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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

"It has role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems."
"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."
"IR360 does not require a large team to manage our entire middleware estate and allows the leveraging of a logical model of reuse."
"It's what we use for monitoring our MQ system, so the features that they provide are just really, really good."
"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 product has a small footprint on our system, they're very knowledgeable of MQ, which we use, and the features that they provide for monitoring our MQ system are just really, really good."
"The administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities."
"Administration, Monitoring, and Delegation are the most valuable features of the solution."
"We have found the security and monitoring capabilities of the product most valuable."
"Using a message queuing solution, we had a banking solution that integrated multiple branches and interbank systems. Different systems for credits, debits, CRM, and others communicated through this message queue solution. It wasn't just about communication; for instance, a CRM application needed to collect information from various banking systems, such as account balances, properties, contracts, and credit cards."
"The best features of IBM MQ were stability and straightforward application functionality; it has vendor support, which was a significant advantage, and in case of any production issues, we definitely get vendor support, whereas with Kafka and others, we have to rely on open community and our research."
"Compared to any other product, it's the most robust I've worked with, and it's extremely easy to manage."
"If you're looking for a traditional queuing system, IBM MQ is the right choice because of the stability and the performance."
"We are able to transport data across any platform in a secure fashion, be it internal or external."
"Secure, safe, and very fast."
"There are many things that I like about IBM MQ, such as, its performance and reliability."
 

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."
"The user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic. The competing products have similar problems."
"We desire a dashboard that could accumulate BOQ lengths per tenant on one screen for all tenants."
"The user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic."
"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 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."
"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."
"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 solution isn't free. There are other solutions, like RabbitMQ, which are open source and absolutely free to use. It's one reason we are moving away from IBM."
"With MQ, we always have trouble with the initial priming call failing."
"There could be a better front-end GUI interface for us, where we can see things more easily."
"We did experience some security issues with the older versions."
"IBM HQ's scalability isn't the best."
"More documentation would be good because some features are not deeply implemented."
"They need to add the ability to send full messages (header + payload) from the MQ Explorer program, not just the payload."
"There are many complications with IBM MQ servers."
 

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."
"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."
"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)."
"The fee for this solution is on the higher end of the scale."
"It is a licensed product. As compared to an open-source solution, such as RabbitMQ, it is obviously costly. If you're using IBM Message Broker, which is a licensed product, IBM MQ is included in the same license. You don't have to pay separately for IBM MQ. The license cost of IBM MQ is lesser than IBM Message Broker."
"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."
"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."
"We have a special contract with IBM MQ that give us a certain price."
"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."
"IBM is expensive."
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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.
896,510 professionals have used our research since 2012.