What is the difference between Amazon MQ and SQS?

Question

I am a newbie to AWS. As I understand, both AWS MQ and AWS SQS are Message Queue tools. The only noted difference is that SQS is fully managed.

When should we use SQS or MQ?

Answer 1

SQS is a simple queueing service. It doesn't support many higher level abstractions like message routing, fanouts, distribution lists etc. It is a queue - a message is produced, and a message is delivered. It is useful when you need a Queue with limited backing logic.

AWS MQ is a managed Apache ActiveMQ(or RabbitMQ) broker service.

This provides you a fully managed Apache ActiveMQ system in the cloud, with support for a variety of industry-standard queue and broadcast protocols like AMQP, JMS etc. It is useful when you have complicated delivery rules - or when you're migrating an existing system from outside AWS into AWS, and your systems happen to talk to one another with a standard queueing protocol.

Answer 2

From AWS Documentation, you can search "Q: When should I use Amazon MQ vs. Amazon SQS and SNS?":

Amazon MQ, Amazon SQS, and Amazon SNS are messaging services that are suitable for anyone from startups to enterprises. If you're using messaging with existing applications, and want to move your messaging to the cloud quickly and easily, we recommend you consider Amazon MQ. It supports industry-standard APIs and protocols so you can switch from any standards-based message broker to Amazon MQ without rewriting the messaging code in your applications. If you are building brand new applications in the cloud, we recommend you consider Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS. Amazon SQS and SNS are lightweight, fully managed message queue and topic services that scale almost infinitely and provide simple, easy-to-use APIs. You can use Amazon SQS and SNS to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications, and improve reliability.

Also, in this doc, you can check comparisons with other services.