Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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

"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."
"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."
"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."
"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."
"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."
"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."
"The high availability and session recovery are the most valuable features because we need the solution live all day."
"There are a lot of extensible options for security, i.e., various things you can do. It's pretty easy to navigate."
"The feature I find most effective for ensuring message delivery without loss is the backup threshold. This feature allows for automatic retries of transactional messages within a specified threshold."
"We use our routing feature when the request is coming from the business application. The request goes to the distributive side and it is routed to the right claim instance."
"Assists with our apps and has great message processing."
"It is very robust and very scalable."
"It offers better reliability and monitoring compared to other tools."
"The MQ protocol is widely used across multiple applications and it's so simple for connectivity."
 

Cons

"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."
"I would rate the stability a five out of ten because sometimes it gets stuck, and we have to restart it. We"
"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."
"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."
"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."
"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 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 solution should offer a freeware version, free vouchers, or certifications for learning purposes and building knowledge base."
"Scalability is lacking compared to the cloud native products coming into the market."
"The issue is that they're using a very old clustering model."
"Better error handling, such as a default dead message queue for errors, would be beneficial."
"The solution requires a lot of work to implement and maintain."
"IBM could revamp the interface. The API is huge, but some developers find it limiting because of the cost. They tend to wrap the API course into the JMS, which means they're missing out on some good features. They should work a little bit on the API exposure."
"I would like to see message duplication included."
"With IBM products, there's less marketing. If they do more demos and more seminars on their products, it will be very useful. On a given day. I get seminar invites for many vendors and products, but for IBM, I may get an invite once or twice a year."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"We use the open-source version."
"I think the software is free."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"The pricing seems good according to the functionality that the solution provides."
"I think it's pretty reasonable, but I'm not so too sure of the current pricing strategy from IBM. We use many bundled services, and most often, we go through a service provided by some other third-party implementation. So, I can't really give an honest opinion about that."
"The problem with this product is that it's a little bit expensive."
"Pricing could be better, as with all IBM products. But their performance in production, along with security and scalability, will pay returns in the long run."
"The price of IBM MQ could improve by being less expensive."
"The license for IBM MQ is commercial and not cheap. You get a multi-platform solution, which is important because it lets you connect systems on mainframes, personal solutions, Unix, Linux, etc."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Message Queue (MQ) Software solutions are best for your needs.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.