Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) vs. iZooto

Using SNS for any notification use case where available is the default and defacto solution. It directly integrates with SES to configure both incoming email and email delivery responses.

Additionally, any notifications, such as CloudWatch alarms, are a good use case for SNS topics and allow us to fan out delivery as needed (pagerduty, email, etc)

iZooto is great if you have a case where you are selling something to consumers on your site. Or are looking to re-target them after they came to you. It may not be suited for targeting existing customers of a SaaS company who have already been acquired, when you've got the user locked in. However it can be useful to retarget the top level funnel of a SaaS company and increase leads.

Incentivized

• Built in for quicker setup within AWS ecosystem.
• Trusted as you control the users and configuration via IAM and easy access controls.
• Can be sent to S3 simple storage or for long term storage if required.
• Can be used in many regions, same configs.

Incentivized

• iZooto allows us to keep up to date with various browser developments & push notification standards that keep evolving.
• iZooto allows us to re-target users who viewed a particular product, or products in a certain price range or users from a certain location or all all of these together.
• iZooto allows us to monetise our push notifications without any extra effort.

Incentivized

• At times you receive access denied errors which are annoying.
• Rarely do you receive internal failure errors where you can't access the information. It is rare but it does happen.
• You are required to add an MWS Authentication Token every so often. I wish it would pull that information automatically for you so you don't have to go searching for it.

Incentivized

• Their WordPress plugin works but is a bit glitchy when you try to override a post's default settings in the notification
• More opportunities to brand the opt in prompt would be great -- with, say, our logo, though I am not sure it's supported by browsers
• There is no clear way to UNSUBSCRIBE from prompts, unlike with OneSignal.

Incentivized

It is useful for applications developed using event driven architecture. It helps in tracking and logging the events in a very timely and efficient manner. The dashboards are a little difficult to implement. But overall it is very easy to integrate with other AWS services like Lambda, API GW, S3 and DynamoDB. The permissions to access should be resolved before using it.

Incentivized

The AWS documentation is well maintained and has lots of information which makes it easier for developers to refer to and develop applications in a fast efficient manner. It is well documented with examples which is easy to understand and implement. You can also get help by posting into forums from like-minded developers.

Incentivized

They were on top of things right away when I reported an issue with their WordPress plugin, or when I needed to switch from Shopify to WordPress. Very hands-on and responsive. They have built-in live chat support in their app, though it would be nice if they incorporated it into their WordPress plugin too, so I didn't have to leave WordPress to report issues.

Incentivized

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is well integrated in AWS and has been there since the early days of public cloud. It is a cost effective and very inexpensive solution to meet the needs of event notifications and custom messaging. Wish to share that there is considerable number of developers who can easily build solutions using AWS SNS. So, training costs are minimal. Other solutions are emerging and we are seeing a great usage especially of Firebase notifications because of its very neat integration with open source cross platform hybrid app frameworks like ionic, xamarin. SNS needs to become better and should have plugin support for the mobile application developers using low code/no code tools too.

Incentivized

OneSignal is free up to a very high limit, whereas iZooto is paid. But OneSignal is only suitable for posting notifications about news articles, whereas iZooto has cart abandonment. That alone makes it a no brainer. Also, the custom prompts to subscriptions add a nice touch and a way to start a non-generic relationship from the very first touch.

Incentivized

• Cost of alert calls to the different stakeholders across different geographies have gone down since using Amazon SNS.
• Amazon SNS has saved a lot of time for the employees that they used to spend to call multiple stakeholders so they can now focus more on productive tasks.
• Amazon SNS usage needs prior knowledge of programming.

Incentivized

• I bought iZooto as a lifetime deal when it was on early beta, so the ROI is high. I am about to transition a major news property I manage on to iZooto from OneSignal as it allows for easy segmentation and cart recovery, which OneSignal does not offer, at least anywhere near as easily.
• We spend up to $20 on user acquisition, and since implementing iZooto, that number has gone down to closer to $15. Still, I cannot say if the whole gain is from iZooto, as attribution is messy, but I'm sure it has contributed to our efficiency.
• Push notifications are the 4th highest source of referrals for us, so it's bringing users back.

Incentivized