Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
4th
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 July 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 26.1%, up from 22.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon SQS is 8.1%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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

"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."
"The most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."
"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 feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."
"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'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."
"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."
"One of the most valuable features of Amazon SQS is its event-driven invocation."
"It is stable and scalable."
"Amazon SQS provides faster search through indexing via OpenSearch."
"I am able to find out what's going on very easily."
"I think the tool is very reliable."
"The most valuable features of the solution are AWS Lambda services, ECS, and QuickSight reports, which are beneficial for data analysis."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon SQS is its scalability."
"The dead-letter queue is very helpful in maintaining the messages that come into the queue."
 

Cons

"The tool needs to improve its installation part which is lengthy. The product is already working on that aspect so that the complete installation gets completed within a month."
"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."
"The solution's stability needs improvement."
"One potential area would be the complexity of the initial setup."
"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."
"There are some stability issues."
"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."
"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 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."
"The solution is not available on-premises so that rules out any customers looking for the messaging solution on-premises."
"I cannot send a message to multiple people simultaneously. It can only be sent to one recipient."
"The search should be more user-friendly, allowing me to search for a longer period of time and return results faster."
"The retention period for messages could be improved. Currently, messages are retained for four or seven days."
"I do not think that this solution is easy to use and the documentation of this solution has a lot of problems and can be improved in the next release. Most of the time, the images in the document are from older versions."
"The tool needs improvement in user-friendliness and discoverability."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"I think the software is free."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"We use the open-source version."
"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"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 EC2 and other services, Amazon SQS' pricing is cheaper."
"Compared to the other options and based on what I have heard, Amazon SQS is relatively more expensive, but it is not insanely expensive."
"Amazon SQS is more affordable compared to other solutions."
"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."
"The pricing model is pay-as-you-use. It depends on your usage and configuration."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Message Queue (MQ) Software solutions are best for your needs.
860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
33%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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.
What needs improvement with ActiveMQ?
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 c...
What is your primary use case for ActiveMQ?
ActiveMQ inside AP is one of those powerful features because we generally use ActiveMQ for acting on incidents which do not involve any human interaction or personal activity. For example, you have...
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: June 2025.
860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.