Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) versus Amazon MQ

05 Mar 2026

Learn how Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) differs from Amazon MQ.

	Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events)	Amazon MQ
Scaling	not disclosed (default soft limit depends on region; e.g., 10,000 msg/sec in eu-west-1)	80 msg/sec; can be increased with a network of brokers
Max. message size	256 KB	limited by disk space
Persistence	archiving is possible	forever (up to 200 GB)
Replication	Multi-AZ	Multi-AZ (optional)
Order guarantee	no	yes
Delivery guarantee	at least once	exactly once; supports distributed (XA) transactions
Pricing	per message	per broker hour + used storage
Protocols	AWS Rest API	JMS, AMQP, MQTT, STOMP, OpenWire
AWS Integrations	Lambda, SQS, SNS, and many more	Lambda
License	AWS only	open source (Apache ActiveMQ)
Encryption at rest	yes	yes
Encryption in transit	yes	yes

Further reading