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ActiveMQ vs Amazon SQS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

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
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon SQS
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 22.0%, down from 26.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon SQS is 7.3%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ActiveMQ22.0%
Amazon SQS7.3%
Other70.7%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

MD
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.
reviewer2281650 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Specialist at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
Efficient data retention and high scalability drive significant productivity improvements
The features of Amazon SQS that I find most valuable include its data retention capabilities and message durability. The retention of data is crucial, as other systems like RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ require management. Furthermore, if there's a failure in the system after consuming a message, SQS's settings ensure the message is not deleted until confirmation. Additionally, generating FIFO and standard queues based on use cases is a helpful feature.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."
"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."
"The most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."
"For reliable messaging, the most valuable feature of ActiveMQ for us is ensuring prompt message delivery."
"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes."
"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."
"The most valuable features of the solution are AWS Lambda services, ECS, and QuickSight reports, which are beneficial for data analysis."
"We used SQS for the Kapolei system to ensure that certain tasks were executed precisely once. The first-in, first-out (FIFO) capability was a great feature for us. Additionally, its redundancy out of the box meant we didn't have to worry about missing messages. It provided peace of mind and automatically instilled trust, relieving us of any concerns."
"We use Amazon SQS for notifying, queuing servers, queuing messages, and notifying the people for alerting systems."
"With SQS, we can trigger events in various cloud environments. It offers numerous benefits for us."
"We use the tool in interface integrations."
"SQS is very stable, and it has lots of features."
"It's very quick and easy to build or set up Amazon SQS."
"The most valuable features include the ability to handle a huge number of messages and the presence of a dead letter queue."
 

Cons

"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."
"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."
"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."
"I would rate the stability a five out of ten because sometimes it gets stuck, and we have to restart it. We"
"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."
"The solution can improve the other protocols to equal the AMQ protocol they offer."
"For additional functionality, I suggest making it easier to install and monitor the queues, topics, broker status, publisher status, and consumer status. Improved monitoring tools would help avoid needing to manually access the server for monitoring purposes."
"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."
"I cannot send a message to multiple people simultaneously. It can only be sent to one recipient."
"There could be improvements in the UI for security and scalability."
"Improvement is needed in terms of troubleshooting and logs."
"The tool needs improvement in user-friendliness and discoverability."
"Support could be improved."
"A feature I would like to see in Amazon SQS is the ability to view the content of messages without removing them from the queue."
"It would be easier to have a dashboard that allows us to see everything and manage everything since we have so many queues."
"There are some issues with SQS's transaction queue regarding knowing if something has been received."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"I think the software is free."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"We use the open-source version."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."
"I rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten."
"The pricing of Amazon SQS is reasonable. The first million requests are free every month, and after, it's cost 40 cents for every million requests. There are not any additional fees."
"Amazon SQS is quite expensive and is at the highest price point compared to other solutions."
"It's quite expensive."
"SQS's pricing is very good - I would rate it nine out of ten."
"Amazon SQS is more affordable compared to other solutions."
"Amazon SQS is moderately priced."
"The pricing model is pay-as-you-use. It depends on your usage and configuration."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
 

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.
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 ...
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.
What needs improvement with Amazon SQS?
There is nothing I can remember that I would want as new features for Amazon SQS.
What is your primary use case for Amazon SQS?
If you need a messaging service to help decouple your application, Amazon SQS would be a smart choice because it's easy to use and very easy to manage.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AMQ
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc. 
EMS, NASA, BMW, Capital One
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.