Amazon SNS vs Mandrill: What are the differences?
Developers describe Amazon SNS as "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. On the other hand, Mandrill is detailed as "Send transactional, triggered, and personalized email, then track results". Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.
Amazon SNS belongs to "Mobile Push Messaging" category of the tech stack, while Mandrill can be primarily classified under "Transactional Email".
Some of the features offered by Amazon SNS are:
- 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.
On the other hand, Mandrill provides the following key features:
- Inbound Email- Set up inboxes for Mandrill to control. When they receive email, we’ll make an API call to your app with all the relevant information, so you don’t have to worry about what’s happening behind the scenes.
- Webhooks Support- Create custom event notifications, keep track of new signups and unsubscribes in real-time, get a notice of every spam complaint so you can flag them in your database.
- Rules Engine- Modify the content of email coming through Mandrill without having to involve developers. For example, you could tell Mandrill to take any email coming from confirmation@yourdomain.com, give it a new template, and add Google Analytics tracking.
Stripe, Nubank, and Bukalapak are some of the popular companies that use Mandrill, whereas Amazon SNS is used by Intuit, PedidosYa, and Clever. Mandrill has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2313 company stacks & 208 developers stacks; compared to Amazon SNS, which is listed in 230 company stacks and 78 developer stacks.
