Cloudflare Queues vs SQS vs IronMQ vs QStash
Four message-queue providers with very different free tiers — serverless queues co-located with edge Workers, the battle-tested AWS free tier, a simple managed queue, and an HTTP-based serverless scheduler — compared on free operations, throughput, and pricing.
| Cloudflare Queues | AWS SQS | IronMQ | Upstash QStash | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier note | Serverless message queues co-located with Workers; 10M operations/month free (1M base + 9M included), pay-per-op after. | Battle-tested managed queue: always-free 1M SQS requests/month + 1 GB data transfer out/month within the AWS Free Tier. | Simple managed message queue with a 14-day trial; no forever-free tier, pay-as-you-go after. | Serverless HTTP-based queue + scheduler (QStash) with 500 messages/day free, pay-per-message after; no infra to manage. |
| Bandwidth | included | 1 GB egress/month | n/a | included |
| Builds | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Requests | 10 million operations/month | 1 million requests/month (always free) | 14-day free trial (no forever-free tier) | 500 messages/day free |
| Custom domains | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Paid from | $5/mo | — | $19/mo | — |
| Generosity ★ | 44 | 14 | 4 | 24 |
| Last verified | 2025-09-01 | 2025-09-01 | 2025-09-01 | 2025-09-01 |
| Visit site | Cloudflare Queues ↗ | AWS SQS ↗ | IronMQ ↗ | Upstash QStash ↗ |
Data verified 2025-09-01.