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  4. Mobile Push Messaging
  5. Amazon Pinpoint vs Google Cloud Messaging

Amazon Pinpoint vs Google Cloud Messaging

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Google Cloud Messaging
Google Cloud Messaging
Stacks88
Followers247
Votes22
Amazon Pinpoint
Amazon Pinpoint
Stacks74
Followers323
Votes13

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

Introduction: Amazon Pinpoint and Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) are two popular platforms used for sending push notifications and messages to mobile devices. While both services offer similar functionality, there are key differences that differentiate them from each other.

  1. Target audience: The first major difference between Amazon Pinpoint and Google Cloud Messaging is their target audience. Amazon Pinpoint primarily caters to businesses of all sizes, providing marketers with tools to engage and communicate with their customers effectively. On the other hand, Google Cloud Messaging is more developer-centric, designed to enable app developers to send messages and notifications to their app users.

  2. Messaging capabilities: Another key difference lies in the messaging capabilities offered by both platforms. Amazon Pinpoint provides a comprehensive set of messaging capabilities beyond push notifications, including email, SMS, and voice messaging. In contrast, Google Cloud Messaging focuses solely on push notifications for Android and iOS devices, without offering additional messaging channels.

  3. Platform support: When it comes to platform support, there is a notable difference between Amazon Pinpoint and Google Cloud Messaging. Amazon Pinpoint is part of the larger Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem and integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, allowing businesses to leverage the entire suite of AWS offerings. On the other hand, Google Cloud Messaging is a product within the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), providing tight integration with other GCP services and APIs.

  4. Analytics and reporting: Amazon Pinpoint provides detailed analytics and reporting capabilities, enabling businesses to track user engagement, measure the success of their campaigns, and gain valuable insights into customer behavior. In contrast, Google Cloud Messaging offers limited built-in analytics and reporting features, primarily focusing on delivery and error tracking for push notifications.

  5. Ease of use: While both platforms offer intuitive interfaces, Amazon Pinpoint is often praised for its user-friendly and intuitive interface, making it easier for businesses to set up and manage their messaging campaigns without much technical expertise. Google Cloud Messaging, being more developer-focused, requires a certain level of technical knowledge and familiarity with GCP tools and services.

  6. Pricing structure: Finally, there is a difference in the pricing structure of Amazon Pinpoint and Google Cloud Messaging. Amazon Pinpoint adopts a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model, where businesses pay for the number of messages sent and additional services used. Google Cloud Messaging, on the other hand, follows a tiered pricing structure based on the number of push notifications sent, with additional charges for advanced features and usage.

In summary, Amazon Pinpoint and Google Cloud Messaging differ in their target audience, messaging capabilities, platform support, analytics and reporting, ease of use, and pricing structure. While Amazon Pinpoint focuses on providing comprehensive messaging solutions for businesses, Google Cloud Messaging is primarily geared towards app developers with a focus on push notifications.

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Advice on Google Cloud Messaging, Amazon Pinpoint

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.

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Detailed Comparison

Google Cloud Messaging
Google Cloud Messaging
Amazon Pinpoint
Amazon Pinpoint

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.

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.

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.;
Understand User Behavior;Create Targeted Campaigns;Measure Results
Statistics
Stacks
88
Stacks
74
Followers
247
Followers
323
Votes
22
Votes
13
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 9
    Free
  • 6
    Scalable
  • 4
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Easy iOS setup
  • 1
    IOS Support
Cons
  • 1
    Reliability
Pros
  • 13
    Transactional Messages
Integrations
No integrations available
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
AWS Mobile Hub
AWS Mobile Hub

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

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.

Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS

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.

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.

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

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