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 8.6, while Solace is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.3. Apache holds a 20.5% mindshare in MQ, compared to Solace’s 5.5% 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

4,472 Views
4,248 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 19 PubSub+ Platform reviews

3,105 Views
932 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 2026).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform

April 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 (15th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 20.5%, down from 26.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 5.5%, up from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ActiveMQ	20.5%
PubSub+ Platform	5.5%
Other	74.0%

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.

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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

"Thanks to ActiveMQ, the system is able to scale its heavy computing components during traffic peaks."

"The installation was pretty straightforward, and it was also easy setting up HA using an NFS share for hosting the KahaDB."

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

"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."

"The installation was straightforward."

"It's a very easy-to-use product, documentation is sufficient, and anyone with a bit of knowledge about technology, like Java, can quickly set it up and it could be up and running in minutes."

"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."

"Loose coupling of components by the use of messaging queues allows for completely separate component life cycles and ownership within the organization."

More ActiveMQ pros

"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."

"If we talk about Solace, you see the value-add layer; I can say that Solace is a basic Kafka, but on top of that Kafka layer, they have added their own layer that is really good, as this is where it adds value and why we went for it."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"We have seen at least a 50 percent increase in productivity (compared to using Kafka) when using Solace for sharing changes in real-time, onboarding new subscribers, and modifying data sets."

"In my assessment of Solace against other products — as I was responsible for evaluating various products and bringing the right tool into companies in the past — I worked with multiple platforms like RabbitMQ, Confluent, Kafka, and various other tools in the market. But I found the event mesh capability to be a very interesting as well as fulfilling capability, towards what we want to achieve from a digital-integration-strategy point of view... It's distributed, yet it is intelligently connected. It can also span and I can plug and play any number of brokers into the event mesh, so it's a great deal. That's a differentiator."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"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."

"Apache ActiveMQ needs some improvement playing with multi-platform message clients."

"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."

"We have had problems with the message selector as when the queue size reaches a certain level, the message selector does not have enough time to run and finish before the JMS reply timeout."

"There are some stability issues."

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

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

More ActiveMQ cons

"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."

"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."

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

"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."

"For improvements, I would suggest increasing the max payload size to a limit of 100MB or more. The current max payload size is limited to 5MB."

"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 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."

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the open-source version."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

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

"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."

"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."

"I think the software is free."

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."

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

"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."

"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 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."

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

"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

27%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Retailer

Computer Software 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	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	14

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?

I do not know about the pricing of PubSub+ Platform because I did not manage the instance.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?

Additional in-line information about certain things on PubSub+ Platform could be more beneficial for new users who are just starting to use this technology. The analytics tools integrated within Pu...

See all answers

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

I describe the main use cases for PubSub+ Platform as wanting to use it as a messaging queue pipeline for managing the data stream events in our IoT platform while I was working at an IoT-based com...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 50% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 9% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 7% of the time

EMQX vs ActiveMQ

Compared 4% of the time

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Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 10% of the time

IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 7% of the time

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Software AG Universal Messaging vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Stream Analytics vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 5% of the time

More PubSub+ Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

April 2026

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

March 2026

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 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

April 2026

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