Amazon SQS
Ranked 4 of 12 message brokers by recommenders
Cheap, reliable managed message queue that is simple to start with and needs little upkeep; critics warn of complex plumbing, timeouts and surprise usage costs.
14 people recommended Amazon SQS in Hacker News comments, 4 had mixed feelings and 13 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026.
Summary written by Claude from 30 comments. It was written before the November 2026 recount, and 29 of those comments still count.
31 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 14
- mixed feelings
- 4
- warn against or regret it
- 13
The record
Recommended in 7 of 12 months
In 11 different threads.
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 14 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1 recommender for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 12 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
- Recommended in 11 threadsNeeds 5 or more, met.
- The biggest thread supplies 14% of its recommendersNeeds half or less, met.
The same rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. Mixed feelings count toward neither side. How the badge works
What people say about it
Reasons grouped from a sample of 29 of the 32 opinions about it, picked in proportion to how many people recommend it, have mixed feelings and criticize it. Each mark is one comment in the sample. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Default queue within AWS stacks
“SQS is dead simple, and if your in AWS (forever) it is "in the stack”
Comment from 11 Apr 2026 in “Keeping a Postgres Queue Healthy” “I like ECS + Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS.”
Comment from 28 Aug 2026 in “I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again” “S3, SQS, EC2 and VPC were great innovations”
Comment from 24 May 2026 in “Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out” - Comment from 24 Jun 2026 in “PostgreSQL Is Enough”
- Comment from 2 Dec 2025 in “Amazon launches Trainium3”
Simple to set up
“There are lots of purpose-built bullet proof queuing systems that are simple to setup and administer (or just use SQS”
Comment from 24 Jun 2026 in “PostgreSQL Is Enough” “because it was one less thing we needed to spend time on”
Comment from 20 Aug 2026 in “PostgreSQL for Everything” Handles traffic spikes well
“With SQS and their recent fair queues, you not only don't need to worry about the spikes”
Comment from 26 Feb 2026 in “You Just Need Postgres” “They made it easy to configure throttling, alerting, buffering”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Adds complex multi-service plumbing
“a myriad of intermediate steps are introduced to write data to dynamo/s3/kinesis + sqs/and coordination”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “Don't rent the cloud, own instead” “it wasn’t constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a slow SQS maze of queues”
Comment from 31 Jan 2026 in “Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native” “we burned time on a Postgres+SQS setup where the enqueue happened in a trigger”
Comment from 24 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite” - Comment from 12 Sep 2026 in “My last six months at Evernote”
Reliability problems and timeouts
“Retried/poison sqs messages are a problem. They will eventually clog up your queue”
Comment from 6 Aug 2026 in “AWS Webhook Serverless Ingestion” “Also had SQS queues time out several times this week”
Comment from 20 Dec 2025 in “Go ahead, self-host Postgres” “near-criminally incompetent design of SQS”
Comment from 9 Oct 2026 in “Our $445M Series D” Poor fit for long-running workflows
“I see people choose Kafka and SQS for things that Graphile Worker could do all day long.”
Comment from 11 Apr 2026 in “Keeping a Postgres Queue Healthy” “Message queues (e.g. SQS) are inappropriate for tracking long-running tasks/workflows.”
Comment from 21 Nov 2025 in “Building a Durable Execution Engine with SQLite” Surprise usage costs
“over the next couple of hours my run rate went to about $4k per day in cloudtrail+sqs usage”
Comment from 4 Oct 2026 in “We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything” “because they're "so cheap!!11”
Comment from 23 Apr 2026 in “I Am Building a Cloud”
Other message brokers people recommend
The four most recommended other message brokers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Mixed | Criticize | Approval | Months | Had for | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache Kafka | 31 | 18 | 49 | 39% | 11 | — | — |
| NATS | 21 | 10 | 14 | 60% | 9 | — | — |
| Redpanda | 17 | 0 | 4 | 81% | 7 | — | — |
| Amazon SQSThis page | 14 | 4 | 13 | 52% | 7 | — | — |
| PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY | 9 | 3 | 10 | 47% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
29 of the 32 opinions about it, picked in proportion to the three counts, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“near-criminally incompetent design of SQS”
“over the next couple of hours my run rate went to about $4k per day in cloudtrail+sqs usage”
“converting a convoluted hairball of python, lambdas and SQS”
“AWS is good at operations, i.e. running something like S3 at massive scale”
“I like ECS + Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS.”
“because it was one less thing we needed to spend time on”
“Retried/poison sqs messages are a problem. They will eventually clog up your queue”
“it's always better to use something like SQS, Redis queues, etc.”
“for message queues I’d stick with SQS”
“There are lots of purpose-built bullet proof queuing systems that are simple to setup and administer (or just use SQS”
“S3, SQS, EC2 and VPC were great innovations”
“Things such as AWS cognito, lambda elastic beanstalk, SQS can make it completely uneconomical to do multicloud.”
“uses FIFO SQS (optionally by way of FIFO SNS) connected to the task runner Lambda. Easy.”
“SQS is heavily underrated.”
“we burned time on a Postgres+SQS setup where the enqueue happened in a trigger”
“because they're "so cheap!!11”
“its reputation is far from stellar”
“SQS is dead simple, and if your in AWS (forever) it is "in the stack”
“I see people choose Kafka and SQS for things that Graphile Worker could do all day long.”
“With SQS and their recent fair queues, you not only don't need to worry about the spikes”
“you can probably beat SQS for a number of use cases”
“a myriad of intermediate steps are introduced to write data to dynamo/s3/kinesis + sqs/and coordination”
“it wasn’t constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a slow SQS maze of queues”
“There are other services like S3, BigQuery or SQS that feels like magic.”
“They made it easy to configure throttling, alerting, buffering”
“On AWS, SQS is cheap, reliable, easy to start with, and gives you plenty of room to grow.”
“Also had SQS queues time out several times this week”
“I'd add SQS to the solid category.”
“Message queues (e.g. SQS) are inappropriate for tracking long-running tasks/workflows.”
Counts come from 1,791,911 Hacker News comments labeled by Claude, November 2025 to October 2026, with data through October 31, 2026. Counts updated 2 Nov 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.