ActiveMQ vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

Apache and Solace are both solutions in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category. Apache is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.0, while Solace is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.6. Apache holds a 26.5% mindshare in MQ, compared to Solace’s 4.7% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Solace users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 26 ActiveMQ reviews

6,942 Views
4,318 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 16 PubSub+ Platform reviews

1,169 Views
872 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: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform

April 2025

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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

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

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

Ranking in other categories

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (10th), Streaming Analytics (11th)

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 PubSub+ Platform is 4.7%, down 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

Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

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.

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BhanuChidigam

Sofware Engineering Manager at Wells Fargo

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"I'm impressed, I think that Active MQ is great."

More ActiveMQ pros

"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 event portal and the diversity of deployment options in a hybrid landscape are the most valuable features."

"As of now, the most valuable aspects are the topic-based subscription and the fanout exchange that we are using."

"We've built a lot of products into it and it's been quite easy to feed market data onto the systems and put entitlements and controls around that. That was a big win for us when we were consolidating our platforms down. Trying to have one event bus, one messaging bus, for the whole globe, and consolidate everything over time, has been key for us. We've been able to do that through one API, even if it's across the different languages."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"When it comes to granularity, you can literally do anything regarding how the filtering works."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"It would be great if it is included as part of the solution, as Kafka is doing. Even though the use case of Kafka is different, If something like data extraction is possible, or if we can experiment with partition tolerance and other such things, that will be great."

"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."

"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."

"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."

"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 solution can improve the other protocols to equal the AMQ protocol they offer."

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

More ActiveMQ cons

"A challenge we currently have is Solace's ability to integrate with single sign-on in our Active Directory and other single sign-on tools and platforms that any company would have. It's important for the platforms to work. Typically, they support only LDAP-based connectivity to our SQL Servers."

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

"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."

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

"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 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. For example, if I would like to spin up a new software broker, then I could in theory use the API, but it would require a considerable amount of development effort to do so. There should be a tool, or something that Solace supports, that we could use for this, e.g., a platform like Terraform where we could use infrastructure as code to configure our source appliances."

"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?"

"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."

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

"We use the open-source version."

"I think the software is free."

"There are no fees because it is open-source."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

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

"It’s open source, ergo free."

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

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"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."

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

"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."

"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 price of PubSub+ Event Broker is reasonable for the capability it offers. However, when compared to others solutions on the market it is expensive."

"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."

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

34%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

35%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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

The price of the solution is expensive.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 53% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

Apache Kafka vs ActiveMQ

Compared 3% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 30% of the time

IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 23% of the time

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon SQS vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 5% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 4% of the time

More PubSub+ Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

April 2025

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

March 2025

Download PubSub+ Platform product report

Also Known As

AMQ

PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal

Overview

Apache ActiveMQ is the most popular and powerful open source messaging and Integration Patterns server.

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License

Apache

PubSub+ Platform supports real-time shipment tracking, IT event management in multiclouds, and connects legacy and cloud-native systems for application modernization. It's utilized for trading, streaming market data, and app-to-app messaging, enhancing event-driven architectures with reliable message queuing.

Organizations adopt PubSub+ to efficiently transport events across hybrid and cloud environments, managing audit trails and long processing tasks. The platform aids integration through dynamic data publication, event mesh capabilities, and WAN optimization. Features like seamless integration, protocol agnosticism, and flexible topic hierarchy enhance versatility. Solace Admin Utility simplifies configuration and management, while the event portal allows hybrid deployment.

What are the key features of PubSub+ Platform?

Dynamic Data Publication: Enables flexible and responsive data handling.
Event Mesh Capabilities: Facilitates efficient event transportation.
WAN Optimization: Enhances data transfer across networks.
Protocol Agnosticism: Supports a wide range of protocols for integration.
Flexible Topic Hierarchy: Allows detailed and organized data exchange.
Solace Admin Utility: Provides intuitive configuration and management.
Granular Topic Filtering: Offers precise data filtering options.
Guaranteed Messaging: Ensures reliable message delivery.

What benefits or ROI should users consider?

Seamless Integration: Reduces complexity in connecting systems.
Performance and Scaling: Supports high-load environments efficiently.
Asynchronous Messaging: Improves application performance.
Robust Support System: Provides guidance and problem resolution.

PubSub+ is implemented in industries requiring real-time data handling and integration between disparate systems. Financial institutions use it for trading and streaming market data, while logistics companies benefit from real-time shipment tracking. Enterprises apply it to modernize operations by connecting legacy systems with cloud-native applications, enhancing their architecture and ensuring data reliability across environments.

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

April 2025

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform

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