ActiveMQ vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Apache and Solace are both solutions in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category. Apache is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.0, while Solace is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.8. Apache holds a 20.1% mindshare in MQ, compared to Solace’s 5.7% 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

6,953 Views
6,744 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 19 PubSub+ Platform reviews

6,112 Views
1,650 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: November 2026).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform

November 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

10th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (13th), Streaming Analytics (14th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 20.1%, down from 24.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 5.7%, up from 4.4% 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	5.7%
Other	74.2%

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It provides the best support services."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"I fully recommend this product, but you need to have some expertise working with JMS and asynchronous tasks."

"ActiveMQ is a good solution; it is low cost, high performance, and scalable."

More ActiveMQ pros

"The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable."

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

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

"With all these new features in place it increases our productivity by something like 50 percent."

"We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code."

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

"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 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."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

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

"Another area of improvement is the monitoring console, which is kind of rudimentary."

"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."

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

"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."

"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."

"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

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

"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."

"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 licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls."

"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."

"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."

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

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"We use the open-source version."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

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

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

"It’s open source, ergo free."

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

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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Construction 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?

The pricing and setup cost of PubSub+ Platform is very seamless and reliable for medium and large-scale enterprises. For small-sized enterprises, it may be a higher cost, or they may be looking for...

See all answers

What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?

PubSub+ Platform could improve by simplifying some advanced configurations and providing better visualization for event flow. Some advanced configurations in PubSub+ Platform could be made simpler ...

See all answers

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

PubSub+ Platform's main use case in our company is real-time data streaming using applications and API integrations. We are working on an IoT-based application, and our company handles most of ...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 56% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 4% 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

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Stream Analytics vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 5% of the time

Aurea CX Messenger vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

November 2026

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

October 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 offers high-speed processing and flexible protocol exchange capabilities, appreciated for its seamless integration with IoT applications. Supporting event-driven architectures, it ensures real-time event streaming and efficient management via an intuitive dashboard.

PubSub+ Platform enables seamless integration and real-time processing across hybrid cloud environments. It supports event mesh capabilities that enhance operational efficiency and connectivity. The high-speed processing, scalability, and topic hierarchy features are valued. Organizations utilize PubSub+ for guaranteed message delivery, microservice development, and data routing between applications. Flexible deployment options, including on-premise and cloud, make it suitable for diverse use cases such as enterprise-grade event brokering and robust messaging systems. Improvements are sought in integrations, message pooling, and observability as its complex architecture can challenge new users. Enhanced visualization, better third-party integration, and robust authentication support are desired.

What are the most notable features of PubSub+ Platform?

High-Speed Processing: Enables rapid message publication and consumption.
Scalability: Supports growth with flexible deployment options.
Protocol Exchange: Facilitates communication across different protocols.
Topic Hierarchy: Allows efficient message organization and routing.
Event Mesh Capability: Enhances connectivity across cloud environments.

What benefits should be considered in reviews?

Operational Efficiency: Improved through real-time event streaming.
Connectivity: Ensured by seamless IoT and hybrid cloud integration.
Management: Intuitive dashboard for monitoring and configuration.
Support System: Robust and beneficial for users.

In capital markets, PubSub+ Platform plays a crucial role in trading operations and financial transactions. It is extensively applied in IoT data management and system monitoring. By supporting microservice development and data routing, organizations achieve real-time event processing and integration, whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud.

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

November 2026

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