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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

"Monitoring that ties into our incident management system"
"Administration, Monitoring, and Delegation are the most valuable features of the solution."
"Role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems."
"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."
"IR360 does not require a large team to manage our entire middleware estate and allows the leveraging of a logical model of reuse."
"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."
"The administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities."
"In my opinion, the best features of the WebSphere Application Server make it the ultimate product."
"Offers good performance as well as scalability and stability."
"We like IBM MQ for our synchronous communications and transactional applications that require a lot of CPS."
"IBM MQ is a choice to create a relation between the Mainframe and distributed servers, allowing applications running on Linux or Windows to interface with Mainframe applications and enable more development of easier and open applications in a distributed environment."
"The solution is very stable."
"I have seen in many organizations it has helped in designing great architectural solutions by helping transfer messages between different systems."
"RabbitMQ and Kafka require more steps for setup than IBM MQ. Installation of the IBM product is very simple."
"Rock-solid performance really is the most solid feature of it."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"The user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic. The competing products have similar problems."
"We definitely need a better overview in terms of a dashboard giving us insights."
"The customer service or technical support from IBM is not as good as we expected; it could be better. They don't meet our standards due to the timing to get a person with knowledge."
"In some cases, when a file got transferred, it has same name on both sides. That could have something to do with the product or it could have to do with something else."
"It needs a User Interface which is better than the aging MQ Explorer. The existing solution MQ Explorer is outdated."
"The solution requires a lot of work to implement and maintain."
"The solution should offer a freeware version, free vouchers, or certifications for learning purposes and building knowledge base."
"With IBM products, there's less marketing. If they do more demos and more seminars on their products, it will be very useful. On a given day. I get seminar invites for many vendors and products, but for IBM, I may get an invite once or twice a year."
"Everything in the solution could be simplified a little. We have trouble with the configuration and cost which is mostly an internal issue, but nevertheless, the errors do come up when there are configuration changes across a specific version. We have slightly different versions, which may have slightly different configurations which cause issues."
"One possible area with room for improvement is some integration with the alert system to alert us in case of any failure of any message to be transmitted from one source to another; maybe that could help."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"There is a different platform price between Windows, z/OS, and iSeries."
"It would be a 10 out of 10 if it wasn't so expensive."
"I rate the product price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"The price of IBM MQ could improve by being less expensive."
"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."
"The price is high."
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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.
896,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.