We compared IBM MQ and ActiveMQ based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
IBM MQ is highly praised for its reliability, scalability, security, and integration capabilities, along with positive remarks on customer service and pricing. On the other hand, ActiveMQ is valued for its efficient messaging, integration, and versatility, with notable customer service. However, areas for improvement include documentation, interface, and stability/performance issues.
Features: IBM MQ is praised for its reliability, scalability, security, and ease of integration, while ActiveMQ offers reliable messaging, seamless integration, efficient message handling, versatile configuration, and robust support for messaging protocols.
Pricing and ROI: IBM MQ is praised for its reasonable and cost-effective pricing structure, manageable setup costs, and user-friendly licensing process. On the other hand, ActiveMQ is commended for its favorable pricing structure, minimal setup costs, and positive user experiences with the licensing process., IBM MQ has been praised for enhancing efficiency, improving communication and integration, streamlining workflows, and reducing downtime. Users appreciated its reliability, scalability, and ease of use. This resulted in cost savings and increased productivity. On the other hand, ActiveMQ was commended for its reliability, performance, and ease of use. It improved messaging capabilities, increased efficiency, and offered seamless integration. Both products seem to have provided positive ROI.
Room for Improvement: IBM MQ has been identified by users as needing enhancements in certain areas, while ActiveMQ could benefit from improved documentation, a more intuitive user interface, and increased stability and performance.
Deployment and customer support: IBM MQ and ActiveMQ have different user experiences when it comes to the duration required for establishing new tech solutions. While some IBM MQ users reported a range of three months to one week for deployment and setup, ActiveMQ users reported spending several months on deployment and an additional week on setup, but some were able to complete both in just one week., IBM MQ's customer service is highly regarded for its promptness, effectiveness, expertise, and reliability. Users appreciate the help they receive from the support team. ActiveMQ's customer service is praised for being responsive, helpful, and exceeding expectations. Users value the prompt resolution of concerns and the knowledge of the support team.
The summary above is based on 29 interviews we conducted recently with IBM MQ and ActiveMQ users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes."
"It’s a JMS broker, so the fact that it can allow for asynchronous communication 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."
"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."
"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."
"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."
"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."
"Technical support is quite helpful."
"Overall the solution operates well and has good integration."
"I have found the solution to be very robust. It has a strong reputation, easy to use, simple to configure in our enterprise software, and supports all the protocols that we use."
"The message queue and the integration with any development platform/language, i.e., NET and Java, are the most valuable features."
"Support for JMS 2.0, because we develop solutions compatible with Java EE7."
"The product helps us monitor messages with other queues, view duplicated messages and control undelivered messages."
"IBM MQ is the right choice because of the stability and the performance. And from the support perspective, it's enough to have a really small team."
"A stable and reliable software that offers good integration between different systems."
"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."
"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."
"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."
"The solution can improve the other protocols to equal the AMQ protocol they offer."
"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 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."
"The tool needs to improve its installation part which is lengthy. The product is already working on that aspect so that the complete installation gets completed within a month."
"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."
"IBM HQ's scalability isn't the best."
"I would like the ability to connect with some of the more recent offerings, such as API Connect; being able to publish our MQ endpoints, the queues, the messaging infrastructure as IT assets."
"MQ needs instruments for connection with new modern queues like Kafka or RabbitMQ."
"It would be great if the dashboard had additional features like a board design."
"I'm not sure that current version has event-driven mechanism requests that people go for. I would like the latest version to come with both type of event mechanisms: an email server and a POP server. If that is not there, then that would be a great addition."
"I wanted to upgrade Windows Server. It's not that easy to move."
"We would like to see the IBM technical support team extend their hand to providing support for other cloud vendors like Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS"
"You should be able to increase the message size. It should be dynamic. Each queue has a limitation of 5,000."
ActiveMQ is ranked 4th in Message Queue (MQ) Software with 24 reviews while IBM MQ is ranked 2nd in Message Queue (MQ) Software with 158 reviews. ActiveMQ is rated 7.8, while IBM MQ is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of ActiveMQ writes "Allows for asynchronous communication, enabling services to operate independently but issues with stability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM MQ writes "Offers the ability to batch metadata transfers between systems that support MQ as the communication method". ActiveMQ is most compared with Anypoint MQ, Red Hat AMQ, Amazon SQS, VMware Tanzu Data Services and Apache Kafka, whereas IBM MQ is most compared with Apache Kafka, VMware Tanzu Data Services, Red Hat AMQ, PubSub+ Event Broker and Anypoint MQ. See our ActiveMQ vs. IBM MQ report.
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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