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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Helped 849,190 peers since 2012

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

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

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

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

"It provides the best support services."

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

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

"The main function I find valuable in ActiveMQ is facilitating message transfer within the client's internal network. ActiveMQ handles the message transfer from the internal network to the cloud. Regarding multi-protocols, we use different approaches based on client capabilities. Some clients connect for real-time data transfer, using database queries for periodic updates every ten minutes. We collect data from multiple clients, ensuring we get real-time sensor values where possible and periodic updates for others."

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

More ActiveMQ pros

"Kafka allows you to handle huge amounts of data and classify it into different categories. If you have huge amounts of data, Kafka is a very good solution for data classification."

"Deployment is speedy."

"The solution is very scalable. We started with a cluster of three and then scaled it to seven."

"The most valuable feature is that it can handle high volume."

"We get amazing throughput. We don't get any delay."

"I like Kafka's flexibility, stability, reliability, and robustness."

"It is a useful way to maintain messages and to manage offset from our consumers."

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

More Apache Kafka pros

Cons

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

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

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

"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."

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

"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

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

More ActiveMQ cons

"They need to have a proper portal to do everything because, at this moment, Kafka is lagging in this regard."

"Pulsar gives more scalability to an even grouping, but Apache Kafka is used more if you want to send something in a time series-based. If this does not matter to you then Pulsar could be more customizable. Apache Kafka is nothing but a streaming system with local storage."

"The price for the enterprise version is quite high. It would be better to have a lower price."

"The initial setup and deployment could be less complex."

"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)."

"I would like to see an improvement in authentication management."

"Kafka is a nightmare to administer."

"In the next release, I would like for there to be some authorization and HTL security."

More Apache Kafka cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s open source, ergo free."

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

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

"I think the software is free."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"We use the open-source version."

"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

"It's a bit cheaper compared to other Q applications."

"We are using the free version of Apache Kafka."

"It is approximately $600,000 USD."

"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution."

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

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

"Apache Kafka is open-source and can be used free of charge."

"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution."

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

31%

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?

Its pricing is reasonable. It's not always about cost, but about meeting specific needs.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 53% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 3% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Amazon SQS vs Apache Kafka

Compared 17% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 15% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 14% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs Apache Kafka

Compared 2% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

April 2025

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

April 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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