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  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Messaging
  4. Voice And SMS
  5. Amazon SNS vs Twilio

Amazon SNS vs Twilio

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Twilio
Twilio
Stacks11.5K
Followers8.8K
Votes521
Amazon SNS
Amazon SNS
Stacks1.4K
Followers1.2K
Votes18

Amazon SNS vs Twilio: What are the differences?

Amazon SNS and Twilio are two popular communication platforms. Let's explore the key differences between them.

  1. Integration with Other AWS Services: Amazon SNS is tightly integrated with other AWS services, allowing seamless communication between various components of a cloud infrastructure, such as EC2 instances, Lambda functions, and more. On the other hand, Twilio offers integration with a wide range of services beyond the AWS ecosystem, making it more versatile to connect with different systems.

  2. Protocols and Message Types: Amazon SNS supports multiple protocols and message types, including SMS, email, Amazon SQS, and HTTP/HTTPS. This flexibility enables developers to choose the most suitable method for their specific use cases. In contrast, Twilio primarily focuses on SMS and voice messages, providing more extensive features and customization options for these types of communications.

  3. Pricing Structure: Both Amazon SNS and Twilio offer pay-as-you-go pricing models, but there are differences in their cost structures. Amazon SNS pricing depends on the number of messages sent, subject to varying rates for different regions and destinations. In contrast, Twilio's pricing is more granular, charging per message, call minute, and additional features, making it more suitable for applications with specific cost optimization requirements.

  4. Global Reach: Twilio has a larger global reach compared to Amazon SNS, with coverage in over 180 countries. This widespread availability allows businesses to connect with customers worldwide effortlessly. While Amazon SNS provides global support, it may have limitations in certain regions, impacting the reachability for specific use cases.

  5. Platform Usage: Amazon SNS primarily serves as a messaging platform within the broader range of AWS services. It is often chosen by businesses already using AWS, benefiting from its seamless integration with other cloud services. Twilio, on the other hand, is more commonly used as a standalone communication platform, catering to companies seeking a dedicated and versatile messaging service.

  6. Additional Features: Twilio offers a broader range of features beyond basic messaging, including voice recordings, conference calling, and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. These additional functionalities make Twilio a preferred choice for applications that require advanced telephony capabilities. While Amazon SNS offers some additional features, it primarily focuses on messaging functionalities without extensive voice-related features.

In summary, Amazon SNS is a fully managed messaging service for application-to-application communication, offering flexible message delivery options and scalability. Twilio, on the other hand, is a cloud communications platform that provides APIs for building voice, SMS, and messaging applications, offering extensive features for real-time communication needs.

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Advice on Twilio, Amazon SNS

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
Finch
Finch

Ops at SLS

Jul 23, 2020

Needs adviceonSalesforce Sales CloudSalesforce Sales CloudSalesforceSalesforce

Hey! We need an omnichannel inbox that's housed within Salesforce Sales Cloud that makes it super easy for our reps to respond to inbound communication (needs: clean inbox, provides historical context, etc.). We're a high-volume call center, and we get a ton of incoming SMS and email every day. We'd love a solution that lets us view all of that in one place — ideally Salesforce, as that's where our reps work, and we want to avoid needing them to switch between windows. Thanks!

189k views189k
Comments
Dainis
Dainis

Marketing project manager at Colortime

Jan 31, 2020

Needs advice

Hello! We need to integrate an SMS gateway into our app for user phone verification. As we are just starting, we are searching for the most affordable/best price/performance option for SMS gateway to verify client phone numbers with the code, maybe you can suggest something between those two or maybe something else. We are planning to do business in Europe

135k views135k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Twilio
Twilio
Amazon SNS
Amazon SNS

Twilio offers developers a powerful API for phone services to make and receive phone calls, and send and receive text messages. Their product allows programmers to more easily integrate various communication methods into their software and programs.

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.

Phone- Phone Numbers API;Phone- Convert Text to Speech and Play Audio;Phone- Record Calls and Store Them;Phone- Create Conferences;Phone- API Queueing;Phone- Call Queues;Phone- Convert Speech to Text;Phone- Usage API;Phone- Status Callbacks and Logs;Phone- Global Reach;SMS- Supports Unicode;SMS- Message Queueing;SMS- Realtime API;SMS- Global Reach;SMS- Status Callbacks and Logs;SMS- Usage metering & API triggers;SMS- Voice Enabled Numbers;SMS- Short Codes;Two-factor authentication;Call tracking;Voice broadcasting;Cloud IVR;Mobile app distribution
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
Statistics
Stacks
11.5K
Stacks
1.4K
Followers
8.8K
Followers
1.2K
Votes
521
Votes
18
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 148
    Powerful, simple, and well documented api
  • 88
    RESTful API
  • 66
    Clear pricing
  • 61
    Great sms services
  • 58
    Low cost of entry
Cons
  • 4
    Predictable pricing
  • 2
    Expensive
Pros
  • 12
    Low cost
  • 6
    Supports multi subscribers
Integrations
Google App Engine
Google App Engine
Bugsnag
Bugsnag
Zendesk
Zendesk
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Parse
Parse
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Twilio, Amazon SNS?

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.

Nexmo

Nexmo

Nexmo connects your apps directly to carriers around the world. Integrate SMS and Voice messages using one simple API. Use Nexmo Verity to register users, verify transactions, and implement two factor authentication.

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.

Google Cloud Messaging

Google Cloud Messaging

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.

Plivo

Plivo

Plivo provides basic building block APIs in the form of Plivo XML and HTTP API, to create telephony apps, so developers can completely do away with learning the nitty-gritty of the telephony plumbing.

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.

Agora

Agora

Agora.io provides building blocks for you to add real-time voice and video communications through a simple and powerful SDK. You can integrate the Agora SDK to enable real-time communications in your own application quickly.

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).

OpenTok

OpenTok

It adds the clarity and emotion of face-to-face communication to your brand whether you're developing for the web, iOS, or Android. We make the integration of high-quality live video a breeze so that you can focus on building a great product.

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