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IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform 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

IBM MQ
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
1st
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
163
Ranking in other categories
Business Activity Monitoring (1st)
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
6th
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (9th), Streaming Analytics (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

SelvaKumar4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers the ability to batch metadata transfers between systems that support MQ as the communication method
We find it scalable for internal applications, but not so much for external integrations. 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. IBM MQ needs to improve the UI for quicker logging. Users should also have a lot more control over logging, with a dashboard-like interface. That's something they should definitely work on.
BhanuChidigam - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs well, high availability, and helpful support
We use approximately four people for the maintenance of the solution. My advice to others is this solution has high throughput and is used for many stock exchanges. For business critical use cases, such as processing financial transactions at a quick speed, I would recommend this solution. I rate PubSub+ Event Broker an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The initial setup is easy."
"It also has a backup queue concept and topics, features that I have not seen anywhere else. I like these features very much."
"Encryption and the fact that we have not had any data loss issues so far have been very valuable features. IBM MQ is well encrypted so that we are well within our compliance and regulatory requirements, so that is a plus point as well."
"The most valuable feature is the interaction within the system."
"We use our routing feature when the request is coming from the business application. The request goes to the distributive side and it is routed to the right claim instance."
"The first things are its simplicity and its robustness. Compared to any other product, it's the most robust I've worked with. And it's extremely easy to manage."
"This solution has improved and influenced the communication between different applications, then standardized that communication."
"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."
"We've built a lot of products into it and it's been quite easy to feed market data onto the systems and put entitlements and controls around that. That was a big win for us when we were consolidating our platforms down. Trying to have one event bus, one messaging bus, for the whole globe, and consolidate everything over time, has been key for us. We've been able to do that through one API, even if it's across the different languages."
"The most useful features has been the WAN optimization and probably the HybridEdge, which requires some third-party adapters or plugins. The idea that we can position Solace as a protocol-agnostic message transport fabric is key to our company having all manners of asynchronous messaging protocols from MQ, Kafka, JMS, etc. I really like the WAN optimization: Send once over a WAN, then distribute locally as many times as there are subscribers."
"We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code."
"The topic hierarchy is pretty flexible. Once you have the subject defined just about anybody who knows Java can come onboard. The APIs are all there."
"In my assessment of Solace against other products — as I was responsible for evaluating various products and bringing the right tool into companies in the past — I worked with multiple platforms like RabbitMQ, Confluent, Kafka, and various other tools in the market. But I found the event mesh capability to be a very interesting as well as fulfilling capability, towards what we want to achieve from a digital-integration-strategy point of view... It's distributed, yet it is intelligently connected. It can also span and I can plug and play any number of brokers into the event mesh, so it's a great deal. That's a differentiator."
"The most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was done manually with a file, and it can be done instantly live."
"When it comes to granularity, you can literally do anything regarding how the filtering works."
"This solution reduces the latency to access changes in real-time and the effort required to onboard a new subscriber. It also reduces the maintenance of each of those interfaces because now the publisher and subscribers are decoupled. Event Broker handles all the communication and engagement. We can just push one update, then we don't have to know who is consuming it and what's happening to that publication downstream. It's all done by the broker, which is a huge benefit of using Event Broker."
 

Cons

"It could provide more monitoring tools and some improvement to the UI. I would also like to see more throughput in future versions."
"We need to have a better administration console and better monitoring features. Right now, they are not good and could be a lot better."
"It could get a face lift with a modern marketing campaign."
"IBM HQ's scalability isn't the best."
"The initial setup is difficult. Creating your own cluster is difficult. Working with cluster repositories is difficult. Issue management with IBM MQ is difficult."
"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."
"Sometimes, not all messages are consumed in the queues. File transfers need improvement."
"I can't say pricing is good."
"The ease of management could be approved. The GUI is very good, but to configure and manage these devices programmatically in the software version is not easy. For example, if I would like to spin up a new software broker, then I could in theory use the API, but it would require a considerable amount of development effort to do so. There should be a tool, or something that Solace supports, that we could use for this, e.g., a platform like Terraform where we could use infrastructure as code to configure our source appliances."
"We've pointed out some things with the DMR piece, the event mesh, in edge cases where we could see a problem. Something like 99 percent of users wouldn't ever see this problem, but it has to do with if you get multiple bad clients sending data over a WAN, for example. That could then impact other clients."
"Some of the feature's gaps with some of the open-source vendors have been closed in a lot of ways. Being more agile and addressing those earlier could be an area for improvement."
"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."
"For improvements, I would suggest increasing the max payload size to a limit of 100MB or more. The current max payload size is limited to 5MB."
"The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls."
"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."
"One of the areas of improvement would be if we could tell the story a bit better about what an event mesh does or why an event mesh is foundational to a large enterprise that has a wide diversity of applications that are homegrown and a small number off the shelf."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side."
"I think the pricing is reasonable, especially with IIB as a part of it."
"Licensing for this software is on a yearly basis. The standard fee includes the maintenance and updates that are released periodically."
"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."
"I think IBM needs to look at its pricing. The prices of IBM products should be simple. The old way of pricing should now be moving on to the cloud to be pay as you go, a plan-based kind of pricing."
"Our costs haven't increased but they also have not improved."
"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."
"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version."
"The price of PubSub+ Event Broker is reasonable for the capability it offers. However, when compared to others solutions on the market it is expensive."
"We are looking for something that will add value and fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only."
"There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."
"The licensing is dependent on the volume that is flowing. If you go for their support services, it will cost some more money, but I think it is worth it, especially if you are just starting your journey."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
38%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
4%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about PubSub+ Event Broker?
The most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was done manually with a file, and it can be done instantly live.
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively. Additionally, providing a comprehensive dashboard t...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

WebSphere MQ
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet 
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM MQ vs. PubSub+ Platform and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
830,726 professionals have used our research since 2012.