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IBM MQ vs Red Hat JBoss A-MQ for xPaaS 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
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (1st)
Red Hat JBoss A-MQ for xPaaS
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of IBM MQ is 21.0%, down from 26.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat JBoss A-MQ for xPaaS is 1.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ21.0%
Red Hat JBoss A-MQ for xPaaS1.8%
Other77.2%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

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.
AR
System Administrator at BH Bank
It's scalable and easy to use, and we have local support here in Tunisia
We have an application-presentation layer, and we use JBoss to communicate with the application layer. The interceptors use Active MQ.  JBoss is easy to use, and we have a good partner here in Tunisia to provide local support.  JBoss could add more automation. We have been using JBoss for five…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"IBM is doing really good and they're still growing."
"From a company's productivity perspective, we see a lot of benefits."
"We are able to transport data across any platform in a secure fashion, be it internal or external."
"Data integrity, reliability and security are valuable features that IBM MQ possesses."
"The best thing about IBM MQ solution is that it's guaranteed delivery and it's fast."
"This is a good product if you are looking for 100 percent stability and reliability, as opposed to implementing an open source solution."
"IBM is still adding some features and coding some other systems on the security end, and it has the most security features I've seen in a communication solution, which is the most important thing for our purposes."
"JBoss is easy to use, and we have a good partner here in Tunisia to provide local support."
"JBoss is easy to use, and we have a good partner here in Tunisia to provide local support."
 

Cons

"The solution requires a lot of work to implement and maintain."
"There are things within the actual product itself that can be improved, such as limitations on message length, size, etc. There is no standardized message length outside of IBM."
"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."
"I'd like to see improvements around that area, so we can take our z/OS systems into our distributed environments even easier."
"One of the things we did not see meeting our need was the lack of integrated monitoring for both IIB flows and MQ's."
"The licensing fees should be more cost-effective so that we can better pitch the product to our clients. With the pricing as it is, they tend to move away from IBM products."
"Should have more integration in the monitoring tools."
"A better user interface; right now, it's technician dependent, so it's a tech support role."
"JBoss could add more automation."
"JBoss could add more automation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a special contract with IBM MQ that give us a certain price."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, and we are on an annual subscription."
"In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side."
"There is real money involved here. As compared to RabbitMQ, IBM MQ is on the higher side in terms of cost."
"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."
"It is a very expensive product compared to the open source products in the market."
"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."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise147
No data available
 

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...
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Also Known As

WebSphere MQ
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
E*TRADE, CERN, CenturyLink, AECOM, Sabre Holdings
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Apache, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Message Queue (MQ) Software. Updated: May 2026.
896,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.