ActiveMQ Reviews

Scalability is good as it has the concept of a "network of brokers", so there are no different queue names for distributed queues or physical queues.

The network of brokers scales by need but the queue name stays the same, hence the client does not need to worry about queue name change.

For example, if you use MQ from Oracle weblogic to implement messaging system with scalibility in mind, then you would implement one distributed queue on managed server and physical queues on each node, ideally the client connects to your distributed queue which has been configured to distribute messages to each physical queue by either round robin or weight policy etc.

In the above example, if you add new nodes then you have to add newly created physical queue to the distributed queue, or you have to inform the client what is the new physical queue name if your client choose to connect to the physical queue instead of distributed queue.

With the concept of the network of brokers, AMQ may add more brokers under load, but it always expose the same queue name to the client, so client won't notice the scale change and you don't need to config extra queues when it scales

It is cost effective and is a much cheaper solution compared to Weblogic or IBM MQ.

It has good performance in general use cases and is reliable.

It is easy to implement, especially in an MVP project for PoC.

It is easy to configure a composite queue for message forwarding.

We have had problems with the message selector as when the queue size reaches a certain level, the message selector does not have enough time to run and finish before the JMS reply timeout. In this case the client will not consume the JMS reply message even when the correlation ID matches.

Try not to use the hawt.io feature but use the AMQ console which is much better. If you have to use hawt.io , you may need to configure Jolokia, which is the JMX layer of hawt.io, to display queues properly if you have a lot of queues.

I have been using the solution for about four years now.

I have not experienced any unstable situations.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have no experience with the technical support.

I have used Weblogic MQ and IBM MQ before, and I switched to AMQ because we wanted to have a cheaper, faster and easier solution for messages.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Just follow the manual and there will be no issues.

I have no experience in enterprise pricing and licensing.

I have evaluated Rabbit MQ, which is the fastest solution, but AMQ has more features and better support.

• Try not to use the temp queue.
• Pay attention to message selectors and queue size.
• Pay attention to queue names as if you use a wrong queue name, AMQ won't report the error but it will create a new queue for you which is sometimes hard to investigate.

Most architecture nowadays requires too much performance. We can use products like ActiveMQ to improve our architecture.

I implemented a micro-services based architecture and did some of the communication via queues. I used actors with the Akka framework, and not only threads in Java.

The most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration.

The product is really straightforward. All the operations that you use are pretty simple and worked fine.

The deal is to write the correct logic.

Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle.

To clarify, it needs some queues in memory with the same abstract logic that ActiveMQ provides. An interesting example could be the embedded Redis framework, or the Derby database for integration tests.

ActiveMQ does not persist the messages in the queue. So it would be fine if active has that feature, or some way to do it. So you can grab that message any time during the application lifecycle.

Apache Kafka has that feature.

The improvement could be the availability to persist the message in the
queue for any time along the app running.

Testing: I did not find a correct way to test the integration using Java, but rather only with manual testing.

We did not encounter any stability issues.

There were no scalability issues. With a good strategy, we can scale onto large systems using ActiveMQ.

I would give technical support a rating of 10/10. Despite the doubts that I encountered during the development, I could get the answer in the documentation.

The initial setup is very easy. You don't need to install anything. Just run the start command or put the URL in the browser.

I think the software is free.

We evaluated Apache Kafka and also RabbitMQ. The choice was about the better integration with JMS.

I fully recommend this product, but you need to have some expertise working with JMS and asynchronous tasks. You also need a correct strategy, or at least think about one.

We use ActiveMQ for message brokering in our architecture. It is a central hub where we publish codes like city codes and office IDs for our server application. Other applications subscribe to relevant topics on ActiveMQ to receive and consume these messages, ensuring they stay updated with the latest code information.

For reliable messaging, the most valuable feature of ActiveMQ for us is ensuring prompt message delivery. Losing messages could lead to critical issues, especially when different systems need to exchange time-sensitive information like financial records. 

In terms of improvement, one potential area would be the complexity of the initial setup. It is not overly complex, but it could pose challenges for first-time users.

I have been working with ActiveMQ for two years.

ActiveMQ has been a stable tool for us, with no downtime or critical technical issues so far.

ActiveMQ's scalability meets our project needs well. Our application doesn't require rapid message delivery, so we haven't encountered scalability issues. The frequency of code updates isn't extremely high, so ActiveMQ effectively handles our messaging requirements without any significant challenges.

The technical support is quite good. I would rate it as a nine out of ten.

Positive

Setting up ActiveMQ initially was not overly difficult for us. However, as it was our first time using it, we faced some challenges during client installation. The setup itself wasn't problematic; rather, our lack of familiarity with the system caused some initial hiccups. Once we gained experience with the installation process, subsequent setups became much smoother.

The performance of ActiveMQ meets our needs adequately. We selected it as our messaging solution because we believed it was the best fit for our requirements, and we haven't encountered significant performance issues directly related to ActiveMQ itself. The challenges we faced were more related to issues like hosting environments, such as OpenShift, and hardware limitations. 

Overall, I would rate ActiveMQ as an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is to send messages between applications.

In all messaging applications, typically, sending and receiving messages is the most important and critical feature that we see our customers use.

The solution can improve the other protocols to equal the AMQ protocol they offer.

I have been using the solution for a couple of years.

The solution is fairly stable. But we are using it in Development, not in production, so I'm probably not the best judge of stability in general.

We don't see the solution used as much as Apache Kafka by our customers, but it is scalable.

We are supporting almost all the messaging platforms for our connectors. So I have been using other messaging products as well.

The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes. We have experience so it doesn't take a whole lot of time.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Since we are using the open-source version of the solution we do see a return on investment.

We use the open-source version.

I give the solution a six out of ten. 

Our customers would use the solution in any model. We have to test with the on-premise deployments and run on an EC2 cloud.

We have about ten users in our organization.

We do not require any people for deployment or maintenance.

Whenever we need support we get it from the online community.

I do not recommend ActiveMQ over Apache Kafka partly because I don't know who provides support for the solution.

When our clients are looking for AMQ protocol support specifically ActiveMQ is our recommendation.

I would like the tool to improve compliance and stability. We will encounter issues while using the central applications. In the solution's future releases, I want to control and set limitations for databases. 

I have been using the tool for three years. 

I haven't contacted the support till now since I have a second layer support for the solution. 

The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions. 

I would rate the product a nine out of ten. You need to scale the application to interact with other automation and robotic systems. Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications.

We use this solution for messaging.

For any messaging system, I think that messaging, in general, is fundamental to software development.

This solution could improve by providing better documentation. IBM MQ has 30 years of experience to build upon and has had 30 years to grow and improve, while ActiveMQ does not have the same kind of heritage that IBM MQ has. In comparison, I find that IBM documentation is better, but it has had a lot more investment behind it.

In the next release, I think that a roadmap would be interesting. If we look at ActiveMQ and the ActiveMQ Artemis which are parallel streams that might merge, but it's not clear on whether it will or when will it happen. That would be useful.

Also, it is not that clear who offers what implementations. ActiveMQ is available as a managed service in AWS, but it is not clear whenever Red Hat AMQ is camping base around Artemis. It helps in terms of selecting why someone would want to use ActiveMQ.

I have had experience with ActiveMQ, on and off, for approximately five years.

I have not used it heavily in a production environment, but at the moment, I don't have any issues to report. 

I am currently working with some clients to investigate some stability issues they are experiencing, but it could be the result of the way it was implemented.

In terms of performance, I have not any extensive performance tests as a comparison.

I have looked at other messaging providers, and I don't think that it's any worse than any other solution available. I think that it's reasonable.

There is a little bit of community support, but when you have 30 years of experience, it is not difficult to work out. With messaging, you pick up on new messaging products and you can fill in the gaps very quickly.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I have also had experience with IBM MQ for the last 30 years. I am comparing between different products and messaging scenario expertise.

I work in consultancies with many clients who have many different versions.

All messaging whether it's ActiveMQ, Amazon MQ which is Active MQ, or it's IBM MQ, they are all very similar, they all have strengths and weaknesses.

We have clients from small to large enterprises.

I would recommend this solution but it depends on the requirements. For example, what kind of support does the vendor want? What kind of managed services do they want? It is important because you can run ActiveMQ on AWS to get a managed service. It always depends on what their clients are looking for.

I'm impressed, I think that ActiveMQ is great.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use this product to provide us with a real time solution. It has helped us find ways to:

• Message or pass data, aside from hitting and saving data in a database.
• Perform asynchronous messaging.
• Queue database messages so requests are serial, if needed.
• Scale the application by increasing worker nodes via topics and queue load balancing.

I appreciate many features including queue, topic, durable topic, and selectors. I also value a different support for different protocols such as MQTT and AMQP. It has full support for EIP, REST, Message Groups, UDP, and TCP.

I would like to see the following improvements:

• The way it stores data
• Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers.
• For example, AMQP is a different flavor of message broker. However, adding it to ActiveMQ dramatically shifts its methodology and design. It can handle it, but it will be bad at it. Either you create a new forked solution of AMQ with AMQP and align only with AMQP, or just don't do it.

There were stability issues. With a network of brokers, you get a lot of issues, especially if you have the publisher and consumer using the same channel or connection, on different topics and/or queues. It’s causing a lot of issues and weirdness.

Setting up a network of brokers is problematic. The best thing is to do master-slave with a cold backup.

It is open source, so you get a very good response from the community. I heard Fuse is good, but I never talked to them.

We used to deploy Apache Kafka, as it was best for big data.

The initial setup is easy, and you can embed the ActiveMQ on the test.

Depending on the problem, AMQ resolved nearly everything. However, it may not be suitable for complex issues.

For what and where it is used, depending on the project, it will be very good.

For example, if I need to use a web application that will have ability to have an embedded message queue, it can work perfectly.

But if I need to have solution for big data, it may not be the best, especially for large streaming data. It varies by use.

Vet other solutions before implementing anything. Run multiple tests, like multi- thread and flood it with messages, as well as large messages, and combinations of both. See how it behaves.

One of the most important features of ActiveMQ is the ability to set up a network of brokers, and the ability to forward the message to another broker in the network, where there is a demand for messages from a consumer. These brokers could span over WANs and geographies. The messages will get forwarded to the broker where the demand is, which is what makes this a distributed messaging system.

The 'Shared nothing' configuration, where each broker has its own DB instance, is very important. It ensures that every message is accounted for and persisted in the DB to be replayed in case of failure.

Load balancing is important when huge numbers of messages are coming in. The messages get distributed to all the brokers, which are connected. In case of failure of any one broker, the message automatically gets routed to other brokers, ensuring no loss of messages.

By default, the failover protocol uses a random algorithm to choose one of the underlying connectors. If the connection fails, the transport will pick another URI and try to make a connection. The network automatically passes messages to connected brokers that have interested consumers. The failover protocol ensures clients do not need to be manually restarted in the case of a broker failure. As soon as the broker becomes available again, the client will automatically reconnect.

We also appreciate the easy setup of persistent messages using a DB like Oracle.

The master-slave relationship between brokers needs some improvement.

In case of shared architecture between brokers (i.e., both brokers sharing same the DB instance), one becomes master and the others become slaves. In this situation, the master always consumes the message and the slave is always in a dormant condition. This makes load balancing impossible. Probably this can be improved upon.

Another area of improvement is the monitoring console, which is kind of rudimentary. There is no facility to trace the entire XML message and take corrective action, such as resending the message.

If these facilities are added, it will be very good.

I have been using ActiveMQ for 2 months.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not tested scalability.

We considered switching from WebLogic JMS, since we faced many issues including message affinity and lost messages.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The pricing and license policies are pretty good.