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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
9th
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 (80th), Server Monitoring (37th)
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 March 2026, in the Business Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of Avada Software Infrared360 is 5.4%, down from 7.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 19.0%, down from 42.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Activity Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ19.0%
Avada Software Infrared3605.4%
Other75.6%
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'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."
"We have easily created use case testing harnesses for specific flows that incorporate various message types."
"Monitoring that ties into our incident management system"
"The administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities."
"It has role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems."
"The most valuable feature of IBM MQ is transaction processing."
"The most valuable feature of IBM MQ is it has all the features necessary for contemporary messaging, not only for the financial industry but for any application."
"The solution can scale well."
"The system integration is good."
"The most valuable feature is the interaction within the system."
"The most valuable feature is that it's a very strong integration platform but it is quite a monolithic solution. It's got everything."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable features of IBM MQ are its guarantee of delivery, ability to handle high volume while maintaining high availability, and robust security measures such as SSL, TLS, and RBAC."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 desire a dashboard that could accumulate BOQ lengths per tenant on one screen for all tenants."
"They need to add the ability to send full messages (header + payload) from the MQ Explorer program, not just the payload."
"It's hard to put in a nutshell, but it's sort of developed as more of an on-premise solution. It hasn't moved much away from that."
"There are things within the actual product itself that can be improved, such as limitations on message length, size, etc. There is no standardized message length outside of IBM. Each of the implementations of the MQ series or support of that functionality varies between various suppliers, and because of that, it is very difficult to move from one to the other. We have IBM MQ, but we couldn't use it because the platform that was speaking to MQ didn't support the message length that was standard within IBM MQ. So, we had to use a different product to do exactly the same thing. So, perhaps, there could be more flexibility in the standards around the message queue. If we had been able to increase the message queue size within the IBM MQ implementation, we wouldn't have had to go over to another competing product because the system that was using MQ messaging required the ability to hold messages that were far larger than the IBM MQ standard. So, there could be a bit more flexibility in the structuring. It has as such nothing to do with the IBM implementation of MQ. It is just that the standard that is being put out onto the market doesn't actually stipulate those types of things."
"The user interface should be enhanced to include more monitoring features and other metrics. The metrics should include not only those from the IBM MQ point of view but also CPU and memory utilization."
"IBM MQ is not very user-friendly."
"The areas of IBM MQ that have room for improvement are its compatibility with the public clouds, specifically its compatibility with Azure or AWS, as there is definitely a lot of scope for improvement there."
"While there is support for API, it's not like the modern API capabilities."
"I would just like a more user-friendly experience to do common administration tasks. I know that you can use MQ Explorer, but having something that's already built in would definitely be useful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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)."
"Start small, then increase licensing later as per your demand."
"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."
"There is a different platform price between Windows, z/OS, and iSeries."
"IBM MQ is expensive and they charge based on the CPU."
"The solution costs are high, it is going to cost a fair bit for annual operating costs and support."
"Use the new and lightweight version (Liberty) to lower licensing costs. It is also easier to upgrade/maintain."
"The pricing seems good according to the functionality that the solution provides."
"I think it's pretty reasonable, but I'm not so too sure of the current pricing strategy from IBM. We use many bundled services, and most often, we go through a service provided by some other third-party implementation. So, I can't really give an honest opinion about that."
"IBM MQ appliance has pricing options, but they are costly."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Printing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
29%
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

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: March 2026.
883,619 professionals have used our research since 2012.