No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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

"We have easily created use case testing harnesses for specific flows that incorporate various message types."
"It allows non-technical users to inspect their individual components within the total infrastructure without disturbing other components and without bothering the technical teams."
"Administration, Monitoring, and Delegation are the most valuable features of the solution."
"The administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities."
"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."
"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."
"I highly recommend Infrared360 for an all-in-one IBM MQ tool."
"This solution has improved and influenced the communication between different applications, then standardized that communication."
"MQ is a very affordable and easy to use messaging product."
"The solution is fast with end data compared to other messaging tools."
"It seems to be pretty reliable; it's one of the few things we have that just runs, almost to a point where you forget to go back and do some upgrades."
"Stability and reliability are the most valuable features; it's very reliable and very stable, and you can do a fast recovery in case of any failure."
"Offers good performance as well as scalability and stability."
"We have found the security and monitoring capabilities of the product most valuable."
"If you have the right technologist, it's a good tool."
 

Cons

"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."
"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 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."
"Some of the graphics in the interface could be improved. It's pretty basic."
"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."
"Although I'm not involved with costs in our company, IBM products, in general, have high licensing costs and support costs are too high."
"IBM MQ could improve by adding more protocols or APIs for a standard application, such as MuleSoft."
"The product does not allow users to access data from API or external networks since it can only be used in a closed network, making it an area where improvements are required."
"If they could come up with monitoring dashboards that would be good. We are using external monitoring tools, apart from our IBM MQ, to monitor IBM MQ. If we could get monitoring tools or dashboards to keep everything simple for the user to understand, that would be good."
"They could integrate monitoring into the solution, a bit more than they do now. Currently, they have opened the REST API so you can get statistic and accounting information and details from MQ and build your own monitoring, if you want. IBM can improve the solution in this direction."
"I'm not sure that current version has event-driven mechanism requests that people go for."
"The worst part is the monitoring or admin, especially in the ACE or Broker. There is always a problem of transparency. In MQ you can observe any process and you know exactly what's going on behind the scenes, but with the ACE or Broker, it's a problem monitoring the HTTP inputs. It's like a black box."
"Maybe it should have something with respect to being able to provide a graphical view of the data elements that we are processing."
 

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)."
"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."
"Start small, then increase licensing later as per your demand."
"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price a seven. The product is expensive."
"I think the pricing is reasonable, especially with IIB as a part of it."
"IBM MQ has a flexible license model based on the Processor Value Unit (PVU) and I recommend it."
"Licensing for this software is on a yearly basis. The standard fee includes the maintenance and updates that are released periodically."
"The problem with this product is that it's a little bit expensive."
"The solution costs are high, it is going to cost a fair bit for annual operating costs and support."
"Small-scale companies may not want to buy IBM MQ because of its high cost."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Business Activity Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
886,468 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
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

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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.
886,468 professionals have used our research since 2012.