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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

"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 administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities."
"IR360 does not require a large team to manage our entire middleware estate and allows the leveraging of a logical model of reuse."
"Monitoring that ties into our incident management system"
"I highly recommend Infrared360 for an all-in-one IBM MQ tool."
"Administration, Monitoring, and Delegation are the most valuable features of the solution."
"It's what we use for monitoring our MQ system, so the features that they provide are just really, really good."
"Role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems."
"Setting up MQ is easy. We had a "grow as you go" implementation strategy. We started with a single channel and progressed to multiple queues and channels depending on the systems and integrations with other systems. It was a gradual deployment and expansion as we grew the services interacting with the core system using MQ."
"I appreciate the level of control we have over queue managers, queues, and the messaging itself. That provides good security. So, the control and scalability of messaging are important to me."
"The benefits of the new version are greater ease of use and management of MQ."
"IBM MQ deals mainly with the queuing mechanism. It passes the data and it publishes it. These two abilities are the most valuable features."
"I think the most valuable feature is the scale that it can run at."
"MQ is awesome."
"I think the whole product is useful. Their database and all is very good, and the product is fine. The fact that it ensures message delivery is probably the most important thing. I also like that you're able to trace and track everything. If it doesn't arrive at the destination, it will go back to the queue, and no message will be lost."
"IBM is still adding some features and coding some other systems on the security end. However, it has the most security features I've seen in a communication solution. Security is the most important thing for our purposes."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"Some of the graphics in the interface could be improved. It's pretty basic."
"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 user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic. The competing products have similar problems."
"Some of the new features that their competitors are coming out with, like AMQ with transformation of messages, better security, and even scalability at the microservices level, are areas where MQ is not quite there yet."
"I can't say pricing is good."
"The migration from different versions can be very different and difficult."
"I would like to see it integrate with the newer ways of messaging, such as Kafka."
"Better testing by the supplier is needed Ability to send to a group of queues without the need to use pubsub and without the need to write one's own programmes."
"We have used technical support. Not for the solution, but for problems or issues. I would say that they are okay. If you want me to rate between one to ten, I would rate them four."
"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."
"We would like to see the IBM technical support team extend their hand to providing support for other cloud vendors like Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS"
 

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."
"You have to license per application installation and if you expand vertically or horizontally, you will be paying for more licenses. The licenses are approximately $10,000 to $15,000 a license, it can get expensive quite quickly."
"I think the pricing is reasonable, especially with IIB as a part of it."
"The solution costs are high, it is going to cost a fair bit for annual operating costs and support."
"IBM MQ appliance has pricing options, but they are costly."
"I rate the product price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"IBM MQ has a flexible license model based on the Processor Value Unit (PVU) and I recommend it."
"In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side."
"We have a special contract with IBM MQ that give us a certain price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Construction Company
12%
Printing Company
8%
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.
886,011 professionals have used our research since 2012.