Amazon SQS FIFO versus Amazon MSK

05 Mar 2026

Learn how Amazon SQS FIFO differs from Amazon MSK.

	Amazon SQS FIFO	Amazon MSK
Scaling	3000 msg/sec (batch write)	30 brokers per cluster; you need add/remove brokers and reassign partitions manually
Max. message size	256 KB	configurable (default 1 MB)
Persistence	up to 14 days	forever (up to 16384 GiB per broker)
Replication	Multi-AZ	Multi-AZ (optional)
Order guarantee	yes	within a partition
Delivery guarantee	exactly-once possible	up to the consumer
Pricing	per message	per broker hour + provisioned storage
Protocols	AWS Rest API	Kafka protocol
AWS Integrations	Lambda	Lambda
License	AWS only	open source (Apache Kafka)
Encryption at rest	yes	yes
Encryption in transit	yes	yes

Further reading