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 8.5, while Solace is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.3. Apache holds a 22.0% mindshare in MQ, compared to Solace’s 4.4% 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

4,376 Views
4,157 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 18 PubSub+ Platform reviews

2,672 Views
828 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: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform

March 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

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

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

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 22.0%, down from 26.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 4.4%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ActiveMQ	22.0%
PubSub+ Platform	4.4%
Other	73.6%

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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reviewer2714190

freelancer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Offers a seamless way to decouple applications, providing impressive performance and flexibility

Regarding improving the PubSub+ Platform, I'm not sure about the pricing aspect, but I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka. That's the only concern I can mention; otherwise, it was as impressive as Kafka, better than Kafka based on my experience working on the Solace and Kafka white paper.

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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

"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."

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

"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."

"Message broadcasting: There could be a use case sending the same message to all consumers. So as a producer, I broadcast the message to a topic. Then, whichever consumers are subscribed to the topic can consume the same message."

"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."

"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."

"The initial setup and first deployment of ActiveMQ is fairly simple."

More ActiveMQ pros

"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 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."

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

"I rate the PubSub+ Platform a 9 out of 10."

"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."

"The valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the speed of processing, publishing, and consumption."

"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."

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

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."

"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."

"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."

"One potential area would be the complexity of the initial setup."

"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 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."

"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."

More ActiveMQ cons

"I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka."

"The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively."

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

"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."

"The deployment process is complex."

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

"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."

"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

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

"We use the open-source version."

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

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

"I think the software is free."

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

"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."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

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

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

24%

Manufacturing Company

10%

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	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	14

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?

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 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 52% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 11% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 8% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

EMQX vs ActiveMQ

Compared 3% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 12% of the time

IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 7% of the time

Apache Flink vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 7% of the time

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 7% of the time

Azure Stream Analytics vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 5% of the time

More PubSub+ Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

March 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

March 2026

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform

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