Amazon SNS Standard versus Amazon MSK

29 Oct 2025

Learn how Amazon SNS Standard differs from Amazon MSK.

	Amazon SNS Standard	Amazon MSK
Scaling	not disclosed (default soft limit depends on region; e.g., 9000 msg/sec in eu-west-1)	30 brokers per cluster; you need add/remove brokers and reassign partitions manually
Max. message size	256 KB	configurable (default 1 MB)
Persistence	no	forever (up to 16384 GiB per broker)
Replication	Multi-AZ	Multi-AZ (optional)
Order guarantee	no	within a partition
Delivery guarantee	at least once	up to the consumer
Pricing	per message	per broker hour + provisioned storage
Protocols	AWS Rest API	Kafka protocol
AWS Integrations	Lambda, SQS, webhook	Lambda
License	AWS only	open source (Apache Kafka)
Encryption at rest	yes	yes
Encryption in transit	yes	yes

Further reading