ActiveMQ vs Amazon MQ comparison

Apache and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are both solutions in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category. Apache is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.0, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.6. Apache holds a 26.4% mindshare in MQ, compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s 3.4% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 26 ActiveMQ reviews

6,648 Views
4,133 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Amazon MQ

Read 7 Amazon MQ reviews

1,015 Views
855 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

Amazon MQ

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

ActiveMQ and Amazon MQ compete in the messaging solutions category. Amazon MQ holds the upper hand due to its enhanced feature set, especially in cloud environments.

Features: ActiveMQ offers flexible integration, compatibility with various protocols, and strong performance focus. Amazon MQ provides enhanced scalability, automatic failover, and seamless AWS integration, with superior scalability being a key advantage.

Room for Improvement: ActiveMQ could improve its ease of cloud deployment and integration with modern cloud ecosystems. Amazon MQ might benefit from more cost-effective solutions for smaller setups, better offline support, and expanded protocol diversity beyond AWS systems.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: ActiveMQ requires complex on-premises setup but offers high customization and robust community support. Amazon MQ provides a more straightforward managed service, simplifying deployment and maintenance within the AWS ecosystem, backed by reliable support.

Pricing and ROI: ActiveMQ is cost-effective with lower initial setup costs, suitable for existing infrastructures due to its open-source nature and good ROI. Amazon MQ, while more expensive, reduces operational overhead and speeds up time-to-market, offering better ROI for cloud-focused deployments despite higher upfront expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveMQ vs. Amazon MQ Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Amazon MQ

April 2025

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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

ActiveMQ

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

2nd

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Amazon MQ

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 26.4%, up from 21.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon MQ is 3.4%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Featured Reviews

Prashant-Sharma

Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Allows for asynchronous communication, enabling services to operate independently but issues with stability

The feature of ActiveMQ which I feel is good is its ability to have DLP, the later queues. If something goes wrong with the platform, it retries. Even if it fails, it goes to DLP, and later we can rescan the same event for processing. The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable.

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David Onuh

Senior Software Engineer at MentorMate

Provides you with a URL where you can either send or retrieve messages

For messaging, we use SQL queues, not MQ queues. When a request comes into our front-end application, we put this message into a queue. The right service picks up a particular message from the queue, performs the operation, and calls the next service. The next service taking that message can either perform services on the message or attach it to a new queue from multiple services. It's as if we have multiple services working hand-in-hand, but we use a queue system to either get or send messages. I only use Amazon MQ for one specific thing. I wouldn't say I've used it extensively to know what is more beneficial. We use the solution to pick out matrices from a particular queue, process the queue, and process the messages they push into something else. It was really fast. One of the good things I love about the solution is that you hardly get two services working on one message. When a subscriber to a queue consumes their message, it's in the queue at a particular moment. All the messages are only visible to the particular subscriber. Suppose ten services are trying to get a message from the queue. Out of the ten, if five pick the same messages, you will get duplicate transactions and weird errors. It does a very good job abstracting that for you, so you don't have to write the logic. Amazon MQ has done all that it was supposed to do. Most of the issues boil down to a skill or a pricing issue. Overall, I rate Amazon MQ ten out of ten.

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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 straightforward and only takes a few minutes."

"I'm impressed, I think that Active MQ is great."

"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."

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

"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."

"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."

"There is a vibrant community, and it is one of the strongest points of this product. We always get answers to our problems. So, my experience with the community support has been good."

"Message broadcasting: There could be a use case sending the same message to all consumers. So as a producer, I broadcast the message to a topic. Then, whichever consumers are subscribed to the topic can consume the same message."

More ActiveMQ pros

"The tool's most valuable feature is its managed service aspect. It's simple to implement and use. It requires minimal effort to maintain business operations."

"Amazon MQ is important for being collaborative, allowing for centralized information."

"The initial Amazon MQ setup is very easy both when you do it on your own or use the self-managed instance."

"Amazon MQ is managed by AWS and is easy to use."

"Amazon MQ is a very scalable solution."

"We have found Amazon MQ to provide scalability, robustness, and security."

"Amazon MQ is a secure solution."

Cons

"One potential area would be the complexity of the initial setup."

"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."

"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."

"From the TPS point of view, it's like 100,000 transactions that need to be admitted from different devices and also from the different minor small systems. Those are best fit for Kafka. We have used it on the customer side, and we thought of giving a try to ActiveMQ, but we have to do a lot of performance tests and approval is required before we can use it for this scale."

"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."

"The UI. It's both a good thing and a bad thing. The UI is too simple. Sometimes you wanna see the messages coming to the queue, and you have to refresh the dashboard, the console of the product."

"There are some stability issues."

"The clustering for sure needs improvement. When we were using it, the only thing available was an active/passive relationship that had to be maintained via shared file storage. That model includes a single point of failure in that storage medium."

More ActiveMQ cons

"The product should improve its monitoring capabilities. It needs to improve the pricing also."

"In community support, especially with distributed systems and integration, there is a need for better system organization."

"The solution needs improvement in the back end and security."

"Depending on your use cases, Amazon MQ can be cheap or expensive."

"If Amazon provided a templating engine, it would be great."

"Amazon MQ is a good solution for small and medium-sized enterprises. It's open-source software, which means it's cheaper than its competitors."

"Amazon MQ isn't a cheap tool."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s open source, ergo free."

"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."

"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."

"We use the open-source version."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

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

"There are no fees because it is open-source."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"Depending on your use cases, Amazon MQ can be cheap or expensive."

"As a client or as an end user, I would say that Google Cloud Storage or Google Cloud are cheaper than Amazon MQ."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

34%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ActiveMQ?

For reliable messaging, the most valuable feature of ActiveMQ for us is ensuring prompt message delivery.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ActiveMQ?

We need to address the non-deterministic load issues. Sometimes, ActiveMQ either restarts automatically or goes into ActiveMQ mode, causing interruptions. We need to enhance stability and improve t...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for ActiveMQ?

We have a digital ID platform that uses various services running on Kafka. There are two main endpoints where services interact with external services. These include an automatic biometric service ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Amazon MQ?

The tool's most valuable feature is its managed service aspect. It's simple to implement and use. It requires minimal effort to maintain business operations.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon MQ?

The message queue requires an improvement in the message template MQ link. If Amazon provided a templating engine, it would be great.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon MQ?

We are using Amazon MQ for our AI model. It's used for notifications and other services. We have an application for which Amazon MQ acts as a broker.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 53% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 4% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Amazon SQS vs Amazon MQ

Compared 33% of the time

IBM MQ vs Amazon MQ

Compared 30% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs Amazon MQ

Compared 17% of the time

Apache Kafka vs Amazon MQ

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service vs Amazon MQ

Compared 8% of the time

More Amazon MQ Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Message Queue (MQ) Software

May 2025

Download Amazon MQ product report

Also Known As

AMQ

No data available

Overview

Apache ActiveMQ is the most popular and powerful open source messaging and Integration Patterns server.

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License

Apache

Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. Message brokers allow different software systems–often using different programming languages, and on different platforms–to communicate and exchange information. Amazon MQ reduces your operational load by managing the provisioning, setup, and maintenance of ActiveMQ, a popular open-source message broker. Connecting your current applications to Amazon MQ is easy because it uses industry-standard APIs and protocols for messaging, including JMS, NMS, AMQP, STOMP, MQTT, and WebSocket. Using standards means that in most cases, there’s no need to rewrite any messaging code when you migrate to AWS.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc.

SkipTheDishes, Malmberg, Dealer.com, Bench Accounting

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Amazon MQ

April 2025

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. Amazon MQ

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