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 8.7, while Solace is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.5. Apache holds a 20.1% 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

5,809 Views
5,635 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 20 PubSub+ Platform reviews

4,983 Views
1,345 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

PubSub+ Platform

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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: August 2026).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform

August 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

9th

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 August 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 20.1%, down from 26.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 5.8%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ActiveMQ	20.1%
PubSub+ Platform	5.8%
Other	74.1%

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

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

"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."

"For us, initial setup was VERY easy since we were using the Apache-provided Docker image for ActiveMQ, which alleviates a lot of the traditional pains involved with installing new software."

"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 most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."

"We value ActiveMQ for its performance, throughput, and low latency, especially in handling large volumes of data and sequential management of topics."

"ActiveMQ demonstrates excellent stability and sturdiness."

More ActiveMQ pros

"Guaranteed Messaging allows for us to transport messages between on-prem and the cloud without any loss of data."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Because we use it as a message broker, it makes information flow very seamless."

"Capital markets couldn't operate today if Solace were down."

"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."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"The solution's stability needs improvement."

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

"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."

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

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

"There are some stability issues."

"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."

More ActiveMQ cons

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

"The deployment process is complex."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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 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."

"Some improvement is required with Solace professional services. The professional services really needs to drive the solutions for the customers and share best practices."

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

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

"I think the software is free."

"We use the open-source version."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

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

"It’s open source, ergo free."

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

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Construction Company

Outsourcing 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?

Pricing-wise for PubSub+ Platform, I find it a little expensive, so I would rate it at six.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 55% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 6% 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 7% of the time

IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Stream Analytics vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

August 2026

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

July 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

August 2026

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