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 8.5, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.5. Apache holds a 22.4% mindshare in MQ, compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s 4.5% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 28 ActiveMQ reviews

4,451 Views
4,184 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Amazon MQ

Read 8 Amazon MQ reviews

721 Views
620 Comparison Views

87% 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: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Amazon MQ

December 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

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Amazon MQ

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

7th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 22.4%, down from 25.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon MQ is 4.5%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ActiveMQ	22.4%
Amazon MQ	4.5%
Other	73.1%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Featured Reviews

MoumitaDas

Software Engineer III at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Integration capabilities enhance message handling without human interaction

With ActiveMQ there should be more options. If you work with other technologies, for example, Java, there are many options. We can integrate the way we want ActiveMQ. We can create partitions and clusters, but AP is not providing such options currently. It only provides time, request response timing, the number of requests that need to be handled, and protocol types. The configuration needs to be broadened inside AP to perform in a better way. Sometimes issues arise in production with ActiveMQ due to the number of requests. For example, if you have configured one thousand requests at a time and it receives one thousand and one messages at a time, it breaks. The configuration aspect is tricky. When configurations are proper, ActiveMQ almost has zero errors.

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RamilCerrada

Solution architect at SM Supermalls

Has provided consistent functionality across on-premise and cloud while simplifying cloud integration

I have experience with on-premise setups using ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, but with regards to AWS, I use it via cloud only. There's a free tier with Amazon MQ based on their website, which is a six-month free trial of a single instance, allowing per month usage of either ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ, five gig of Amazon EFS storage, and for ActiveMQ, it's 20 gig of Amazon EBS storage for RabbitMQ. I did not purchase Amazon MQ through AWS Marketplace. Amazon MQ has published information about having 650 hours of free trial usage. This can be found via the AWS website by searching for AWS MQ. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Amazon MQ an eight 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

"ActiveMQ demonstrates excellent stability and sturdiness."

"We value ActiveMQ for its performance, throughput, and low latency, especially in handling large volumes of data and sequential management of topics."

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

"The main function I find valuable in ActiveMQ is facilitating message transfer within the client's internal network. ActiveMQ handles the message transfer from the internal network to the cloud. Regarding multi-protocols, we use different approaches based on client capabilities. Some clients connect for real-time data transfer, using database queries for periodic updates every ten minutes. We collect data from multiple clients, ensuring we get real-time sensor values where possible and periodic updates for others."

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

"It’s a JMS broker, so the fact that it can allow for asynchronous communication is valuable."

"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."

"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

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

"Since we utilize AWS, it's easy to integrate Amazon MQ and work with other third-party software, as they have standard communications via API or native language."

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

"Amazon MQ is a secure solution."

"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 a very scalable solution."

"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."

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

Cons

"I would rate the stability a five out of ten because sometimes it gets stuck, and we have to restart it. We"

"Sometimes issues arise in production with ActiveMQ due to the number of requests. For example, if you have configured one thousand requests at a time and it receives one thousand and one messages at a time, it breaks."

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

"There are some stability issues."

"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."

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

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

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

More ActiveMQ cons

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

"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."

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

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

"Monitoring capabilities are not yet fully developed, since it's a message broker service, so it focuses more on the health of Apache."

"Amazon MQ isn't a cheap tool."

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

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the software is free."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"We use the open-source version."

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

"It’s open source, ergo free."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

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

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

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

30%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	17

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	3

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?

Pricing is something to consider with ActiveMQ, though cloud pricing is not costly and depends upon the compute selection. Focusing on AI is essential nowadays. AI capabilities require improvement ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for ActiveMQ?

In my current organization, I'm only working with ActiveMQ. I previously worked with IBM WebSphere MQ.

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?

Amazon MQ needs to have data collected on performance to analyze trends for improvement. Additionally, some tools can suggest how to improve performance in terms of speed, time, and processing, whi...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon MQ?

I have some experience working with Amazon MQ.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 51% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Amazon SQS vs Amazon MQ

Compared 27% of the time

IBM MQ vs Amazon MQ

Compared 20% of the time

Apache Kafka vs Amazon MQ

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs Amazon MQ

Compared 15% of the time

Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service vs Amazon MQ

Compared 13% of the time

More Amazon MQ Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Message Queue (MQ) Software

January 2026

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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

December 2025

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