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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 (79th), Server Monitoring (42nd)
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 February 2026, in the Business Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of Avada Software Infrared360 is 5.7%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 19.9%, down from 42.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Activity Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM MQ19.9%
Avada Software Infrared3605.7%
Other74.4%
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

"The administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities."
"Monitoring that ties into our incident management system"
"It's what we use for monitoring our MQ system, so the features that they provide are just really, really good."
"It has 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."
"IBM MQ's flexibility has sped up our active communication."
"Secure, safe, and very fast."
"I would rate the solution ten out of ten because I have been working on it for the past fifteen years."
"IBM HQ's stability is great - we send six million messages a day, and we're very satisfied with HQ's ability to handle that volume."
"The solution is easy to understand and even medium developers can easily start using it."
"On a scale of 1-10, I rate IBM MQ a nine."
"RabbitMQ and Kafka require more steps for setup than IBM MQ. Installation of the IBM product is very simple."
"This initial setup is not complex at all. Deploying it was very easy."
 

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."
"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. Some interfaces are not up to what you're used to seeing on other, more Windows-like tools."
"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 competing products have similar problems."
"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 memory management is very poor and it consumes too much memory."
"The monitoring could be improved. It's a pain to monitor the throughput through the MQ. The maximum throughput for a queue or single channel isn't clear. We could also use some professional services by IBM to assess and tune the performance."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing needs improvement."
"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."
"IBM MQ's pricing is higher than its competitors'."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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)."
"Because the licensing is at the QMGR level, you need to have at least a small cushion of licenses for occasional enterprise needs."
"IBM MQ is expensive and they charge based on the CPU."
"Small-scale companies may not want to buy IBM MQ because of its high cost."
"We have a special contract with IBM MQ that give us a certain price."
"It is a very expensive product compared to the open source products in the market."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, and we are on an annual subscription."
"I think the pricing is reasonable, especially with IIB as a part of it."
"There is a different platform price between Windows, z/OS, and iSeries."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
28%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Printing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
5%
 

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: February 2026.
881,515 professionals have used our research since 2012.