ActiveMQ vs Apache Kafka comparison

The compared ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka solutions aren't in the same category. ActiveMQ is ranked #2 in MQ , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 26.5% mindshare in the category. Apache Kafka is ranked #8 in SA , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 2.5% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of ActiveMQ users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Apache Kafka users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 26 ActiveMQ reviews

6,942 Views
4,318 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 87 Apache Kafka reviews

978 Views
737 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

Apache Kafka

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka 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. Apache Kafka Report (Updated: May 2024).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Apache Kafka

May 2024

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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

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (2nd)

Apache Kafka

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (8th)

Mindshare comparison

ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. ActiveMQ is designed for Message Queue (MQ) Software and holds a mindshare of 26.5%, up 21.3% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 2.5% mindshare, up 2.0% since last year.

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Streaming Analytics

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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Snehasish Das

Technology Leader at eTCaaS

Data streaming transforms real-time data movement with impressive scalability

I worked with Apache Kafka for customers in the financial industry and OTT platforms. They use Kafka particularly for data streaming. Companies offering movie and entertainment as a service, similar to Netflix, use Kafka Apache Kafka offers unique data streaming. It allows the use of data in…

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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

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

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

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

"I appreciate many features including queue, topic, durable topic, and selectors. I also value a different support for different protocols such as MQTT and AMQP. It has full support for EIP, REST, Message Groups, UDP, and TCP."

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

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

"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."

"It provides the best support services."

More ActiveMQ pros

"Apache Kafka is actually a distributed commit log. That is different than most messaging and queuing systems before it."

"The high availability is valuable. It is robust, and we can rely on it for a huge amount of data."

"It is the performance that is really meaningful."

"This is a system for email and other small devices. There has been a relay of transactions continuously over the last two years it has been in production."

"The solution is very easy to set up."

"Apache Kafka is scalable. It is easy to add brokers."

"Kafka is scalable. It can manage a high volume of data from many sources."

"Apache Kafka has good integration capabilities and has plenty of adapters in its ecosystem if you want to build something. There are adapters for many platforms, such as Java, Azure, and Microsoft's ecosystem. Other solutions, such as Pulsar have fewer adapters available."

More Apache Kafka pros

Cons

"There are some stability issues."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The UI. It's both a good thing and a bad thing. The UI is too simple. Sometimes you wanna see the messages coming to the queue, and you have to refresh the dashboard, the console of the product."

"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."

More ActiveMQ cons

"There have been some challenges with monitoring Apache Kafka, as there are currently only a few production-grade solutions available, which are all under enterprise license and therefore not easily accessible. The speaker has not had access to any of these solutions and has instead relied on tools, such as Dynatrace, which do not provide sufficient insight into the Apache Kafka system. While there are other tools available, they do not offer the same level of real-time data as enterprise solutions."

"I would like to see monitoring service tools."

"Some vendors don't offer extra features for monitoring."

"The product is good, but it needs implementation and on-going support. The whole cloud engagement model has made the adoption of Kafka better due to PaaS (Amazon Kinesis, a fully managed service by AWS)."

"Kafka is a nightmare to administer."

"The support on Apache Kafka could be improved."

"The repository isn't working very well. It's not user friendly."

"Lacks elasticity and the ability to scale down."

More Apache Kafka cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the open-source version."

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

"It’s open source, ergo free."

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

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

"I think the software is free."

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

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution."

"Kafka is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."

"Licensing issues are not applicable. Apache licensing makes it simple with almost zero cost for the software itself."

"The price of the solution is low."

"The cost can vary depending on the provider and the specific flavor or version you use. I'm not very knowledgeable about the pricing details."

"We use the free version."

"Running a Kafka cluster can be expensive, especially if you need to scale it up to handle large amounts of data."

"This is an open-source version."

More Apache Kafka 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

30%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

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 are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?

Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...

See all answers

What do you like most about Apache Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open-source solution that can be used for messaging or event processing.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Kafka?

The open-source version of Apache Kafka results in minimal costs, mainly linked to accessing documentation and limited support. Enterprises usually opt for the more cost-effective open-source edition.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 53% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 15% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

EMQX vs ActiveMQ

Compared 3% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Amazon SQS vs Apache Kafka

Compared 18% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 15% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs Apache Kafka

Compared 3% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

March 2025

Download Apache Kafka 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

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming platform that serves as a central hub for handling real-time data streams. It allows efficient publishing, subscribing, and processing of data from various sources like applications, servers, and sensors.

Kafka's core benefits include high scalability for big data pipelines, fault tolerance ensuring continuous operation despite node failures, low latency for real-time applications, and decoupling of data producers from consumers.

Key features include topics for organizing data streams, producers for publishing data, consumers for subscribing to data, brokers for managing clusters, and connectors for easy integration with various data sources.

Large organizations use Kafka for real-time analytics, log aggregation, fraud detection, IoT data processing, and facilitating communication between microservices.

Apache

Sample Customers

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

Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Apache Kafka

May 2024

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. Apache Kafka

Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveMQ vs. Apache Kafka and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.

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