Cheapest Messaging Queues
Overview
Pricing always plays a role when choosing IT tools. Ideally, you want to get a great product that doesn’t bloat your budget. When you have a limited amount of money to spend, though, it’s tempting to choose the cheapest messaging queues.
Saving money makes sense unless you select a messaging queue solution that makes it harder for your business to operate. Low pricing doesn’t help much when your applications can’t communicate with each other. You might lower your expenses, but you also reduce your revenues and frustrate your employers and end-users.
In the following article, you will learn about some of the cheapest messaging queues, the features they offer, and what users say about their experiences.
Table of Contents
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Essential Features for Your Messaging Queue
Before diving into the cheapest messaging queues, you should make sure you understand the essential features that your network needs from MQ microservices. On the most basic level, you need your messaging queue to process requests between your apps. A closer look, however, shows that a tool’s details can add up to help or hinder your processes.
Some essential features that you should look for in any messaging queue product include:
- Asynchronous delivery that lets an app continue working while it waits for a different app to complete a task.
- High availability ensures users get quick results.
- One-time delivery that prevents duplicate requests.
- First In, First Out (FIFO) queues that line-up requests on a first-come, first-served basis — essential when applications need to finish one task before moving to the next.
- Pub/sub (publish/subscribe) patterns that do not force publishers to send messages to specific receivers (subscribers). You may need to choose between SNS and SQS distributions.
- Scalability that conforms to the user’s changing needs in real-time.
- Low-latency that processes messages quickly.
- Compatibility with popular object-oriented programming languages like Java, Python, JavaScript, JMS, C++, and Erlang.
More often than not, you can’t tolerate sacrificing any of these features. You might think that you can move money to a different section of your budget, but eventually, your low-quality tool will create API problems that either slow your productivity or make it impossible for you to complete tasks.
The Best Cheapest Messaging Queues
Below, you will find some of the cheapest messaging queues that tend to offer decent services. Some MQ software can’t tolerate average payloads. They’re not worth mentioning, no matter how little they cost. Still, some of these messaging queues are obviously superior to others.
IronMQ
Free tier available: Up to 100k API requests per month.
Price: Paid plans start at $39 per month for monthly subscribers. Discounts are available for annual subscribers.
IronMQ gives you a low-cost messaging queue solution that comes packed with features. Many people gravitate to IronMQ because it offers:
- REST-based API.
- Pull, push, and long polling support.
- Automated failover that prevents outages.
- A dashboard that makes configurations easier.
- Unlimited queues that scale with your needs.
- Token authentication to protect your data security.
- Reporting and analytics that provide evidence of its functionality.
- Webhook support.
- Pub/sub.
- FIFO.
- One-time delivery.
Many users also like IronMQ’s flexibility. Deployment options include Mac, Windows, web-based, cloud, and SaaS. You can choose cloud-based, on-premises, or hybrid deployment.
IronMQ also offers something that you will get from few other companies: in-person and live online training. If you have any questions, you can talk to a live representative 24/7.
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Amazon SQS (Amazon Simple Queue Service)
Price: You only pay for what you use.
Free tier available.
Amazon SQS only charges you for the services you use. If you don’t use your messaging queues this month, you don’t owe anything. Of course, even small organizations need their applications to communicate, so you will almost certainly spend some money each month. Still, it’s difficult to resist the opportunity to only pay for what you use.
Depending on your needs, you can get terrific services from Amazon SQS. Stand-out features include:
- Quick scalability.
- Impressive hardiness that rarely fails under pressure.
- Excellent security based on the AWS protocol.
- Server-side encryption that further protects your data.
You will need to know a fair amount about configuring message queues to get the most out of Amazon SQS. For example, you can choose standard queues that give you a high throughput or FIFO that guarantees message delivery. If you don’t know the difference, you will struggle with SQS.
Redis RQ
Price: Free
The word “free” will excite plenty of IT managers who need to take control of their budgets. Before you take the plunge, understand that Redis RQ doesn’t work like your typical MQ software. Redis RQ uses an in-memory database that works exceptionally well for real-time messages. It doesn’t give you the same level of reliability or storage that you get from IronMQ, though.
Some perks of choosing Redis RQ include:
- The open-source software gives highly skilled professionals opportunities to customize it.
- Surprisingly fast speed for a free tool.
- Option to use it as a cache and a message broker.
Unfortunately, Redis RQ can’t give you the features and flexibility that a large enterprise needs. It might suit the needs of a small business, but growth and increased payloads can lead to failure.
Other Cheap Messaging Queues to Explore
If you want to explore other popular message queuing options, learn about:
- Apache Kafka – a reliable open-source message broker that can work well for enterprise clients and experienced developers. Plus, Netflix’s streaming platform uses it.
- MQTT – a service that works particularly well with the Internet of Things (IoT).
- ZeroMQ – an open-source message queue that users find helpful for small projects.
- Apache ActiveMQ – an open-source, multi-messaging protocols tool that requires a lot of experience to use.
- IBM MQ – more expensive than the other options, but still a very reliable choice.
- RabbitMQ- an AMQP messaging queue system with good features, but it actually performs about 10x slower than IronMQ.
Related Reading: Are Free, Open-Source Message Queues Right For You?
Get an Affordable, Reliable Message Queue
Saving money matters, but you need a messaging system that you can count on for routing requests to the correct destinations. You can get that without spending a lot of money by signing up with IronMQ. Schedule a demo to see IronMQ in action. If you like what you see, you can become a member and starting reaping the benefits quickly.
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