ActiveMQ vs Apache Kafka comparison

The compared ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka solutions aren't in the same category. ActiveMQ is ranked #2 in MQ , with an average rating of 8.1, and holds a 26.2% mindshare in the category. Apache Kafka is ranked #8 in SA , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 3.5% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of ActiveMQ users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Apache Kafka users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 28 ActiveMQ reviews

6,175 Views
5,681 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 88 Apache Kafka reviews

5,201 Views
884 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

Apache Kafka

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Message Queue (MQ) Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveMQ vs. Apache Kafka Report (Updated: May 2024).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Apache Kafka

May 2024

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Helped 865,295 peers since 2012

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

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (2nd)

Apache Kafka

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (8th)

Mindshare comparison

ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. ActiveMQ is designed for Message Queue (MQ) Software and holds a mindshare of 26.2%, up 23.1% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 3.5% mindshare, up 2.0% since last year.

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

Eyob Alemu

Technical Director at NIDP

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.

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Snehasish Das

Technology Leader at eTCaaS

Data streaming transforms real-time data movement with impressive scalability

I worked with Apache Kafka for customers in the financial industry and OTT platforms. They use Kafka particularly for data streaming. Companies offering movie and entertainment as a service, similar to Netflix, use Kafka Apache Kafka offers unique data streaming. It allows the use of data in…

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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

"I am impressed with the tool’s latency. Also, the messages in ActiveMQ wait in a queue. The messages will start to move when the system reopens after getting stuck."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More ActiveMQ pros

"I use it for real-time processing workloads. So, in some instances, it's like IoT data. We need to put it into a data lake."

"Kafka makes data streaming asynchronous and decouples the reliance of events on consumers."

"Kafka is scalable. It can manage a high volume of data from many sources."

"Apache Kafka's most valuable features include clustering and sharding...It is a pretty stable solution."

"The most valuable feature is the messaging function and reliability."

"When comparing it with other messaging and integration platforms, this is one of the best rated."

"Apache Kafka offers unique data streaming."

"Resiliency is great and also the fact that it handles different data formats."

More Apache Kafka pros

Cons

"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."

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

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

"There are some stability issues."

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

"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."

"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."

"The solution's stability needs improvement."

More ActiveMQ cons

"In the data sharing space, the performance of Apache Kafka could be improved."

"Observability could be improved."

"Kafka is a nightmare to administer."

"The UI is based on command line. It would be helpful if they could come up with a simpler user interface."

"The GUI tools for monitoring and support are still very basic and not very rich. There is no help in determining a shard key for performance."

"There have been some challenges with monitoring Apache Kafka, as there are currently only a few production-grade solutions available, which are all under enterprise license and therefore not easily accessible. The speaker has not had access to any of these solutions and has instead relied on tools, such as Dynatrace, which do not provide sufficient insight into the Apache Kafka system. While there are other tools available, they do not offer the same level of real-time data as enterprise solutions."

"I suggest using cloud services because the solution is expensive if you are using it on-premises."

"Some vendors don't offer extra features for monitoring."

More Apache Kafka cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"I think the software is free."

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

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

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

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

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"It is approximately $600,000 USD."

"I rate Apache Kafka's pricing a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. There are no additional costs apart from the licensing fees for Apache Kafka."

"Kafka is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."

"Kafka is more reasonably priced than IBM MQ."

"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution and there are no fees, but there are fees associated with confluence, which are based on subscription."

"The solution is open source; it's free to use."

"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution."

"I was using the product's free version."

More Apache Kafka pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

33%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

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?

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 are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?

Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...

See all answers

What do you like most about Apache Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open-source solution that can be used for messaging or event processing.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Kafka?

Its pricing is reasonable. It's not always about cost, but about meeting specific needs.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 50% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 17% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 6% of the time

Redis vs ActiveMQ

Compared 2% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 12% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 12% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 11% of the time

Informatica Data Engineering Streaming vs Apache Kafka

Compared 3% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

August 2025

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

August 2025

Download Apache Kafka 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

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming platform that serves as a central hub for handling real-time data streams. It allows efficient publishing, subscribing, and processing of data from various sources like applications, servers, and sensors.

Kafka's core benefits include high scalability for big data pipelines, fault tolerance ensuring continuous operation despite node failures, low latency for real-time applications, and decoupling of data producers from consumers.

Key features include topics for organizing data streams, producers for publishing data, consumers for subscribing to data, brokers for managing clusters, and connectors for easy integration with various data sources.

Large organizations use Kafka for real-time analytics, log aggregation, fraud detection, IoT data processing, and facilitating communication between microservices.

Apache

Sample Customers

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

Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Apache Kafka

May 2024

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. Apache Kafka

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