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 8.0, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.6. Apache holds a 31.8% mindshare in MQ, compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s 11.3% 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

8,024 Views
4,798 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Amazon SQS

Read 29 Amazon SQS reviews

2,864 Views
2,377 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: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

January 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

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 January 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 31.8%, up from 25.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon SQS is 11.3%, down from 18.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Featured Reviews

Prashant-Sharma

Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Allows for asynchronous communication, enabling services to operate independently but issues with stability

The feature of ActiveMQ which I feel is good is its ability to have DLP, the later queues. If something goes wrong with the platform, it retries. Even if it fails, it goes to DLP, and later we can rescan the same event for processing. The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable.

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Ariel Tarayants

Powerful queue system facilitates seamless asynchronous operations

A feature I would like to see in Amazon SQS is the ability to view the content of messages without removing them from the queue. Enhanced filtering on the messages would be beneficial, as currently one has to pull all messages out, filter the right one by code, and then re-insert the remaining messages. This solution is not effective with the FIFO queue.

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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

"I'm impressed, I think that Active MQ is great."

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

"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."

"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes."

"We value ActiveMQ for its performance, throughput, and low latency, especially in handling large volumes of data and sequential management of topics."

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

"There is a vibrant community, and it is one of the strongest points of this product. We always get answers to our problems. So, my experience with the community support has been good."

"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

"It works consistently and is economical under a standard non-FIFO model."

"The scale it manages is quite impressive."

"It is stable and scalable."

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

"The solution is easy to scale and cost-effective."

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

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

"We use the tool in interface integrations."

More Amazon SQS pros

Cons

"There are some stability issues."

"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."

"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."

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

"The solution's stability needs improvement."

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

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

"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."

More ActiveMQ cons

"There is room for improvement by making use of Kafka services to create more flexible data streams."

"There could be improvements in the UI for security and scalability."

"For Amazon SQS, in particular, I think AWS Management Console has shortcomings. AWS Management Console should be a better pluggable option to help users with some integrations."

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

"There is room for improvement in the pricing, especially for the FIFO model."

"Sending or receiving messages takes some time, and it could be quicker."

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

"Support could be improved."

More Amazon SQS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s open source, ergo free."

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

"I think the software is free."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

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

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

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

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

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

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

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

"It's quite expensive."

"Amazon SQS is moderately priced."

"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."

"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 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

34%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

16%

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 47% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 17% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 12% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

Apache Kafka 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 21% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Amazon SQS

Compared 15% 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

January 2025

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon SQS

January 2025

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

January 2025

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

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