS, which is currently being used to send outbound push notification and including SMS, we want to build the 2 Way SMS using Amazon Pinpoint. Just want to know about Pinpoint and any outstanding issues if we drop SNS since it does not support 2 Way and use Pinpoint for both incoming and outgoing flow.

248k views248k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon SNS
Amazon SNS
Google Cloud Messaging
Google Cloud Messaging

Amazon Simple Notification Service makes it simple and cost-effective to push to mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire, and internet connected smart devices, as well as pushing to other distributed services. Besides pushing cloud notifications directly to mobile devices, SNS can also deliver notifications by SMS text message or email, to Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues, or to any HTTP endpoint.

Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is a free service that enables developers to send messages between servers and client apps. This includes downstream messages from servers to client apps, and upstream messages from client apps to servers.

In most cases, developers can get started with Amazon SNS by using just three APIs: CreateTopic, Subscribe, and Publish. Additional APIs are available, which provide more advanced functionality.;With SNS you can publish a message once, and deliver it one or more times. So you can choose to direct unique messages to individual Apple, Google or Amazon devices, or broadcast deliveries to many mobile devices with a single publish request.;SNS allows you to group multiple recipients using topics. A topic is an “access point” for allowing recipients to dynamically subscribe for identical copies of the same notification. One topic can support deliveries to multiple endpoint types -- for example, you can group together iOS, Android and SMS recipients. When you publish once to a topic, SNS delivers appropriately formatted copies of your message to each subscriber.;Amazon SNS allows applications and end-users on different devices to receive notifications via Mobile Push notification (Apple, Google and Kindle Fire Devices), HTTP/HTTPS, Email/Email-JSON, SMS or Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues.;Amazon SNS provides access control mechanisms to ensure that topics and messages are secured against unauthorized access
Versatile Messaging Targets: Distribute messages to your client app in any of three ways — to single devices, to groups of devices, or to devices subscribed to topics.; Downstream Messaging: For purposes such as alerting users, chat messaging or kicking off background processing before the user opens the client app, GCM provides a reliable and battery-efficient connection between your server and devices.; Upstream Messaging: Send acknowledgments, chats, and other messages from devices back to your server over GCM’s reliable and battery-efficient connection channel.;
Statistics
Stacks
1.4K
Stacks
88
Followers
1.2K
Followers
247
Votes
18
Votes
22
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 12
    Low cost
  • 6
    Supports multi subscribers
Pros
  • 9
    Free
  • 6
    Scalable
  • 4
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Easy iOS setup
  • 1
    IOS Support
Cons
  • 1
    Reliability

What are some alternatives to Amazon SNS, Google Cloud Messaging?

OneSignal

OneSignal

OneSignal is a high volume push notification service for websites and mobile applications. OneSignal supports all major native and mobile platforms by providing dedicated SDKs for each platform, a RESTful server API, and a dashboard.

Urban Airship

Urban Airship

We’ve built the smartest, most aware, precise, easy-to-use, scalable, secure and powerful push messaging platform on the planet. Our Push messaging platform leverages all that is unique about mobile as a channel, and that lights the spark to create meaningful and valuable mobile experiences. We help put your app in front of your users at the right time, and in the right place to drive usage and brand engagement.

Firebase Cloud Messaging

Firebase Cloud Messaging

It is a cross-platform messaging solution that lets you reliably deliver messages at no cost. You can notify a client app that new email or other data is available to sync. You can send notification messages to drive user re-engagement and retention. For use cases such as instant messaging, a message can transfer a payload of up to 4KB to a client app.

Amazon Pinpoint

Amazon Pinpoint

Amazon Pinpoint makes it easy to run targeted campaigns to drive user engagement in mobile apps. Amazon Pinpoint helps you understand user behavior, define which users to target, determine which messages to send, schedule the best time to deliver the messages, and then track the results of your campaign.

Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API

Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API

Send push notifications to iOS and Android devices through one unified Push Notifications API for Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) and Apple Push Notification Service (APNS).

ZeroPush

ZeroPush

ZeroPush provides a clean web-friendly API to APNS and GCM for mobile push notifications.

PushBots

PushBots

Reach all your customers on mobile or desktop. Send and manage push notification, in-app messages, or polls. Understand user behavior, retention and engagement.

Wonderpush

Wonderpush

It is a push notifications platform for Web and Mobile. It is very fast, GDPR compliant and full-featured. It supports all major native mobile and web platforms, provides a RESTful API and an online dashboard to design notifications and analyze their impact.

Pushover

Pushover

Pushover is a platform for sending and receiving push notifications. On the server side, we provide an HTTP API for queueing messages to deliver to devices addressable by User or Group Keys. On the device side, our iOS, Android, and Desktop clients receive those push notifications, show them to the user, and store them for offline viewing.

Azure Notification Hubs

Azure Notification Hubs

Tutorials, API references, and other documentation show you how to set up and send push notifications from any backend to any mobile device

Related Comparisons

Postman
Swagger UI

Postman vs Swagger UI

Mapbox
Google Maps

Google Maps vs Mapbox

Mapbox
Leaflet

Leaflet vs Mapbox vs OpenLayers

Twilio SendGrid
Mailgun

Mailgun vs Mandrill vs SendGrid

Runscope
Postman

Paw vs Postman vs Runscope