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Avada Software Infrared360 vs IBM MQ comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Avada Software Infrared360
Ranking in Business Activity Monitoring
8th
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
12th
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (78th), Server Monitoring (35th)
IBM MQ
Ranking in Business Activity Monitoring
1st
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Business Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of Avada Software Infrared360 is 6.4%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 19.3%, down from 42.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Activity Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ19.3%
Avada Software Infrared3606.4%
Other74.3%
Business Activity Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

WK
ICT Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems
* We now have the possibility of getting a central perspective on all tenants. * We have defined access roles for developers. Therefore, they can 'read in' their queues on the development and testing stages. With special roles, they may also write. This improves our development and testing cycle. * For operative systems, we have restricted the access. Still, selected people can react if something is happening in the various BOQs.
MK
SWIFT manager at Raiffeisen Bank Aval
Reliable payment processing is achieved with minimal disruption
Currently, we have some disadvantages; it's a bit difficult to use IBM ID to access support from the IBM site. To get nice support from IBM, we need to use IBM ID, and it's a bit complicated to integrate it with IBM support. Support can be better because sometimes we need explanations for some behaviors of the product, and it's not easy to reach the proper person in IBM support. They could add some new features into IBM MQ to make it better. A graphical user interface in addition to MQ Explorer could be useful, but we are satisfied with MQ Explorer as well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It allows non-technical users to inspect their individual components within the total infrastructure without disturbing other components and without bothering the technical teams."
"The administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities."
"Role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems."
"IR360 does not require a large team to manage our entire middleware estate and allows the leveraging of a logical model of reuse."
"One way it's helped the business is how you're able to empower MQ users, without your administrators, to be able to do different types of processes in the environment."
"The ability for development teams to have access to their MQ queues has freed us up as administrators to do things other than chase down an application’s message for research purposes."
"It has role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems."
"We have easily created use case testing harnesses for specific flows that incorporate various message types."
"It's reliable."
"The solution is very stable."
"Compared to any other product, it's the most robust I've worked with, and it's extremely easy to manage."
"Setting up MQ is easy; we had a "grow as you go" implementation strategy, starting with a single channel and progressing to multiple queues and channels depending on the systems and integrations with other systems, resulting in a gradual deployment and expansion as we grew the services interacting with the core system using MQ."
"Stability and reliability are the most valuable features; it's very reliable and very stable, and you can do a fast recovery in case of any failure."
"The solution offers very good features, including listener channels, remote queues, and transmit queues."
"Definitely, you should use IBM MQ because it is a stable product and provides a wide interface with different systems."
"Combined with IBM MQ, this product is our primary data store."
 

Cons

"We definitely need a better overview in terms of a dashboard giving us insights."
"One area where they could improve is with their documentation. Some sections are not up to date with new release information and providing additional samples in some areas would be very helpful."
"We are still working with the FTE/MFT subscription monitoring and reporting functionality. That is an area in which we would like to see further development taking place."
"The user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic. The competing products have similar problems."
"One area where they could improve is with their documentation. Some sections are not up to date with new release information and providing additional samples in some areas would be very helpful."
"Some of the graphics in the interface could be improved. It's pretty basic. Some interfaces are not up to what you're used to seeing on other, more Windows-like tools."
"The UI can be cumbersome - but we are still using the Viper interface and we have not had the time to check out the Alloy interface which is supposed to be much improved."
"The UI can be cumbersome - but we are still using the Viper interface and we have not had the time to check out the Alloy interface which is supposed to be much improved."
"IBM MQ's pricing is higher than its competitors'."
"IBM MQ can scale, but there are some challenges with it."
"I would like to see it integrate with the newer ways of messaging, such as Kafka. They might say that you have IBM Integration Bus to do that stuff, but it would be great if MQ could, out-of-the-box, listen to public Kafka."
"I'd like to see improvements around that area, so we can take our z/OS systems into our distributed environments even easier."
"I haven’t given it a perfect rating because there's always room for improvement."
"I don’t like legacy view of MQ."
"Normally, the system is very stable but we've actually just got a call, "Part of it's down!" So, at the moment, we have got a bit of downtime."
"With the previous versions, it was just that we were a version behind on what the version of Maximo and everything we were using, so it was causing a few little glitches and buggy issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Start small, then increase licensing later as per your demand."
"Because the licensing is at the QMGR level, you need to have at least a small cushion of licenses for occasional enterprise needs."
"Avada Software's licensing metric is very good because the license fees are based on the number of connections (which have not increased for us very much over the years) rather than the CPU processing power (which increases significantly whenever our hardware is upgraded) or the number of users (which has increased for us a lot since our original purchase)."
"Our internal budget calculation model incorporates the pricing per endpoint for any new projects. However, as our footprint for distributed queue managers shrinks as part of our shared middleware hub deployment, the initial licensing and support costs have been reduced over the last five years."
"I think the pricing is reasonable, especially with IIB as a part of it."
"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price a seven. The product is expensive."
"The license for IBM MQ is commercial and not cheap. You get a multi-platform solution, which is important because it lets you connect systems on mainframes, personal solutions, Unix, Linux, etc."
"Small-scale companies may not want to buy IBM MQ because of its high cost."
"99.999 percent availability for less than a penny per message over the past 25 years. IBM MQ is the cheapest software in the IBM software portfolio, and it is one of the best."
"IBM MQ has a flexible license model based on the Processor Value Unit (PVU) and I recommend it."
"It is a very expensive product compared to the open source products in the market."
"The price is high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Construction Company
12%
Printing Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

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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...
 

Also Known As

Infrared360
WebSphere MQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

USBank, Southwest Airlines, Visiting Nurse Services of New York, Aon Hewitt, Parker Hannifin,  Cantonal Bank of Zurich (ZKB), Hagemeyer NA, and many others
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about Avada Software Infrared360 vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,932 professionals have used our research since 2012.