ActiveMQ vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Apache and Solace are both solutions in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category. Apache is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7, while Solace is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.8. Apache holds a 19.9% mindshare in MQ, compared to Solace’s 5.8% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Solace users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 28 ActiveMQ reviews

6,545 Views
6,349 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 20 PubSub+ Platform reviews

5,724 Views
1,545 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

PubSub+ Platform

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

ActiveMQ and PubSub+ Platform are both key players in the messaging and streaming industry. While ActiveMQ offers a cost-effective solution, PubSub+ Platform provides robust features, making it superior in terms of extensive functionality and performance.

Features: ActiveMQ provides simplicity and compatibility with JMS-based applications, transaction support, and multi-protocol capabilities. PubSub+ Platform is known for dynamic message routing, high availability, and real-time streaming, offering robust support for complex data systems.

Room for Improvement: ActiveMQ could enhance its high availability features and improve message routing under load. It might also benefit from better real-time streaming capabilities. PubSub+ Platform could offer a more straightforward deployment process and reduce complexity in its feature set. Simplifying its cost structure could also be an area for enhancement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: ActiveMQ is appreciated for its straightforward deployment process and ease of use. PubSub+ Platform, while more elaborate in deployment, offers superior integration options and robust customer support, providing efficiency in larger environments.

Pricing and ROI: ActiveMQ, being open-source, is cost-effective with low initial setup costs, ideal for budget-conscious projects. PubSub+ Platform, despite its higher cost, delivers long-term benefits through advanced features and scalability, resulting in enhanced ROI for large enterprises seeking high performance.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform

September 2026

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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

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

PubSub+ Platform

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

8th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (11th), Streaming Analytics (14th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 19.9%, down from 25.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 5.8%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ActiveMQ	19.9%
PubSub+ Platform	5.8%
Other	74.3%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Featured Reviews

MoumitaDas

Software Engineer III at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Integration capabilities enhance message handling without human interaction

With ActiveMQ there should be more options. If you work with other technologies, for example, Java, there are many options. We can integrate the way we want ActiveMQ. We can create partitions and clusters, but AP is not providing such options currently. It only provides time, request response timing, the number of requests that need to be handled, and protocol types. The configuration needs to be broadened inside AP to perform in a better way. Sometimes issues arise in production with ActiveMQ due to the number of requests. For example, if you have configured one thousand requests at a time and it receives one thousand and one messages at a time, it breaks. The configuration aspect is tricky. When configurations are proper, ActiveMQ almost has zero errors.

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Deepankar Bbhowmick

Integration Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Messaging design has become visual and reliable and now supports fast microservice communication

The unique functions I appreciate about PubSub+ Platform are that it allows me to design my solution in a graphical manner, which is not available in many other products, and the design can also be pushed to the actual infrastructure layer, making it quite advantageous. Mesh technology is useful in scenarios where different geographies have to be connected, although such situations are not commonly found. It is beneficial but not a super-used feature of PubSub+ Platform. The event replay function is quite mature in PubSub+ Platform, allowing me to replay messages that are days in the past, which is a good feature. The main benefits PubSub+ Platform provides for the end-user include building a robust and scalable system with very low network latency, which improves the customer experience, whether using mobile phones or applications. This type of messaging framework is extremely important, and Solace is a very good product in that space. Nowadays, most applications are built using microservices technology, with small microservices interchanging messages via PubSub+ Platform. Without it, realizing a scalable system would not be possible; for example, one cannot have Netflix or similar services that require quick data transit and a good user experience, ensuring that data cannot be lost in transit. The analytics part of PubSub+ Platform is quite useful as it can connect with many analytical software tools, mainly for analysis of system logs, such as Splunk, DataDog, or Prometheus. It has the flexibility to connect with any of these and supports OpenTelemetry, which is not available in many other products, making traceability very easy. I can see how a message travels from a source system to the target system, end-to-end, along with what happens to that message along the path, making the analytics quite good.

Read full review

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."

"One of the most important features of ActiveMQ is the ability to set up a network of brokers, and the ability to forward the message to another broker in the network, where there is a demand for messages from a consumer."

"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."

"ActiveMQ is a great messaging system for synchronizing call and "fire and forget" types of calls."

"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes."

"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."

"ActiveMQ demonstrates excellent stability and sturdiness."

"It’s a JMS broker, so the fact that it can allow for asynchronous communication is valuable."

More ActiveMQ pros

"The best features of PubSub+ Platform are its real-time simulation, real-time event data streaming, and integration with any IoT applications."

"This solution reduces the latency to access changes in real-time and the effort required to onboard a new subscriber. It also reduces the maintenance of each of those interfaces because now the publisher and subscribers are decoupled. Event Broker handles all the communication and engagement. We can just push one update, then we don't have to know who is consuming it and what's happening to that publication downstream. It's all done by the broker, which is a huge benefit of using Event Broker."

"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."

"The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable."

"The best features of PubSub+ Platform include being highly scalable, allowing us to handle billions and billions of events, and configuring and managing PubSub+ Platform is straightforward and simple while being highly reliable."

"Solace has been incident free in HA deployment for seven years."

"One of the main reasons for using PubSub+ is that it is a proper event manager that can handle events in a reactive way."

"The topic hierarchy is pretty flexible. Once you have the subject defined just about anybody who knows Java can come onboard. The APIs are all there."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"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."

"We ran into various stability problems with our implementations over the years."

"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."

"I do not recommend ActiveMQ over Apache Kafka partly because I don't know who provides support for the solution."

"The included admin web app is not sufficient and we ended up disabling it."

"Because this is an open-source project, there is no support. We don't have any help or anything like that."

"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."

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

More ActiveMQ cons

"We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building."

"The integrations could improve in PubSub+ Event Broker."

"We've pointed out some things with the DMR piece, the event mesh, in edge cases where we could see a problem. Something like 99 percent of users wouldn't ever see this problem, but it has to do with if you get multiple bad clients sending data over a WAN, for example. That could then impact other clients."

"For small-sized enterprises, it may be a higher cost, or they may be looking for other options."

"If you create one event in the past, you cannot resend it."

"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."

"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."

"The ease of management could be approved. The GUI is very good, but to configure and manage these devices programmatically in the software version is not easy."

More PubSub+ Platform cons

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."

"I think the software is free."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."

"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."

"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."

"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."

"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."

"We have been really happy with the product licensing rates. It has been free for us, up to a 100,000 transactions per second, and all we have to do is pay for support. Making their product available and accessible to us has not been a problem at all."

"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."

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	17

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	15

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with ActiveMQ?

Pricing is something to consider with ActiveMQ, though cloud pricing is not costly and depends upon the compute selection. Focusing on AI is essential nowadays. AI capabilities require improvement ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for ActiveMQ?

In my current organization, I'm only working with ActiveMQ. I previously worked with IBM WebSphere MQ.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering ActiveMQ?

We have not deployed ActiveMQ's flexible clustering as that requirement is not present for us. We only use active-passive configuration. On a scale of one to ten, I rate ActiveMQ a ten out of ten.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PubSub+ Event Broker?

The pricing and setup cost of PubSub+ Platform is very seamless and reliable for medium and large-scale enterprises. For small-sized enterprises, it may be a higher cost, or they may be looking for...

See all answers

What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?

PubSub+ Platform could improve by simplifying some advanced configurations and providing better visualization for event flow. Some advanced configurations in PubSub+ Platform could be made simpler ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?

PubSub+ Platform's main use case in our company is real-time data streaming using applications and API integrations. We are working on an IoT-based application, and our company handles most of the ...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 56% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

EMQX vs ActiveMQ

Compared 4% of the time

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Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Stream Analytics vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 5% of the time

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 5% of the time

Aurea CX Messenger vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

October 2026

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

October 2026

Download PubSub+ Platform product report

Also Known As

AMQ

PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal

Overview

ActiveMQ is a messaging broker facilitating microservices communication and event management. It supports message queues, Camel routes, and asynchronous communication, enhancing integration capabilities and scalability with a network of brokers.

ActiveMQ efficiently supports message transfer in IoT applications and third-party systems, acting as a hub for code distribution and data flow management. It integrates well with XML and protocols like MQTT, while its fast messaging, reliable delivery, and efficient setup via Docker cater to diverse messaging needs. Though ActiveMQ is cost-effective, challenges exist with scalability, stability, and administration tools. Enhanced documentation and broader protocol support could resolve these issues, improving administration and initial configurations.

What are the key features of ActiveMQ?

Message Queues: Supports efficient queuing systems for distributing messages.
Camel Routes: Facilitates robust routing mechanisms within applications.
High Availability: Ensures reliable service delivery without interruptions.
Asynchronous Communication: Supports real-time interaction across systems.
XML Integration: Provides flexible communication through XML compatibility.
Protocol Support: Works with protocols like MQTT for versatile messaging.
Brokers Network: Enhances scalability with interconnected broker systems.
Docker Setup: Simplifies deployment processes using containerization.

What benefits should users expect from ActiveMQ?

Reliable Delivery: Guarantees messages are delivered promptly and consistently.
Cost-Effectiveness: Ensures affordability for small-scale applications.
Flexible Integration: Offers adaptable messaging solutions with varied systems.
Ease of Setup: Provides straightforward configuration and deployment processes.

ActiveMQ implementation spans industries from IoT, managing device communications and responses, to middleware solutions for payload consumption. It handles registrations and updates, sometimes being used in demonstrations of message broker concepts. Users often leverage it for its message handling efficiency in industry-specific applications.

Apache

PubSub+ Platform is designed for real-time message publishing and outstanding interoperability. With features like intuitive administration and topic filtering, it offers both stability and high performance for scalable deployments across diverse scenarios.

PubSub+ Platform enhances data integration with its event mesh and seamless protocol compatibility, providing a comprehensive solution for organizations tracking shipments, generating reports, and managing transactions. Its granular topic filtering and WAN optimization ensure high utility in event-driven applications and cloud deployments. Users highlight the platform's intuitive administration and ease of management, though some seek improved integration with third-party tools and enhanced observability. Concerns include scalability for large payloads and training resource availability. Despite its interface complexity, PubSub+ remains valuable for trading and market data distribution.

What are the key features of PubSub+ Platform?

Real-time messaging: Facilitates seamless communication across platforms.
Flexible topic hierarchy: Supports dynamic topic taxonomy for efficient data management.
Event mesh: Enhances integration and interoperability with diverse protocols.
Intuitive administration: Simplifies system management and configuration.
WAN optimization: Ensures efficient connectivity for global deployment.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Messaging stability: Offers consistent performance in dynamic environments.
Scalability: Provides seamless expansion to accommodate growing data volumes.
Security: Maintains robust protection for sensitive information.
Support and configuration: Accessible, reliable support, and UI-driven setup streamline the management.

PubSub+ Platform is widely implemented for asynchronous messaging in industries like finance for trading and market data, logistics for shipment tracking, and tech operations management. It enables companies to modernize applications while ensuring data accuracy and efficiency across global systems.

Solace

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

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform

September 2026

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