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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
6th
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 (70th), 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 May 2026, in the Business Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of Avada Software Infrared360 is 7.3%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 20.4%, down from 43.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Activity Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ20.4%
Avada Software Infrared3607.3%
Other72.3%
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.
David Pizinger - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Technical Leader at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has faced unexpected VM restarts but continues to deliver messages reliably
I'm not sure if we've utilized IBM MQ's high availability. Our MQ VMs are set up in clusters, and I think our queue managers are set up in pairs. However, I don't know if we actually use any specific high availability features of IBM MQ that are out of the box. We have it architected with high availability because we use F5 load balancers, and everything about our architecture is highly available. I haven't personally used the management tools with IBM MQ, but we do have them, and our middleware folks leverage them. I can't really comment on them because I don't use them myself. I don't think the management tools help optimize message flows, and I'm not really aware of how they help in this. I'm not familiar with dynamic routing for IBM MQ.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"We have easily created use case testing harnesses for specific flows that incorporate various message types."
"Role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems."
"Monitoring that ties into our incident management system"
"It has role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems."
"It's what we use for monitoring our MQ system, so the features that they provide are just really, really good."
"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."
"The message queue and the integration with any development platform/language, i.e., NET and Java, are the most valuable features."
"I think the most valuable feature is the scale that it can run at."
"I would rate the solution ten out of ten because I have been working on it for the past fifteen years."
"Reliable messaging and throughput are the most valuable."
"The scalability of the environment is the most valuable feature; we also like the speed and the manageability of this tool."
"From a company's productivity perspective, we see a lot of benefits."
"The most valuable features are the point to point messaging and the MQ API."
"Clustering is one of its most valuable features."
 

Cons

"The user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic."
"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."
"Some of the graphics in the interface could be improved. It's pretty basic."
"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."
"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."
"The user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic. The competing products have similar problems."
"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."
"We are looking at the latest version, and we hope that resilience, high availability, and monitoring will be improved."
"It would be an advantage if they can include streaming in IBM MQ, similar to Kafka. Kafka is used mainly for streaming purposes. This feature is clearly lacking in IBM MQ. If they add this feature to IBM MQ, it will have an edge over other products."
"I'm not sure that current version has event-driven mechanism requests that people go for."
"I would like to see it integrate with the newer ways of messaging, such as Kafka."
"However, it would be great if the dashboard had additional features like a board design or picture management features."
"You should be able to increase the message size. It should be dynamic. Each queue has a limitation of 5,000."
"The worst part is the monitoring or admin, especially in the ACE or Broker."
"They might be able to improve the monitoring features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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)."
"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."
"The fee for this solution is on the higher end of the scale."
"Most of our customers are quite happy with the solution but they have an issue with the cost. They want to move to cheaper solutions."
"I think the pricing is reasonable, especially with IIB as a part of it."
"We have a special contract with IBM MQ that give us a certain price."
"There is a different platform price between Windows, z/OS, and iSeries."
"To implement such an IBM solution, a company has to pay a lot in term of licensing and consultancy. A pricing model might be a better option."
"The solution costs are high, it is going to cost a fair bit for annual operating costs and support."
"Licensing for this software is on a yearly basis. The standard fee includes the maintenance and updates that are released periodically."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Construction Company
12%
Printing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
7%
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 Enterprise19
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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.
896,202 professionals have used our research since 2012.