Amazon Pinpoint vs Amazon SNS: What are the differences?

Amazon Pinpoint: Targeted Push Notifications for Mobile Apps. 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; Amazon SNS: Fully managed push messaging service. 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.

Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon SNS can be primarily classified as "Mobile Push Messaging" tools.

Some of the features offered by Amazon Pinpoint are:

• Understand User Behavior
• Create Targeted Campaigns
• Measure Results

On the other hand, Amazon SNS provides the following key features:

• 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.