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Amazon SQS vs IBM MQ 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon SQS enhances reliability and productivity by handling user spikes and message integrity while allowing teams to focus elsewhere.
Sentiment score
7.2
Organizations benefit from IBM MQ's data protection, cost efficiency, reliability, and low error frequency, achieving investment recovery within two years.
Using Amazon SQS has led to increased productivity and reduced man-hour costs.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.6
Amazon SQS support is inconsistent, but comprehensive documentation helps; larger users receive better service than smaller ones.
Sentiment score
7.0
IBM MQ support receives both praise for efficiency and criticism for slow responses and initial information demands, prompting mixed feedback.
They meet their tasks effectively.
With containerized flavors of these products, we are having a tough time dealing with PMRs because the versions are new to IBM.
I would rate technical support as an eight.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Amazon SQS efficiently manages scalable message loads, integrating seamlessly with AWS services like SNS and Lambda, despite occasional message duplicates.
Sentiment score
7.5
IBM MQ is praised for scalability and adaptability, despite some challenges with legacy dependencies and skills availability.
Amazon SQS is highly scalable, automatically managing itself based on the load.
IBM MQ handles many thousands of messages in a second, indicating good scalability.
In our environment, we do not have horizontal scaling for IBM MQ, but as demand increases, we would just vertically scale it.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Amazon SQS is praised for stability and reliability, handling loads effectively with minimal downtime compared to other solutions.
Sentiment score
8.1
IBM MQ is praised for its stability, reliability, and performance, despite occasional configuration challenges in specific environments.
With Amazon SQS, such maintenance is not needed, making it more reliable and secure.
The transaction is always guaranteed with IBM MQ, which is the main reason I have been working with it for fifteen years while dealing with financial transactions or messages.
We have never had any downtime or crashes since it's been running.
 

Room For Improvement

The document highlights the need for better tools, integration, scalability, and security to improve user efficiency and satisfaction.
IBM MQ needs improved security, a modern interface, better monitoring, seamless cloud integration, competitive pricing, and enhanced message support.
It would be beneficial if there was a provision to configure and retain messages for longer than a week.
Having a graphical user interface would improve usability.
We are dealing with IBM MQ client applications mostly.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon SQS pricing is moderately competitive with initial free requests but can become costly with high usage.
IBM MQ is expensive but valued for performance and support, justifying costs for large enterprises despite cheaper alternatives.
On a scale of one to ten, where one is very cheap, I would rate the pricing as one.
I am not exactly sure about the licensing cost compared to similar products, but I assume it is affordable since we continue to use it, and it is also used by our customers.
IBM MQ is pretty reasonable when compared to IBM ESB.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon SQS provides seamless integration, scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness, efficiently managing large-scale data with robust features.
IBM MQ ensures reliable, secure message delivery with cross-platform compatibility, scalability, and strong integration, favored for banking and enterprise use.
If there's a failure in the system after consuming a message, SQS's settings ensure the message is not deleted until confirmation.
These are financial transactions, so we do not want to lose the message at any cost.
We have not experienced any downtime or crashes with IBM MQ.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon SQS
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM MQ
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
165
Ranking in other categories
Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of Amazon SQS is 8.5%, down from 11.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 25.6%, up from 20.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

Ariel Tarayants - PeerSpot reviewer
Powerful queue system facilitates seamless asynchronous operations
A feature I would like to see in Amazon SQS is the ability to view the content of messages without removing them from the queue. Enhanced filtering on the messages would be beneficial, as currently one has to pull all messages out, filter the right one by code, and then re-insert the remaining messages. This solution is not effective with the FIFO queue.
SelvaKumar4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers the ability to batch metadata transfers between systems that support MQ as the communication method
We find it scalable for internal applications, but not so much for external integrations. It should support a wider range of protocols, not just a few specific ones. Many other products have broader protocol support, and IBM MQ is lagging in that area. IBM MQ needs to improve the UI for quicker logging. Users should also have a lot more control over logging, with a dashboard-like interface. That's something they should definitely work on.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
38%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon SQS?
AWS provides another messaging service, which is fine for certain purposes. SQS meets the cloud messaging workload requirements. However, combining the features of both products could be an easier ...
What is your primary use case for Amazon SQS?
I primarily use SQL Server for messaging services, and I need to offer loose couplings. SQS is handy for offloading non-urgent tasks that can be reverted later. I use it as a queue management servi...
What is MQ software?
Hi As someone with 45+ years of experience in the Transaction and Message Processing world, I have seen many "MQ" solutions that have come into the market place. From my perspective, while each pro...
What are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?
Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...
How does IBM MQ compare with VMware RabbitMQ?
IBM MQ has a great reputation behind it, and this solution is very robust with great stability. It is easy to use, simple to configure and integrates well with our enterprise ecosystem and protocol...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
WebSphere MQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

EMS, NASA, BMW, Capital One
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon SQS vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.