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ActiveMQ vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 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
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (9th), Streaming Analytics (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 26.2%, up from 20.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 5.0%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

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.
BhanuChidigam - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs well, high availability, and helpful support
We use approximately four people for the maintenance of the solution. My advice to others is this solution has high throughput and is used for many stock exchanges. For business critical use cases, such as processing financial transactions at a quick speed, I would recommend this solution. I rate PubSub+ Event Broker an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."
"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes."
"I'm impressed, I think that Active MQ is great."
"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."
"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."
"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."
"We value ActiveMQ for its performance, throughput, and low latency, especially in handling large volumes of data and sequential management of topics."
"The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable. It can be used for any kind of business where you've got multiple users who need information. Any company, such as LinkedIn, with a huge number of subscribers and any business, such as publishing, supermarket, airline, or shipping can use it."
"Going from something where we had outages and capacity issues constantly to a system that was able to scale with the massive market data and messaging spikes that happened during the initial stages of the COVID crisis in March, we were able to scale with 40 plus percent growth in our platform over the course of days."
"Guaranteed Messaging allows for us to transport messages between on-prem and the cloud without any loss of data."
"The most useful features has been the WAN optimization and probably the HybridEdge, which requires some third-party adapters or plugins. The idea that we can position Solace as a protocol-agnostic message transport fabric is key to our company having all manners of asynchronous messaging protocols from MQ, Kafka, JMS, etc. I really like the WAN optimization: Send once over a WAN, then distribute locally as many times as there are subscribers."
"Some valuable features include reconnecting topics, placing queues, and direct connections to MongoDB. The platform provides a dashboard to monitor the status of messages, such as how many have been processed or delivered, which is helpful for tracking performance."
"We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code."
"When we went to add another installation in our private cloud, it was easy. We received support from Solace and the install was seamless with no issues."
"As of now, the most valuable aspects are the topic-based subscription and the fanout exchange that we are using."
 

Cons

"I would rate the stability a five out of ten because sometimes it gets stuck, and we have to restart it. We"
"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."
"One potential area would be the complexity of the initial setup."
"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."
"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."
"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."
"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."
"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."
"Some of the feature's gaps with some of the open-source vendors have been closed in a lot of ways. Being more agile and addressing those earlier could be an area for improvement."
"We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building. A current workaround is using the message's header, where the business data can be put into this header and be used for a dynamic topic lookup. I want to see this in action when there are a couple of hundred cases live. E.g., how does it perform? From an administration perspective, is the ease of use there?"
"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."
"The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively."
"The section on observability pertains to understanding the functioning of an event crash. Instead of focusing on how the crash occurs, attention is given to the observable aspects, such as a memory pipeline where one person pushes messages and another reads them. However, this pipeline often encounters issues, such as the reader being unavailable, causing the system to become stuck and preventing the messages from moving forward. This can lead to the pipeline being permanently stalled."
"One of the areas of improvement would be if we could tell the story a bit better about what an event mesh does or why an event mesh is foundational to a large enterprise that has a wide diversity of applications that are homegrown and a small number off the shelf."
"The deployment process is complex."
"The integrations could improve in PubSub+ Event Broker."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"I think the software is free."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."
"We use the open-source version."
"The licensing is dependent on the volume that is flowing. If you go for their support services, it will cost some more money, but I think it is worth it, especially if you are just starting your journey."
"Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version."
"There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."
"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."
"Having a free version is critical for our technology operations use case. This is primarily because our technology operations team is a cost center in our company. They are not profit drivers and having a free version for installation will probably meet our needs. Even for production, it'll support up to a 100,000 messages per second. I don't think in technology operations that we have that many events and alerts from our detection tools. Even if I have 20 or 30 event detection products out there, they're only going to publish the things which are critical or warnings. I don't think we'll ever reach a 100,000 messages per second."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"We are looking for something that will add value and fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only."
"The price of PubSub+ Event Broker is reasonable for the capability it offers. However, when compared to others solutions on the market it is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
34%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
35%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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 do you like most about PubSub+ Event Broker?
The most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was done manually with a file, and it can be done instantly live.
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively. Additionally, providing a comprehensive dashboard t...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AMQ
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc. 
FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet 
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.