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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
7.4
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 25.4%, up from 23.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon SQS is 7.9%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ActiveMQ25.4%
Amazon SQS7.9%
Other66.7%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

Eyob Alemu - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient data flow management with high performance and occasional stability improvements
For high traffic volumes where management time on ActiveMQ is minimal and where the rate of flow from the provider is slower than from the consumer, ActiveMQ offers the highest performance based on our experience. It has been efficient for data flow control between two endpoints, despite occasional unexpected glitches. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.
Hari Prakash Pokala - PeerSpot reviewer
Valuable AWS services enhance data analysis yet could benefit from flexible data streams
I am using multiple services such as AWS Lambda, S3, EC2, ECS, and the SNS SQS services, along with QuickSight reports and some of the VPC concepts.  We have an email notification system integrated with Spring Branch. Once a batch job completes, SNS and SQS trigger events, sending notification…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For reliable messaging, the most valuable feature of ActiveMQ for us is ensuring prompt message delivery."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."
"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."
"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."
"The most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."
"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."
"The initial setup and first deployment of ActiveMQ is fairly simple."
"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."
"I think the tool is very reliable."
"There is no setup just some easy configuration required."
"We use the tool in interface integrations."
"The dead-letter queue is very helpful in maintaining the messages that come into the queue."
"The solution is easy to scale and cost-effective."
"Overall, I would rate Amazon SQS as ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon SQS is its scalability."
 

Cons

"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."
"It would be great if it is included as part of the solution, as Kafka is doing. Even though the use case of Kafka is different, If something like data extraction is possible, or if we can experiment with partition tolerance and other such things, that will be great."
"The solution can improve the other protocols to equal the AMQ protocol they offer."
"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."
"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."
"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."
"The solution's stability needs improvement."
"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."
"The retention period for messages could be improved. Currently, messages are retained for four or seven days."
"Sometimes, we have to switch to another component similar to SQS because the patching tool for SQS is relatively slow for us."
"A primary area of improvement for Amazon SQS is the message size limitation, which is currently restricted to 256 kilobytes per message."
"The initial setup of Amazon SQS is in the middle range of difficulty. You need to learn Amazon AWS and know how to navigate, create resources, and structures, and provide rules."
"Amazon SQS is costly. I think there could be improvements in how it facilitates comparisons between different AWS products. A calculator would be helpful. The calculator for Kafka is based on factors like throughput or storage used in the last month. In contrast, the calculator for Amazon SQS is based on the number of transactions processed. These different approaches make it challenging to compare them directly. I suggest AWS provide a straightforward calculator where I can input one aspect, and it calculates costs for multiple solutions."
"Packages sometimes have delays in dropping, indicating reliability issues."
"The search should be more user-friendly, allowing me to search for a longer period of time and return results faster."
"The current visibility timeout of five minutes is okay. However, I'd like to explore the possibility of extending it for specific use cases."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."
"I think the software is free."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."
"We use the open-source version."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"It's quite expensive."
"Amazon SQS offers a generous free tier, beyond which it remains very cost-effective. The cost per million messages is less than a dollar, making it an economical choice."
"Compared to the other options and based on what I have heard, Amazon SQS is relatively more expensive, but it is not insanely expensive."
"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."
"I rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten."
"Amazon SQS is quite expensive and is at the highest price point compared to other solutions."
"Compared to EC2 and other services, Amazon SQS' pricing is cheaper."
"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
32%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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?
The retention period for messages could be improved. Currently, messages are retained for four or seven days. It would be beneficial if there was a provision to configure and retain messages for lo...
What is your primary use case for Amazon SQS?
I primarily use Amazon SQS ( /products/amazon-sqs-reviews ) for asynchronous messaging. It is part of our distributed system design, where we use it for asynchronous communication by posting a mess...
 

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: September 2025.
867,445 professionals have used our research since 2012.