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 7.7, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.5. Apache holds a 31.2% mindshare in MQ, compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s 11.9% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 26 ActiveMQ reviews

8,393 Views
4,952 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Amazon SQS

Read 28 Amazon SQS reviews

2,959 Views
2,471 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

Amazon SQS

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ActiveMQ and Amazon SQS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Message Queue (MQ) Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

December 2024

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Categories and Ranking

ActiveMQ

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

2nd

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

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 December 2024, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 31.2%, up from 24.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon SQS is 11.9%, down from 18.6% 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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Aravind Nithiyanandham

Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Optum

Used for notifying, queuing servers, and queuing messages

I created a support ticket one or two years ago. The technical support team responded promptly and helped us with the issues. I am very much happy with the solution’s technical support. They are knowledgeable, understand our problem easily, and then figure out the issues. On a scale from one to ten, where one is bad and ten is excellent, I rate the solution’s technical support nine and a half out of ten.

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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

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

"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."

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

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

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

"It’s a JMS broker, so the fact that it can allow for asynchronous communication is valuable."

"I am impressed with the tool’s latency. Also, the messages in ActiveMQ wait in a queue. The messages will start to move when the system reopens after getting stuck."

More ActiveMQ pros

"We use Amazon SQS for notifying, queuing servers, queuing messages, and notifying the people for alerting systems."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to decouple components."

"With SQS, we can trigger events in various cloud environments. It offers numerous benefits for us."

"Amazon SQS is reliable, with no issues to date."

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

"I am able to find out what's going on very easily."

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

"We use the tool in interface integrations."

More Amazon SQS pros

Cons

"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."

"The solution's stability needs improvement."

"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."

"The tool needs to improve its installation part which is lengthy. The product is already working on that aspect so that the complete installation gets completed within a month."

"I would rate the stability a five out of ten because sometimes it gets stuck, and we have to restart it. We"

"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."

"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."

More ActiveMQ cons

"I do not think that this solution is easy to use and the documentation of this solution has a lot of problems and can be improved in the next release. Most of the time, the images in the document are from older versions."

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

"There are some issues with SQS's transaction queue regarding knowing if something has been received."

"As a company that uses IBM solutions, it's difficult to compare Amazon SQS to other solutions. We have been using IBM solutions for a long time and they are very mature in integration and queuing. In my role as an integration manager, I can say that Amazon SQS is designed primarily for use within the Amazon ecosystem and does not have the same level of functionality as IBM MQ or other similar products. It has limited connectivity options and does not easily integrate with legacy systems."

"I cannot send a message to multiple people simultaneously. It can only be sent to one recipient."

"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."

"Sometimes, we have to switch to another component similar to SQS because the patching tool for SQS is relatively slow for us."

"The current visibility timeout of five minutes is okay. However, I'd like to explore the possibility of extending it for specific use cases."

More Amazon SQS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"It’s open source, ergo free."

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

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"We use the open-source version."

"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."

"I think the software is free."

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

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

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

"It's quite expensive."

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

"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 offers a generous free tier, beyond which it remains very cost-effective. The cost per million messages is less than a dollar, making it an economical choice."

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

"Compared to EC2 and other services, Amazon SQS' pricing is cheaper."

More Amazon SQS pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Message Queue (MQ) Software solutions are best for your needs.

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824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

34%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

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?

We need to address the non-deterministic load issues. Sometimes, ActiveMQ either restarts automatically or goes into ActiveMQ mode, causing interruptions. We need to enhance stability and improve t...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for ActiveMQ?

We have a digital ID platform that uses various services running on Kafka. There are two main endpoints where services interact with external services. These include an automatic biometric service ...

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?

A primary area of improvement for Amazon SQS is the message size limitation, which is currently restricted to 256 kilobytes per message. If this could be increased, it would benefit many use cases....

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon SQS?

I have been heavily using Amazon SQS for the last more than four years in serverless and decoupled solutions. We use it in workflows like order creation, where the order creation task is queued, al...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 45% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 18% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 12% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

Redis vs ActiveMQ

Compared 4% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Apache Kafka vs Amazon SQS

Compared 28% of the time

Redis vs Amazon SQS

Compared 22% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Amazon SQS

Compared 14% of the time

Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service vs Amazon SQS

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon MQ vs Amazon SQS

Compared 8% of the time

More Amazon SQS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

December 2024

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon SQS

December 2024

Download Amazon SQS product report

Also Known As

AMQ

No data available

Learn More

Apache

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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

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.

Sample Customers

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

EMS, NASA, BMW, Capital One

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

December 2024

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

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