ActiveMQ vs Amazon SQS comparison

Apache and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are both solutions in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category. Apache is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.0. Apache holds a 26.2% mindshare in MQ, compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s 8.1% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 28 ActiveMQ reviews

6,175 Views
5,681 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Amazon SQS

Read 30 Amazon SQS reviews

3,317 Views
1,824 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

Amazon SQS

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

ActiveMQ and Amazon SQS are message broker solutions. Amazon SQS may have the upper hand in scalability and reliability, making it a potentially better choice based on data comparisons.

Features: ActiveMQ supports multiple protocols, advanced message queuing, and can be deployed on-premises. Amazon SQS integrates seamlessly with AWS, supports high scalability, and provides reliable message delivery.

Room for Improvement: ActiveMQ could benefit from smoother deployment and enhanced customer support. Amazon SQS might improve its flexibility and customization options for users unfamiliar with AWS.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: ActiveMQ's deployment is customizable but requires manual setup, while Amazon SQS offers smoother deployment through AWS, requiring less hands-on management and providing robust customer support.

Pricing and ROI: ActiveMQ's open-source nature lowers setup costs, offering good ROI for technical users. Amazon SQS uses a pay-as-you-go model, providing predictable costs that scale with usage for efficient ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

July 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

ActiveMQ

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Amazon SQS

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 26.2%, up from 23.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon SQS is 8.1%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Featured Reviews

Eyob Alemu

Technical Director at NIDP

Efficient data flow management with high performance and occasional stability improvements

For high traffic volumes where management time on ActiveMQ is minimal and where the rate of flow from the provider is slower than from the consumer, ActiveMQ offers the highest performance based on our experience. It has been efficient for data flow control between two endpoints, despite occasional unexpected glitches. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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Hari Prakash Pokala

Senior Java Engineer at Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

Valuable AWS services enhance data analysis yet could benefit from flexible data streams

I am using multiple services such as AWS Lambda, S3, EC2, ECS, and the SNS SQS services, along with QuickSight reports and some of the VPC concepts. We have an email notification system integrated with Spring Branch. Once a batch job completes, SNS and SQS trigger events, sending notification…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."

"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."

"ActiveMQ demonstrates excellent stability and sturdiness."

"The most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."

"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."

"Message broadcasting: There could be a use case sending the same message to all consumers. So as a producer, I broadcast the message to a topic. Then, whichever consumers are subscribed to the topic can consume the same message."

"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."

More ActiveMQ pros

"Amazon SQS provides faster search through indexing via OpenSearch."

"All Amazon Web Services resources are easy to configure."

"We use the tool in interface integrations."

"The most valuable features of the solution are AWS Lambda services, ECS, and QuickSight reports, which are beneficial for data analysis."

"The libraries that connect and manage the queues are rich in features."

"We used SQS for the Kapolei system to ensure that certain tasks were executed precisely once. The first-in, first-out (FIFO) capability was a great feature for us. Additionally, its redundancy out of the box meant we didn't have to worry about missing messages. It provided peace of mind and automatically instilled trust, relieving us of any concerns."

"There is no setup just some easy configuration required."

"Overall, I would rate Amazon SQS as ten out of ten."

More Amazon SQS pros

Cons

"One potential area would be the complexity of the initial setup."

"It would be great if it is included as part of the solution, as Kafka is doing. Even though the use case of Kafka is different, If something like data extraction is possible, or if we can experiment with partition tolerance and other such things, that will be great."

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

"The clustering for sure needs improvement. When we were using it, the only thing available was an active/passive relationship that had to be maintained via shared file storage. That model includes a single point of failure in that storage medium."

"From the TPS point of view, it's like 100,000 transactions that need to be admitted from different devices and also from the different minor small systems. Those are best fit for Kafka. We have used it on the customer side, and we thought of giving a try to ActiveMQ, but we have to do a lot of performance tests and approval is required before we can use it for this scale."

"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."

"For additional functionality, I suggest making it easier to install and monitor the queues, topics, broker status, publisher status, and consumer status. Improved monitoring tools would help avoid needing to manually access the server for monitoring purposes."

"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."

More ActiveMQ cons

"Packages sometimes have delays in dropping, indicating reliability issues."

"The retention period for messages could be improved. Currently, messages are retained for four or seven days."

"Amazon SQS is costly. I think there could be improvements in how it facilitates comparisons between different AWS products. A calculator would be helpful. The calculator for Kafka is based on factors like throughput or storage used in the last month. In contrast, the calculator for Amazon SQS is based on the number of transactions processed. These different approaches make it challenging to compare them directly. I suggest AWS provide a straightforward calculator where I can input one aspect, and it calculates costs for multiple solutions."

"Improvement is needed in terms of troubleshooting and logs."

"It would be easier to have a dashboard that allows us to see everything and manage everything since we have so many queues."

"It would be beneficial to have the ability to peek at messages currently in Amazon SQS without needing to monitor incoming messages."

"The solution is not available on-premises so that rules out any customers looking for the messaging solution on-premises."

"The tool needs improvement in user-friendliness and discoverability."

More Amazon SQS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"I think the software is free."

"We use the open-source version."

"There are no fees because it is open-source."

"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."

"It’s open source, ergo free."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"Amazon SQS is quite expensive and is at the highest price point compared to other solutions."

"Compared to the other options and based on what I have heard, Amazon SQS is relatively more expensive, but it is not insanely expensive."

"The pricing of Amazon SQS is reasonable. The first million requests are free every month, and after, it's cost 40 cents for every million requests. There are not any additional fees."

"Amazon SQS is more affordable compared to other solutions."

"Amazon SQS is moderately priced."

"I rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten."

"SQS's pricing is very good - I would rate it nine out of ten."

"The pricing model is pay-as-you-use. It depends on your usage and configuration."

More Amazon SQS pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

33%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ActiveMQ?

For reliable messaging, the most valuable feature of ActiveMQ for us is ensuring prompt message delivery.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ActiveMQ?

Pricing is something to consider with ActiveMQ, though cloud pricing is not costly and depends upon the compute selection. Focusing on AI is essential nowadays. AI capabilities require improvement ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for ActiveMQ?

In my current organization, I'm only working with ActiveMQ. I previously worked with IBM WebSphere MQ.

See all answers

What do you like most about Amazon SQS?

It is stable and scalable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon SQS?

The retention period for messages could be improved. Currently, messages are retained for four or seven days. It would be beneficial if there was a provision to configure and retain messages for lo...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon SQS?

I primarily use Amazon SQS ( /products/amazon-sqs-reviews ) for asynchronous messaging. It is part of our distributed system design, where we use it for asynchronous communication by posting a mess...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 51% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 17% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 4% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 4% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Apache Kafka vs Amazon SQS

Compared 19% of the time

Redis vs Amazon SQS

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Amazon SQS

Compared 14% of the time

Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service vs Amazon SQS

Compared 14% of the time

Amazon MQ vs Amazon SQS

Compared 11% of the time

More Amazon SQS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

August 2025

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon SQS

August 2025

Download Amazon SQS product report

Also Known As

AMQ

No data available

Overview

Apache ActiveMQ is the most popular and powerful open source messaging and Integration Patterns server.

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License

Apache

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message oriented middleware, and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. Get started with SQS in minutes using the AWS console, Command Line Interface or SDK of your choice, and three simple commands.

SQS offers two types of message queues. Standard queues offer maximum throughput, best-effort ordering, and at-least-once delivery. SQS FIFO queues are designed to guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the exact order that they are sent.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc.

EMS, NASA, BMW, Capital One

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

July 2025

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

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