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Azure Service Bus

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Fully managed enterprise message broker with queues and publish/subscribe topics

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  • Deployment Cloud Based
  • Starting price Free
  • Free trial Available
  • Best for Startups, SMEs, Enterprises

What is Azure Service Bus?

Azure Service Bus is a fully managed enterprise message broker from Microsoft that provides message queues and publish/subscribe topics for connecting applications and services. It decouples producers and consumers, load balances work across competing consumers, and supports transactional operations across multiple queues or topics. The service uses the AMQP 1.0 open standard and is also compliant with the JMS 2.0 API on its Premium tier.

Advanced capabilities include message sessions for FIFO ordering, dead-letter queues, scheduled delivery, duplicate detection, and autoforwarding between entities. Service Bus is available in Basic, Standard, and Premium tiers, with Premium offering dedicated resources, larger 100 MB messages, and predictable throughput. It integrates closely with Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and Event Grid.

Key Features of Azure Service Bus

Azure Service Bus lists 10 documented features, including Queues for point-to-point messaging and topics/subscriptions for publish/subscribe, Message sessions for FIFO ordering and request-response patterns and Dead-letter queues for undeliverable or expired messages. The list below covers what the product does rather than how it is marketed.

  • Queues for point-to-point messaging and topics/subscriptions for publish/subscribe
  • Message sessions for FIFO ordering and request-response patterns
  • Dead-letter queues for undeliverable or expired messages
  • Scheduled message delivery and message deferral
  • Duplicate detection
  • Autoforwarding to chain queues and topics together
  • Transactional operations across multiple entities
  • AMQP 1.0 protocol support and JMS 2.0 compliance on Premium
  • Geo-replication for disaster recovery on Premium
  • Messages up to 100 MB on the Premium tier

Azure Service Bus Pricing

Azure Service Bus lists 4 plans. Two carry a published figure, from Free to $10; the rest are quoted on request.

Azure Free Account

Free

750 hours/month

Service Bus is included in Azure’s always-free service allowances, plus new accounts get a $200 credit usable within the first 30 days.

Basic

$0.05 per million operations

Queues only, no topics

Pay-as-you-go with no monthly base fee; suited to simple queuing and dev/test workloads.

Standard

$10/month base, then tiered per-operation fees

12.5 million operations included

Base charge includes 12.5M operations/month. Additional usage is approximately $0.80 per million (13-100M/month), $0.50 per million (100-2,500M/month), and $0.20 per million (over 2,500M/month). Supports queues, topics, and subscriptions.

Premium

Approximately $677/month per messaging unit (region-dependent)

1, 2, or 4 messaging units

Flat rate for dedicated CPU/memory resources with no per-operation charges. Supports messages up to 100 MB and predictable, isolated throughput.

Azure Service Bus Specifications

Azure Service Bus is available on web app. It offers an API, has a free trial and has a free plan.

Deployment
  • Cloud Based
Billing cycle
Monthly
Desktop
  • Web App
Languages
  • English
Built for
  • Startups
  • SMEs
  • Enterprises
Support
  • Email
  • Phone
  • Tickets
  • Training
Integrations
Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Event Grid, Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365, Azure Stream Analytics, .NET, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Python SDKs, NServiceBus, MassTransit, and AMQP 1.0 clients such as Apache Qpid
Public API
Yes
Free trial
Yes
Free plan
Yes
Runs in browser
Yes
Customisable
Yes

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Azure Service Bus Comparisons

Side by side comparisons of Azure Service Bus against 3 other Message Oriented Middleware options listed here.

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Azure Service Bus FAQs

Queues provide point-to-point messaging where one consumer processes each message. Topics publish a single message to multiple independent subscriptions using publish/subscribe semantics, with optional filter rules per subscription.

Standard runs on shared multi-tenant infrastructure with per-operation billing, suited to development and moderate workloads. Premium provides dedicated resources, predictable throughput, and messages up to 100 MB for production or mission-critical scenarios.

Service Bus is a brokered queue/topic system built for enterprise messaging features like sessions and dead-lettering, while Event Hubs is built for high-throughput event and telemetry streaming, similar to Apache Kafka.

The primary wire protocol is AMQP 1.0, an open ISO/IEC standard. Premium is also fully compliant with the JMS 2.0 API, and Standard supports a JMS 1.1 subset for queues.

Yes. Service Bus is part of Azure's always-free service allowances at 750 hours per month, and new Azure accounts also receive a $200 credit for the first 30 days.