Azure — Difference between Azure Storage Queue and Service Bus Queue
Comparison — Azure Storage Queue vs Azure Service Bus Queue

TL;DR:
Storage Queue is a simple message queuing service to store large numbers of messages. Service Bus Queue is part of a broader messaging service that supports queuing, publish/subscribe, and more advanced integration patterns.
Storage queues and Service Bus queues have slightly different feature sets. You can choose either one or both, depending on the needs of your particular solution. Azure Storage Queues are simpler to use but are less sophisticated and flexible than Service Bus queues.
Azure Storage Queue
This service offers large numbers of messages storage. You access messages from anywhere via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS. A queue may contain millions of messages. Queues are commonly used to create a backlog of work to process asynchronously.
Azure Service Bus Queue
This service offers FIFO message delivery to one or more competing consumers. A key benefit of using queues is to the producers (senders) and consumers (receivers) don’t have to send and receive messages at the same time.
Key Differences
Ordering Service Bus: Ordering guarantee (through the use of messaging sessions) Storage Queue: No ordering guarantee.
Delivery Service Bus: At-Most-Once (ReceiveAndDelete receive mode) or At-Least-Once (PeekLock receive mode) Storage Queue: At-Least-Once
Maximum Queue Size Service Bus: 1 GB to 80 GB Storage Queue: 500 TB (limited to a storage account capacity)
Maximum Message Size Service Bus: 256 KB (standard tier) or 100 MB (premium tier) Storage Queue: 64 KB (48 KB when using Base64 encoding)
Dead Lettering Service Bus: Supported. Storage Queue: Not supported.
State management Service Bus: Supported Storage Queue: Not supported
Message groups Service Bus: Supported (through the use of messaging sessions) Storage Queue: Not supported
Duplicate detection Service Bus: Supported Storage Queue: Not supported
Maximum number of queues Service Bus: 10,000 Storage Queue: Unlimited
Maximum number of concurrent clients Service Bus: 5,000 Storage Queue: Unlimited
Purge queue Service Bus: Not supported Storage Queue: Supported
Access mode Service Bus: Lock-based Storage Queue: Lease-based
Lease/Lock duration Service Bus: 60 seconds (default) Storage Queue: 30 seconds (default), 7 days (maximum)
Lease/Lock precision Service Bus: Queue level Storage Queue: Message level
Server-side transaction log Service Bus: Not supported Storage Queue: Supported
Use Cases
Choose Service Bus Queues if:
- You need an at-most-once delivery guarantee.
- You need a FIFO guarantee.
- You need to group messages into transactions.
- You want to receive messages without polling the queue.
- You need to provide role-based access to the queues.
- You need to handle messages larger than 64 KB but smaller than 256 KB.
- Your queue size will not grow larger than 80 GB.
- You would like to be able to publish and consume batches of messages.
Choose Storage Queues if:
- You need a simple queue with no particular additional requirements.
- You need an audit trail of all messages that pass through the queue.
- You expect the queue to exceed 80 GB in size.
- You want to track progress for processing a message inside of the queue.
Summary
Storage queues and Service Bus queues have slightly different feature sets. You can choose either one or both, depending on the needs of your application and its architecture.
If your requirements are simple, if you want to send each message to only one destination, or if you want to write code as quickly as possible, a storage queue may be the best option. Otherwise, Service Bus queues provide many more options and flexibility.
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