IBM MQ Reviews

We're a service provider. My company provides services to different clients that include financial institutions in the banking sector.

IBM MQ is used for queue messaging. I have to install and configure, the MQ features of listener channels, remote queues, and some transmit queues. We enable these as per customer requirements.

The solution offers very good features, including listener channels, remote queues, and transmit queues.

The solution is stable.

The initial setup isn't overly complex. It's pretty straightforward. 

Technical support is very good.

IBM MQ is not very user-friendly. MQ needs to redesign or add some sort of user-friendly interface in order to offer better performance.

This is a very old solution. Nowadays, some other products are designed to be much more user-friendly as compared to IBM MQ. 

The product needs better administration.

I've been working with the solution for three years. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

We've found the technical support to be very good. they tend to match the severity level of the situation. We're quite happy with the way they respond.

While the initial setup is not overly difficult, the user interface is not very user-friendly. 

I cannot speak to the pricing of the product. I can't say if it's overly expensive or reasonably priced as I don't deal directly with licensing. 

We are an IBM partner. 

I'd rate the soluton at an eight out of ten. For the most part, I've been pretty happy with its capabilities. 

I'm a technical specialist and we are customers of IBM. 

This solution offers good performance as well as scalability and stability. It offers a template that's beneficial for any company.

I'd very much like to see more integration in the monitoring tools.

I've been using this solution for nine years. 

The stability is good. 

The solution offers very good scalability. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It's all about planning because we have multiple application teams involved. Deployment takes somewhere between half an hour to an hour, but for the coordination to check and perform from the application side, takes almost a full day because we have critical, multiple applications. It needs to be coordinated and we need to be sure they are able to connect perfectly with our environment or with the MQ.

We pay an annual license fee. 

I recommend this product and rate it a nine out of 10. 

IBM MQ is one of the biggest message exchanges in our company. We are in the process of migration to a cloud base environment because in some projects we are using RabbitMQ and Amazon SQS. However, IBM MQ is a big part of our technology ecosystem.

Overall the solution operates well and has good integration.

I have been using IBM MQ within the past 12 months.

We have had stability issues using the solution for some of our projects.

We have had scalability issues with some projects in the past.

The technical support has been helpful.

I have used RabbitMQ and Amazon SQS.

The installation can be easy, but it depends on the environment.

I recommend others use a more cloud-native approach to messaging.

I rate IBM MQ a seven out of ten.

The subscribe and publish features are excellent. We use them a lot.

The usability of the solution is very good.

There isn't that much happening with the installation consoles and monitoring consoles. This could be improved.

We need to have a better administration console and better monitoring features. Right now, they are not good and could be a lot better.

The pricing could be better.

I've been using the solution for ten years. It's been a decade so far, therefore, it's been a rather long time overall.

The technical support has been pretty good. Every time I've used it, they were pretty good and I found them to be knowledgeable and responsive. I'm quite happy with their level of service.

The pricing could be lower. It's not the cheapest option out there. However, I don't have comparison prices with other solutions at this time. We're working on comparison pricing currently.

We are currently evaluating other options. We are starting the comparison now and we are starting on the technical scope, not on the budget. However, we will also consider pricing as we evaluate other potential options for our company.

We're just a customer. We don't have any business affiliation with the organization.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate this solution at a nine.

We use it for application-to-application integration.

Reliable messaging and throughput are the most valuable.

We are looking at the latest version, and we hope that resilience, high availability, and monitoring will be improved. 

It can have some more improvements in the heterogeneous messaging feature. The current solution is on-premises, so good integration with public cloud messaging solutions would be useful.

I have been using IBM MQ for 20 years.

Its stability is great.

Its scalability is okay. The inside scalability is great. We are hoping that the outside scalability is improved in the latest version.

Most of the users are just using the applications, and they are using IBM MQ without realizing it. In terms of the number of people really dealing with IBM MQ on a global scale, there are probably around 30 users. They are actually working with the product. There are thousands of developers who are using applications with IBM MQ.

I am an architect, and I talk with the architects of IBM. The engineers talk with technical support when needed.

The basic setup is simple. The deployment is fully automated.

We received the software from the vendor, but we deployed it on our own. We also do the maintenance ourselves. 

There is real money involved here. As compared to RabbitMQ, IBM MQ is on the higher side in terms of cost.

I would recommend this solution for similar companies. I am very fond of IBM MQ because of the reliability and throughput part, at least on a single server. On the consumer and application side, RabbitMQ seems a bit easier to consume. It is a bit ahead in terms of the scale-out feature.

I would rate IBM MQ an eight out of ten.

We develop applications for 20 companies in the insurance industry. We have about 20 different product systems that use the same MQ layout. 

We are also using it for testing and educational purposes.

Our customer base is in the closed market of Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

We just switched versions from 8.0.0.6 to 9.1.

Most European companies have MQ, though we just added it four years ago. MQ changes the way people think about their applications. E.g., they are more integrated. We see synergies with the tool, but there is a long path to changing people’s minds.

The MQ layout is quite easy.

It is very stable. We don't have many issues.

We have had an issue with the migration. Most of our applications are running on Java and WebSphere. We have a project to get rid of an old .NET application since we are experiencing a loss in connection during the migration to 9.1. The problem appears to be more on the .NET side than the MQ side though.

The technical user interface is outdated in terms of the language used. I think this is inherited from the mainframe. This is more of an engineering issue. It is running on a Windows platform, and I don't like having Windows being the backbone of our company.

I don’t like legacy view of MQ.

Four years.

We don't have a problem with stability.

We have not had any large scalability issues. The business that we have is not that big. In Switzerland, we have around 3,000 people working with all our systems. We don't have that many transactions. For our 20 customers, we have four servers in production with two on standby and two that are active. We need scalability mostly to run large printing jobs for MQ, where we need disk space. Overall, we don't have any scalability issues.

This solution has improved and influenced the communication between different applications, then standardized that communication. Before, we had a lot of different interfaces, which were partly handwritten. Now, we have two or three manned technology with MQ that are automated. Therefore, we are focusing and reducing the amount of technology.

For some special parts, we also had something previously in place. We ran around 100 to 1000 PDFs in a batch mode.

We have a standardized way in describing our servers, services and rights because we have our own infrastructure. We just generate the MQSC scripts, then push it to the right server.

The time it takes to deliver a new integration varies. From our point of view, we are really fast, but we do not develop applications on our own. We are a type of project management and system provider company. This means that most applications are written by different companies. E.g., we have IBM as a software supplier.

Two people from our company maintain the solution along with a consulting company that we have. All this is done part-time.

Our costs haven't increased but they also have not improved.

We are happy with it. I would give it an eight (out of 10). 

We are not using containers.

IBM WebSphere MQ is deployed on a Windows machine, as well as almost all of our infrastructure. Windows services read and write to the MQ server - this is the way that we interact with it. All the messages that we put on the queue are also stored in an SQL Databases. A Windows service reads that message from the SQL Database storage and puts it on a queue on a certain channel; these Windows services are running indefinitely, on a loop so any message is read instantly. 

The solution is very easy to work with.

The solution is very stable, it also offers transaction management and support.

The solution offers very good integration with other services. It's one of the great advantages of the service.

We have had it for a long time now - version 7.1, which is not the latest. 

The admin interface of MQ Explorer that is used to interact with the server seems a little bit dated. It makes it somehow difficult to interact with it. It needs a major update to make it more modern and easy to navigate, maybe a web version.

The solution isn't free. There are other solutions, like RabbitMQ, which are open source and absolutely free to use. This open source solution we use it for non-critical processes.

IBM offers a special version that you need to get if you want to transfer files, especially large files. Maybe it should be included in any version.

We've been using the solution for a very long time. It's been at least a decade - about ten years.

The stability of the solution is good. We've never run into any issues.

IBM MQ offers clustering. We don't have this yet, as it hasn't been implemented, however, I know that you can install it in a cluster of servers. 

My understanding is RabbitMQ is also easier to scale. I'm unsure as to how well IBM can scale in comparison.

I've never contacted technical support in the past. I can't speak to their level or service due to the fact that I've never directly dealt with them.

We're also using RabbitMQ. While IBM is more stable, RabbitMQ is easier to work with. 

We've been trying to change our architecture, and RabbitMQ is more appropriate for us as it's easier to put together with microservices.

While I was part of the process for implementing RabbitMQ, which was very simple and straightforward, in the case of IBM, I didn't install it myself. Unfortunately, I cannot explain how easy or difficult it was as I was not part of the experience. My understanding is it's not too difficult.

In terms of maintenance, we have two people from the support team handling that aspect. They can restart the server or look into the queues. They aren't working in shifts, however, if there are issues, one of them is normally available to troubleshooting.

In comparison, for RabbitMQ, we had only one developer that installed it and created the publishers, workers etc. I believe the support will be the same as for IBM. In both cases, there aren't too many people needed for maintenance.

I'd recommend the solution. It's a very stable solution and very resilient. 

If there is not essential data that needs to be transported between services, then I would go for a RabbitMQ, because it's easier in style, and it's free to use. On top of that, you can have it to wrap around everything in a straightforward way.

That said, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. We've used it for a number of years and it's always worked very well for us.

We are currently working on the use case. I work as an IBM system admin and part of MQ is hosted on the IBM server. We have a lot of other servers and appliances for IBM MQ that costs us a lot of money so we are currently looking for less expensive alternatives. Kafka is one of the choices on the table. We are looking to migrate to services on Google which is why Kafka was proposed for us to implement. 

We use it to integrate the backend and front end solutions and applications. 

The most valuable feature is the stability. It's perfect in this way. 

We are looking for another solution that is less expensive.

There is room for improvement. The live and portal monitoring needs improvement. 

I have been using IBM MQ for four years. 

It's very stable. 

It's scalable. 

I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten.

The initial setup was average. Not so complex and not so straightforward. 

The deployment itself, not including testing, took a couple of hours. 

It's expandable but it will add costs that should be taken into consideration. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

In the next release, I would like for there to be easier monitoring. The UI should be easier for non-technical users to set up appliances and servers.