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Amazon SQS vs Temporal

SEPT 2026 audit

A comparison of Amazon SQS and Temporal built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 26 criteria comparedSources last checked

The short answer

Choose Amazon SQS if…

AWS-resident systems that want a queue with a permanent free million requests a month and no capacity to plan — SQS scales without a throughput setting to choose.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Choose Temporal if…

Long-running, stateful workflows where losing execution history is the failure that matters — Temporal keeps event history as first-class storage rather than logs that expire.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Consider something else if…

  • Amazon SQS: Billing is per request rather than per message, and a 1 MiB payload counts as sixteen, so chatty polling or large messages cost far more than the message count suggests.
  • Temporal: You want to budget by counting jobs: pay-as-you-go bills from $50 per million Actions, a unit that does not map onto messages or task runs, plus storage and 10% of usage for support; the $150 starting credit lasts 90 days.

Neither quite fits? Every other option, ranked by iScore: Amazon SQS alternatives · Temporal alternatives

20 sourced criteria separate them — see where, with sources, below.

Visit Amazon SQS documentationVisit Temporal documentation

No affiliate links, sponsored placements or paid rankings appear on this site. Ordering follows the sourced data and the stated criteria.

01.

At a glance.

CriterionAmazon SQSTemporal
Pricing
Free tier
Yes
No
Kind of free offerFree tierFree credit
Entry paid planNo paid plan or minimum fee; billed per request after the free 1 million requests a month.No plan fee or minimum: pay-as-you-go has no base monthly fee and bills usage from $50 per million Actions, plus storage and Developer support at 10% of usage. New accounts start with $150 in credits valid for 90 days. The Business support add-on starts at $500/month.
Pricing modelPer request, not per message: every API action counts, and a 1 MiB payload is billed as 16 requests. FIFO queues cost $0.50 per million against standard's $0.40 in us-east-1, and fair queue requests add $0.10 per million on top of the standard rate.Pay-as-you-go per Action with no base monthly fee: from $50 per million Actions, falling with volume to $25 self-serve. Storage is billed separately per GB-hour ($0.042 active, $0.00105 retained), and Developer support costs 10% of usage. The Business support add-on is the greater of $500/month or 10% of usage.
Infrastructure
Regions
34 commercial AWS Regions plus 2 AWS GovCloud (US) Regions listed in the SQS service endpoints table.
20 regions for Temporal Cloud Namespaces: 14 AWS regions and 6 Google Cloud regions, each with a PrivateLink or Private Service Connect endpoint.
Uptime SLA
99.9% monthly uptime per AWS Region, one figure with no configuration split.
99.9% on the pay-as-you-go Temporal Cloud plan (no base fee), with 99.99% High Availability options.
Queues
Included per month1,000,000 requests a month free, permanently and across all regions. Beyond that, standard queues are $0.40 per million in us-east-1, falling to $0.30 above 100 billion and $0.24 above 200 billion.No monthly Actions allocation on pay-as-you-go, which bills every Action used. Business includes 2.5 million Actions a month, and Enterprise and Mission Critical include 10 million. An Action is Temporal's own unit (a workflow operation) and is not comparable to a message, operation or execution elsewhere in this category.
Maximum message size
256 KB per message. A single request carries 1 to 10 messages up to 1 MiB total, and each 64 KB chunk of payload is billed as one request.
2 MB maximum payload per request (each Workflow/Activity argument or return value); 4 MB per Event History transaction, non-configurable.
Message retention4 days by default; configurable from 60 seconds up to 14 days per queue.Closed workflow Event History is kept for a Retention Period set per Namespace, up to 90 days on Temporal Cloud; longer needs the Export feature. Business includes 2.5 GB Active and 100 GB Retained Storage. Recorded without a magnitude: this is workflow-history retention, not how long an undelivered message survives.
Maximum delay
15 minutes maximum per-message delay (message timer) or per-queue delay; default is 0 seconds.
Timers (durable sleeps) may run up to 100 years in Temporal Cloud.
ConcurrencyApproximately 120,000 in-flight messages per standard queue (received but not yet deleted); API call rate on standard queues is nearly unlimited.500 Actions per second per Namespace by default, auto-scaling above that with On-Demand Capacity; 20,000 Activity and 20,000 Workflow Task pollers per Namespace.
Compliance
SOC 2Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.SOC 2 Type II certified; trust center lists SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA badges.
ISO 27001Covered under AWS's account-wide ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification — not scoped per-service the way SOC, HIPAA and PCI DSS are on AWS's own site.ISMS is informed by the NIST Cybersecurity Framework; the DPA's certification/assurance measure names only third-party SOC 2 Type II audits. Adjacent evidence: the DPA claims no ISO 27001 certificate, but no Temporal page explicitly denies one.
HIPAAListed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page.Temporal Cloud is stated to be compliant with HIPAA regulations; HIPAA listed among trust-center certifications.
GDPR / data residencyAWS customers can process personal data on all AWS services in compliance with GDPR, and choose the storage type and geographic region for their data.GDPR compliant with a DPA reflecting GDPR; Namespaces do not share data processing or storage across regional boundaries.
PCI DSS
Listed as PCI DSS-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
Terms of Service bar customers from submitting payment card information to the Hosted Services; only contact name, title and email address are permitted. Clause 1.6 Personal Data; a contractual data restriction, not a statement about PCI DSS certification.
Encryption at restServer-side encryption of queue contents with SQS-managed keys (SSE-SQS) or AWS KMS keys (SSE-KMS).Persistence layer and Elasticsearch index encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM; TLS 1.3 in transit.
Customer-managed keys
Supported via SSE-KMS: queues can use a customer managed KMS key created and policy-controlled in AWS KMS.
Client-side Data Converter encrypts payloads with your keys on your Workers before they reach Temporal Cloud, which cannot decrypt them; no server-side KMS option stated.
Role-based access controlIAM identity-based policies on users, groups and roles plus resource-based queue policies control access to queues and actions.Predefined account-level roles (Account Owner, Global Admin, Developer, Finance Admin, Read-Only) plus Namespace-level permissions (Admin, Write, Read-Only), with optional Custom Roles for granular access.
Private networking / VPCInterface VPC endpoints (AWS PrivateLink) let a VPC reach SQS privately, including FIPS endpoints; HTTPS endpoints only.AWS PrivateLink or GCP Private Service Connect to Namespaces, alongside the default public endpoints.

Only criteria both providers publish appear here; a tinted cell marks a real difference. Criteria only one of them documents are listed below, and an absence there means we found no source — not that the feature is missing. How we source this.

The small bar above a value is inetGeek's own lean toward that side — computed from the same facts shown, never a number the provider published. See the picker below "The short answer" to weigh only the criteria you care about.

02.

Where they differ.

Free tier

Amazon SQS
Yes
Temporal
No
Sources (2) →

Kind of free offer

Amazon SQS
Free tier
Temporal
Free credit
Sources (2) →

Entry paid plan

Amazon SQS
No paid plan or minimum fee; billed per request after the free 1 million requests a month.
Temporal
No plan fee or minimum: pay-as-you-go has no base monthly fee and bills usage from $50 per million Actions, plus storage and Developer support at 10% of usage. New accounts start with $150 in credits valid for 90 days. The Business support add-on starts at $500/month.
Sources (2) →
  • Amazon SQS Pricing ↗

    “With AWS SQS, you pay only for what you use and there is no minimum fee.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Temporal Platform Pricing Options | Temporal ↗

    “No commitment. No minimums. [...] Pay-As-You-Go Starting at $50 per million actions Get started for free Free $150 credits for 90 days No base monthly fee $0.042/GBhr Active Storage $0.00105/GBhr Retained Storage Developer support for 10% of usage [...] Business Starting at $500/month”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official pricing · Report a correction

Pricing model

Amazon SQS
Per request, not per message: every API action counts, and a 1 MiB payload is billed as 16 requests. FIFO queues cost $0.50 per million against standard's $0.40 in us-east-1, and fair queue requests add $0.10 per million on top of the standard rate.
Temporal
Pay-as-you-go per Action with no base monthly fee: from $50 per million Actions, falling with volume to $25 self-serve. Storage is billed separately per GB-hour ($0.042 active, $0.00105 retained), and Developer support costs 10% of usage. The Business support add-on is the greater of $500/month or 10% of usage.
Sources (2) →
  • AWS Price List API — AWSQueueService, us-east-1 ↗

    “"$0.50 per million Amazon SQS FIFO requests in Tier1 in US East" [...] "$0.40 per million Amazon SQS standard requests in Tier1" [...] "$0.10 per million Amazon SQS fair queue requests in US East"”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Temporal Platform Pricing Options | Temporal ↗

    “Pay-As-You-Go Starting at $50 per million actions [...] No base monthly fee $0.042/GBhr Active Storage $0.00105/GBhr Retained Storage Developer support for 10% of usage 99.9% SLA and 99.99% HA Options SSO via SAML Volume Discounts Self service down to $25 per million actions [...] Price: Greater of $500/mo or 10% of usage”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official pricing · Report a correction

Regions

Amazon SQS

34 commercial AWS Regions plus 2 AWS GovCloud (US) Regions listed in the SQS service endpoints table.

Temporal

20 regions for Temporal Cloud Namespaces: 14 AWS regions and 6 Google Cloud regions, each with a PrivateLink or Private Service Connect endpoint.

Sources (2) →

Uptime SLA

Amazon SQS

99.9% monthly uptime per AWS Region, one figure with no configuration split.

Temporal

99.9% on the pay-as-you-go Temporal Cloud plan (no base fee), with 99.99% High Availability options.

Sources (2) →

Included per month

Amazon SQS
1,000,000 requests a month free, permanently and across all regions. Beyond that, standard queues are $0.40 per million in us-east-1, falling to $0.30 above 100 billion and $0.24 above 200 billion.
Temporal
No monthly Actions allocation on pay-as-you-go, which bills every Action used. Business includes 2.5 million Actions a month, and Enterprise and Mission Critical include 10 million. An Action is Temporal's own unit (a workflow operation) and is not comparable to a message, operation or execution elsewhere in this category.
Sources (2) →
  • AWS Price List API — AWSQueueService, us-east-1 ↗

    “"First 1,000,000 Amazon SQS Requests per month are free" [...] "$0.40 per million Amazon SQS standard requests in Tier1 in US East" [...] "$0.30 per million ... Tier2" [...] "$0.24 per million ... Tier3"”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Temporal Cloud Pricing ↗

    “Some plans include a monthly Actions allocation (2.5M on Business, 10M on Enterprise/Mission Critical). [...] On the Temporal Cloud pay-as-you-go model, you are only billed for what you use (actions, storage, support).”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official pricing · Report a correction

Maximum message size

Amazon SQS

256 KB per message. A single request carries 1 to 10 messages up to 1 MiB total, and each 64 KB chunk of payload is billed as one request.

Temporal

2 MB maximum payload per request (each Workflow/Activity argument or return value); 4 MB per Event History transaction, non-configurable.

Sources (2) →

Message retention

Amazon SQS
4 days by default; configurable from 60 seconds up to 14 days per queue.
Temporal
Closed workflow Event History is kept for a Retention Period set per Namespace, up to 90 days on Temporal Cloud; longer needs the Export feature. Business includes 2.5 GB Active and 100 GB Retained Storage. Recorded without a magnitude: this is workflow-history retention, not how long an undelivered message survives.
Sources (2) →

Maximum delay

Amazon SQS

15 minutes maximum per-message delay (message timer) or per-queue delay; default is 0 seconds.

Temporal

Timers (durable sleeps) may run up to 100 years in Temporal Cloud.

Sources (2) →

Concurrency

Amazon SQS
Approximately 120,000 in-flight messages per standard queue (received but not yet deleted); API call rate on standard queues is nearly unlimited.
Temporal
500 Actions per second per Namespace by default, auto-scaling above that with On-Demand Capacity; 20,000 Activity and 20,000 Workflow Task pollers per Namespace.
Sources (2) →

SOC 2

Amazon SQS
Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
Temporal
SOC 2 Type II certified; trust center lists SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA badges.
Sources (2) →

ISO 27001

Amazon SQS
Covered under AWS's account-wide ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification — not scoped per-service the way SOC, HIPAA and PCI DSS are on AWS's own site.
Temporal
ISMS is informed by the NIST Cybersecurity Framework; the DPA's certification/assurance measure names only third-party SOC 2 Type II audits. Adjacent evidence: the DPA claims no ISO 27001 certificate, but no Temporal page explicitly denies one.
Sources (2) →
  • ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Compliance — AWS ↗

    “AWS has certification for compliance with ISO/IEC 27001:2022, 27017:2015, and 27018:2019. These certifications are performed by independent third-party auditors.”

    Read 2026-09-12 · official site · Report a correction

  • Temporal Data Processing Addendum - Annex 2, Technical and Organizational Security Measures ↗

    “implementing an information security management program that is informed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework. [...] Temporal Technologies ensures assurance of products and processes by conducting third party audits of the service according to the 2018 Description Criteria for a Description of a Service Organization's System in a SOC 2 Type II Report as issued by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official site · Report a correction

HIPAA

Amazon SQS
Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page.
Temporal
Temporal Cloud is stated to be compliant with HIPAA regulations; HIPAA listed among trust-center certifications.
Sources (2) →

GDPR / data residency

Amazon SQS
AWS customers can process personal data on all AWS services in compliance with GDPR, and choose the storage type and geographic region for their data.
Temporal
GDPR compliant with a DPA reflecting GDPR; Namespaces do not share data processing or storage across regional boundaries.
Sources (2) →
  • GDPR — Amazon Web Services ↗

    “AWS customers can use all AWS services to process personal data [...] in compliance with the GDPR. [...] Customers have control of their customer data. With AWS, customers can: Determine where their customer data will be stored, including the type of storage and geographic region of that storage.”

    Read 2026-09-12 · official site · Report a correction

  • Security model - Temporal Cloud | Temporal Documentation ↗

    “Namespaces in the same environment are logically segregated. Namespaces do not share data processing or data storage across regional boundaries.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official docs · Report a correction

PCI DSS

Amazon SQS
Listed as PCI DSS-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
Temporal
Terms of Service bar customers from submitting payment card information to the Hosted Services; only contact name, title and email address are permitted. Clause 1.6 Personal Data; a contractual data restriction, not a statement about PCI DSS certification.
Sources (2) →
  • AWS Services in Scope — PCI DSS ↗

    “This webpage provides a list of AWS Services in Scope of AWS assurance programs. [...] Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) ✓ ✓ Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) ✓ ✓ Amazon Simple”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official site · Report a correction

  • Terms of Service - April 2025 | Temporal Technologies ↗

    “Except for contact information consisting of first and last name, title and email address for which Customer has obtained necessary rights of access and use from the individual, Customer agrees not to submit other personal data or any sensitive personal information (including government issued identification numbers, financial account information, payment card information, and personal health information) to Temporal.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official site · Report a correction

Encryption at rest

Amazon SQS
Server-side encryption of queue contents with SQS-managed keys (SSE-SQS) or AWS KMS keys (SSE-KMS).
Temporal
Persistence layer and Elasticsearch index encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM; TLS 1.3 in transit.
Sources (2) →

Customer-managed keys

Amazon SQS
Supported via SSE-KMS: queues can use a customer managed KMS key created and policy-controlled in AWS KMS.
Temporal
Client-side Data Converter encrypts payloads with your keys on your Workers before they reach Temporal Cloud, which cannot decrypt them; no server-side KMS option stated.
Sources (2) →

Role-based access control

Amazon SQS
IAM identity-based policies on users, groups and roles plus resource-based queue policies control access to queues and actions.
Temporal
Predefined account-level roles (Account Owner, Global Admin, Developer, Finance Admin, Read-Only) plus Namespace-level permissions (Admin, Write, Read-Only), with optional Custom Roles for granular access.
Sources (2) →
  • Overview of managing access in Amazon SQS - Amazon Simple Queue Service ↗

    “An account administrator can attach permissions policies to IAM identities (users, groups, and roles), and some services (such as Amazon SQS) also support attaching permissions policies to resources.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Roles and permissions | Temporal Documentation ↗

    “Some account-level roles, such as Account Owner and Global Admin, automatically have Namespace Admin permissions on all Namespaces in the account. [...] For more granular access control, you can also use Custom Roles to define specific permissions for specific Temporal Cloud resources and assign them to any principal. [...] You can grant Namespace Admin, Write, or Read-Only permissions to principals with the account-level roles of Developer, Finance Admin, or Read-Only.”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official docs · Report a correction

Private networking / VPC

Amazon SQS
Interface VPC endpoints (AWS PrivateLink) let a VPC reach SQS privately, including FIPS endpoints; HTTPS endpoints only.
Temporal
AWS PrivateLink or GCP Private Service Connect to Namespaces, alongside the default public endpoints.
Sources (2) →

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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03.

Documented by only one.

These criteria are published by one provider and not the other. An absence here means we have not found a source, not that the feature is missing — except where we say we read the other provider's own page on a given date and it does not state it. Those rows lean, and the provider can correct them with a link.

Credit card to startTemporal: Yes — Card required to sign up for Temporal Cloud; not charged in the first 90 days while credits remain.
Startup credit programTemporal: Temporal Cloud startup credits: $6,000, for funded startups that have raised $30M or less.
Dead letter queueAmazon SQS: Supported
Support on entry paid planTemporal: Developer support comes with pay-as-you-go and is billed at 10% of usage. The Business support add-on, the greater of $500/month or 10% of usage, adds advanced technical support with a 2-hour P0 SLA in business hours.
Response time commitmentTemporal: P0 response: 1 business day on Developer (the pay-as-you-go support level), 2 business hours on Business, 30 minutes on Enterprise and 15 minutes on Mission Critical. No comparable number, because a business day is not a fixed span.
Dedicated infrastructureTemporal: Temporal Cloud is a multi-tenant service; Namespaces are logically segregated and do not share data processing or data storage across regional boundaries. No single-tenant or dedicated-cell option is offered anywhere in the Cloud docs or the plan matrix.
04.

Questions this comparison answers.

Entry paid plan: Amazon SQS or Temporal?

Amazon SQS: No paid plan or minimum fee; billed per request after the free 1 million requests a month.

Temporal: No plan fee or minimum: pay-as-you-go has no base monthly fee and bills usage from $50 per million Actions, plus storage and Developer support at 10% of usage. New accounts start with $150 in credits valid for 90 days. The Business support add-on starts at $500/month.

Free tier: Amazon SQS or Temporal?

Amazon SQS: Yes

Temporal: No

Should I choose Amazon SQS or Temporal?

Pick Amazon SQS if AWS-resident systems that want a queue with a permanent free million requests a month and no capacity to plan — SQS scales without a throughput setting to choose.

Pick Temporal if Long-running, stateful workflows where losing execution history is the failure that matters — Temporal keeps event history as first-class storage rather than logs that expire.

Provider pages

Amazon SQSAWS managed message queue, billed per request with standard and FIFO rates and a permanent free tier.TemporalDurable execution platform metered in Actions, with storage split between open and closed workflows, and a self-hosted open-source edition.

Related comparisons

Amazon SQS vs Azure Queue StorageAmazon SQS vs Cloudflare QueuesAmazon SQS vs Google Cloud Pub/SubAmazon SQS vs HatchetAmazon SQS vs InngestAmazon SQS vs Trigger.devAmazon SQS vs ZeploAzure Queue Storage vs Temporal

Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.