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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
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (11th), Streaming Analytics (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 19.8%, down from 26.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 5.8%, up from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ActiveMQ19.8%
PubSub+ Platform5.8%
Other74.4%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

NS
Sr. Manager - Digital at IndiGo
Offers diverse messaging protocols and excellent cloud support
In my current organization, I'm only working with ActiveMQ. I previously worked with IBM WebSphere MQ The features of ActiveMQ and WebSphere MQ fundamentally do the same thing. From my experience, I prefer WebSphere MQ. Both are very sturdy solutions; there is no doubt. Both are sturdy and…
Deepankar Bbhowmick - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"For reliable messaging, the most valuable feature of ActiveMQ for us is ensuring prompt message delivery."
"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 initial setup and first deployment of ActiveMQ is fairly simple."
"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."
"I fully recommend this product, but you need to have some expertise working with JMS and asynchronous tasks."
"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few 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."
"When it comes to granularity, you can literally do anything regarding how the filtering works."
"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."
"Solace has been incident free in HA deployment for seven years."
"With all these new features in place it increases our productivity by something like 50 percent."
"The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

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."
"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."
"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."
"I do not recommend ActiveMQ over Apache Kafka partly because I don't know who provides support for the solution."
"There is need for more protocols and maybe they should provide documentation on the internet as well."
"Even though there is support from many open source communities, there is still weakness in ease-of-use and ease-of-configuration for more complex scenarios."
"The included admin web app is not sufficient and we ended up disabling it."
"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."
"The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls."
"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."
"We have struggled in a sort of perpetual PoC mode internally."
"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."
"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 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 solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively."
"The integrations could improve in PubSub+ Event Broker."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s open source, ergo free."
"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"We use the open-source version."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"I think the software is free."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."
"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."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
6%
Retailer
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise15
 

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 ...
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.
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PubSub+ Event Broker?
Pricing-wise for PubSub+ Platform, I find it a little expensive, so I would rate it at six.
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
Potential areas for improvement in PubSub+ Platform are its authentication mechanisms, which could be slightly better. While simple authentication using basic methods is easy, moving to more robust...
What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?
PubSub+ Platform is primarily used for guaranteed delivery of messages from across systems, for microservice-based development, and for high-speed data consumption purposes. Guaranteed transmission...
 

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: June 2026.
899,125 professionals have used our research since 2012.