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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
172
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 October 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of IBM MQ is 25.5%, up from 22.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat JBoss A-MQ for xPaaS is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM MQ25.5%
Red Hat JBoss A-MQ for xPaaS0.6%
Other73.9%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

David Pizinger - PeerSpot reviewer
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
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 robust compared to other products in the market. It also gives you support from the IBM team."
"Reliability is the most valuable feature. MQ is used to support critical business applications."
"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."
"Secure, safe, and very fast."
"The most valuable features of IBM MQ are its guarantee of delivery, ability to handle high volume while maintaining high availability, and robust security measures such as SSL, TLS, and RBAC."
"I haven't seen any severe issues related to it. Most of the time it's running. That is the advantage of IBM MQ."
"Support for JMS 2.0, because we develop solutions compatible with Java EE7."
"Whenever payments are happening, such as incoming payments to the bank, we need to notify the customer. With MQ we can actually do that asynchronously. We don't want to notify the customer for each and every payment but, rather, more like once a day. That kind of thing can be enabled with the help of MQ."
"JBoss is easy to use, and we have a good partner here in Tunisia to provide local support."
 

Cons

"IBM MQ has limitations regarding scaling options. The licensing costs associated with scaling up and down were significant, which is why we are moving to Apache-based services such as Kafka."
"They have provided a Liberty Profile in the Web Console for administration, and that could be further enhanced. It is not fit for use by an enterprise. They have to get rid of their WebSphere process and develop a front-end on Node.js or the like."
"Should have more integration in the monitoring tools."
"Scaling is difficult with IBM MQ."
"IBM MQ is still in a premature state. It is in a research phase, so it is very early to make specific suggestions about improvements."
"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."
"What could be improved is the high-availability. The way MQ works is that it separates the high-availability from the workload balance. The scalability should be easier. If something happens so that the messages are not available on each node, scalability is only possible for the workload balance."
"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."
"JBoss could add more automation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of IBM MQ could improve by being less expensive."
"The fee for this solution is on the higher end of the scale."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, and we are on an annual subscription."
"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."
"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."
"You have to license per application installation and if you expand vertically or horizontally, you will be paying for more licenses. The licenses are approximately $10,000 to $15,000 a license, it can get expensive quite quickly."
"IBM MQ is an expensive solution compared to other solutions. However, if you pay less you will not receive the same experience or features."
"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price a seven. The product is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
35%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
4%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise146
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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Comparisons

No data available
 

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: October 2025.
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