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ActiveMQ vs IBM MQ comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

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
7.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM MQ
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
164
Ranking in other categories
Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 26.5%, up from 21.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 25.6%, up from 20.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Q&A Highlights

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 13, 2019
 

Featured Reviews

Prashant-Sharma - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
SelvaKumar4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers the ability to batch metadata transfers between systems that support MQ as the communication method
We find it scalable for internal applications, but not so much for external integrations. It should support a wider range of protocols, not just a few specific ones. Many other products have broader protocol support, and IBM MQ is lagging in that area. IBM MQ needs to improve the UI for quicker logging. Users should also have a lot more control over logging, with a dashboard-like interface. That's something they should definitely work on.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."
"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."
"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."
"We value ActiveMQ for its performance, throughput, and low latency, especially in handling large volumes of data and sequential management of topics."
"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."
"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."
"The most valuable feature of IBM MQ is transaction processing."
"The most valuable features of IBM MQ are its guarantee of delivery, ability to handle high volume while maintaining high availability, and robust security measures such as SSL, TLS, and RBAC."
"I appreciate the level of control we have over queue managers, queues, and the messaging itself. That provides good security. So, the control and scalability of messaging are important to me."
"Offers good performance as well as scalability and stability."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"The thing that I like about MQ most is its reliability. It's one of those types of products that just works. You don't have to tinker around with it too much."
"The usability of the solution is very good."
"I have found that the solution scales well."
 

Cons

"The solution can improve the other protocols to equal the AMQ protocol they offer."
"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."
"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."
"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."
"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."
"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."
"It would be an advantage if they can include streaming in IBM MQ, similar to Kafka. Kafka is used mainly for streaming purposes. This feature is clearly lacking in IBM MQ. If they add this feature to IBM MQ, it will have an edge over other products."
"It's hard to put in a nutshell, but it's sort of developed as more of an on-premise solution. It hasn't moved much away from that."
"SonicMQ CAA (continuous availability architecture) functionality on auto failover and data persistence should be made available without a shared drive, as it exists in multi-instance queue managers."
"Better error handling, such as a default dead message queue for errors, would be beneficial."
"The monitoring could be improved. It's a pain to monitor the throughput through the MQ. The maximum throughput for a queue or single channel isn't clear. We could also use some professional services by IBM to assess and tune the performance."
"The user interface should be enhanced to include more monitoring features and other metrics. The metrics should include not only those from the IBM MQ point of view but also CPU and memory utilization."
"Customer support response times could be improved."
"We have had scalability issues with some projects in the past."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."
"We use the open-source version."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"I think the software is free."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"You have to license per application installation and if you expand vertically or horizontally, you will be paying for more licenses. The licenses are approximately $10,000 to $15,000 a license, it can get expensive quite quickly."
"I think the pricing is reasonable, especially with IIB as a part of it."
"Licensing for this software is on a yearly basis. The standard fee includes the maintenance and updates that are released periodically."
"This solution requires a license and we have purchased an enterprise license."
"IBM MQ is expensive and they charge based on the CPU."
"IBM products, in general, have high licensing costs and support costs are too high."
"There is real money involved here. As compared to RabbitMQ, IBM MQ is on the higher side in terms of cost."
"In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side."
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Answers from the Community

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 13, 2019
Feb 13, 2019
ActiveMQ offers very high throughput and low latency compared to IBM MQ. ActiveMQ supports standard messaging protocols like AMQP, STOMP, MQTT etc whereas IBM MQ just comply with JMS and its own protocol. IBM MQ Light supports AMQP though. IBM MQ is much preferred in enterprise environment, probably due to the support. Redhat AMQ offers enterprise support on ActiveMQ. AFAIK documentation wise,...
See 2 answers
JA
Feb 12, 2019
From my Experience so far i will go for RabbitMQ its rock solid and robust with a simple learning curve. Its free and has great documentation available
WJ
Feb 13, 2019
ActiveMQ offers very high throughput and low latency compared to IBM MQ. ActiveMQ supports standard messaging protocols like AMQP, STOMP, MQTT etc whereas IBM MQ just comply with JMS and its own protocol. IBM MQ Light supports AMQP though. IBM MQ is much preferred in enterprise environment, probably due to the support. Redhat AMQ offers enterprise support on ActiveMQ. AFAIK documentation wise, they are at par. Both support clustering. But only in ActiveMQ real storage of messages in another broker which is less loaded happens. IBM MQ just enables communication between Queue managers. But I would prefer to put a few more options on the table. 1. RabbitMQ - fully compliant with protocols, supports replication and distribution of messages, throughput in tens of thousands 2. Redis - Light weight single threaded server. Supports pub sub messaging and supports HA via sentinel and clustering for distributed messaging 3. Kafka - Preferred mechanism for data streaming. Throughput in millions. 4. ZeroMQ - Brokerless messaging platform. Very high throughput. 5. NanoMsg - Brokerless. Claims to be advanced than ZeroMQ
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
34%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
38%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
5%
 

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.
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...
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 ...
What is MQ software?
Hi As someone with 45+ years of experience in the Transaction and Message Processing world, I have seen many "MQ" solutions that have come into the market place. From my perspective, while each pro...
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...
How does IBM MQ compare with VMware RabbitMQ?
IBM MQ has a great reputation behind it, and this solution is very robust with great stability. It is easy to use, simple to configure and integrates well with our enterprise ecosystem and protocol...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AMQ
WebSphere MQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc. 
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveMQ vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
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