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ActiveMQ vs IBM MQ comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

ActiveMQ
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
2nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
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
6.7
Number of Reviews
162
Ranking in other categories
Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 30.9%, up from 24.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 29.2%, up from 26.4% 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

Eyob Alemu - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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

"It provides the best support services."
"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."
"The most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."
"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."
"We value ActiveMQ for its performance, throughput, and low latency, especially in handling large volumes of data and sequential management of topics."
"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."
"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes."
"IBM MQ is robust compared to other products in the market. It also gives you support from the IBM team."
"The solution is easy to use and has good performance."
"Assists with our apps and has great message processing."
"The most valuable feature of IBM MQ is transaction processing."
"Setting up MQ is easy. We had a "grow as you go" implementation strategy. We started with a single channel and progressed to multiple queues and channels depending on the systems and integrations with other systems. It was a gradual deployment and expansion as we grew the services interacting with the core system using MQ."
"It runs everywhere, from the mainframe in the US to the PCs in the Gobi desert attached to an analog modem."
"The message queue and the integration with any development platform/language, i.e., NET and Java, are the most valuable features."
"The solution is very stable."
 

Cons

"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 can improve the other protocols to equal the AMQ protocol they offer."
"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."
"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."
"I would rate the stability a five out of ten because sometimes it gets stuck, and we have to restart it. We"
"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."
"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."
"The initial setup is difficult. Creating your own cluster is difficult. Working with cluster repositories is difficult. Issue management with IBM MQ is difficult."
"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."
"IBM HQ's scalability isn't the best."
"If they could come up with monitoring dashboards that would be good. We are using external monitoring tools, apart from our IBM MQ, to monitor IBM MQ. If we could get monitoring tools or dashboards to keep everything simple for the user to understand, that would be good."
"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."
"I couldn't find a lot of information on the system API side."
"The issue is that they're using a very old clustering model."
"I would just like a more user-friendly experience to do common administration tasks. I know that you can use MQ Explorer, but having something that's already built in would definitely be useful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"I think the software is free."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"We use the open-source version."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"The pricing needs improvement."
"Licensing for this software is on a yearly basis. The standard fee includes the maintenance and updates that are released periodically."
"It's super expensive, so ask them if they can consolidate some other licensing costs. But, IBM is IBM, so I guess we'll pay for it."
"IBM products, in general, have high licensing costs and support costs are too high."
"The solution costs are high, it is going to cost a fair bit for annual operating costs and support."
"IBM MQ is an expensive solution compared to other solutions. However, if you pay less you will not receive the same experience or features."
"IBM's licensing model seems more reasonable than some competitors. They charge based on usage, which is good."
"To implement such an IBM solution, a company has to pay a lot in term of licensing and consultancy. A pricing model might be a better option."
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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
33%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
38%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
4%
 

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
 

Learn More

 

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: October 2024.
816,816 professionals have used our research since 2012.