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 7.5, and holds a 30.9% mindshare in the category. Apache Kafka is ranked #7 in SA , with an average rating of 8.2, and holds a 0.2% 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

8,673 Views
5,099 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 83 Apache Kafka reviews

1,275 Views
1,004 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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Helped 816,406 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

ActiveMQ

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (2nd)

Apache Kafka

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (7th)

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 30.9%, up 24.3% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 0.2% mindshare, up 0.0% since last year.

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Streaming Analytics

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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Eyob Alemu

Technical Director at NIDP

Significant cost savings with real-time processing and fast recovery

We use Kafka for a stage event-driven process from a process perspective. Our platform is an ID platform, so after registration data is received, it has to be stored from various registration locations. The process includes stages like quality checking, consistency, format, biometric data checking…

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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 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."

"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."

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

"It provides the best support services."

"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."

"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."

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

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

More ActiveMQ pros

"I use it for real-time processing workloads. So, in some instances, it's like IoT data. We need to put it into a data lake."

"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."

"The convenience in setting up after major problems like data center blackouts is a notable feature."

"The most important feature for me is the guaranteed delivery of messages from producers to consumers."

"The most valuable feature is the support for a high volume of data."

"I like the performance and reliability of Kafka. I needed a data streaming buffer that could handle thousands of messages per second with at least one processing point for an analytics pipeline. Kafka fits this requirement very well."

"The stream processing is a very valuable aspect of the solution for us."

"With Kafka, events and streaming are persistent, and multiple subscribers can consume the data. This is an advantage of Kafka compared to simple queue-based solutions."

More Apache Kafka pros

Cons

"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."

"I would like the tool to improve compliance and stability. We will encounter issues while using the central applications. In the solution's future releases, I want to control and set limitations for databases."

"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."

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

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

"The solution can improve the other protocols to equal the AMQ protocol they offer."

"There are some stability issues."

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

More ActiveMQ cons

"As an open-source project, Kafka is still fairly young and has not yet built out the stability and features that other open-source projects have acquired over the many years. If done correctly, Kafka can also take over the stream-processing space that technologies such as Apache Storm cover."

"More Windows support, I believe, is one area where it can improve."

"The user interface is one weakness. Sometimes, our data isn't as accessible as we'd like. It takes a lot of work to retrieve the data and the index."

"The solution should be easier to manage. It needs to improve its visualization feature in the next release."

"Lacks elasticity and the ability to scale down."

"Kafka does not provide control over the message queue, so we do not know whether we are experiencing lost or duplicate messages."

"Something that could be improved is having an interface to monitor the consuming rate."

"The interface has room for improvement, and there is a steep learning curve for Hadoop integration. It was a struggle learning to send from Hadoop to Kafka. In future releases, I'd like to see improvements in ETL functionality and Hadoop integration."

More Apache Kafka cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s open source, ergo free."

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

"I think the software is free."

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

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

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

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"We use the open-source version."

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"Kafka is open-source and it is cheaper than any other product."

"It's a premium product, so it is not price-effective for us."

"The solution is open source."

"The price of the solution is low."

"The price of Apache Kafka is good."

"The solution is open source; it's free to use."

"This is an open-source solution and is free to use."

"We use the free version."

More Apache Kafka 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

Financial Services Firm

31%

Computer Software Company

13%

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...

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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 ...

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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?

I would rate the overall cost of using Kafka as a three out of ten, indicating that it is rather affordable, considering the benefits and savings it provides.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 43% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 19% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 4% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Amazon SQS vs Apache Kafka

Compared 19% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 15% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 13% of the time

IBM Event Streams vs Apache Kafka

Compared 3% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

November 2024

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

November 2024

Download Apache Kafka product report

Also Known As

AMQ

No data available

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Apache

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 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.

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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We monitor all Message Queue (MQ) Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.