ActiveMQ vs Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Platform 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 8.0, 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 3.0% 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 27 ActiveMQ reviews

6,237 Views
2,763 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 88 Apache Kafka reviews

944 Views
108 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 17 PubSub+ Platform reviews

1,106 Views
610 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

Apache Kafka

PubSub+ Platform

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Executive Summary

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

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Apache, Salesforce and others in Message Queue (MQ) Software.

To learn more, read our detailed Message Queue (MQ) Software Report (Updated: June 2025).

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Message Queue (MQ) Software

June 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:

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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BhanuChidigam

Sofware Engineering Manager at Wells Fargo

Performs well, high availability, and helpful support

We use approximately four people for the maintenance of the solution. My advice to others is this solution has high throughput and is used for many stock exchanges. For business critical use cases, such as processing financial transactions at a quick speed, I would recommend this solution. I rate PubSub+ Event Broker 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

"It provides the best support services."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."

"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 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."

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

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

"The initial setup and first deployment of ActiveMQ is fairly simple."

More ActiveMQ pros

"With Kafka, events and streaming are persistent, and multiple subscribers can consume the data. This is an advantage of Kafka compared to simple queue-based solutions."

"The publisher-subscriber pattern and low latency are also essential features that greatly piqued my interest."

"Kafka is scalable to any degree we want, and it has several connectors available for integration in multiple languages, making it easier for integration."

"The most valuable features of the solution revolve around areas like the latency part, where the tool offers very little latency and the sequencing part."

"It is easy to configure."

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

"Kafka, as compared with other messaging system options, is great for large scale message processing applications. It offers high throughput with built-in fault-tolerance and replication."

"The valuable features are the group community and support."

More Apache Kafka pros

"The valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the speed of processing, publishing, and consumption."

"When it comes to granularity, you can literally do anything regarding how the filtering works."

"In my assessment of Solace against other products — as I was responsible for evaluating various products and bringing the right tool into companies in the past — I worked with multiple platforms like RabbitMQ, Confluent, Kafka, and various other tools in the market. But I found the event mesh capability to be a very interesting as well as fulfilling capability, towards what we want to achieve from a digital-integration-strategy point of view... It's distributed, yet it is intelligently connected. It can also span and I can plug and play any number of brokers into the event mesh, so it's a great deal. That's a differentiator."

"The most useful features has been the WAN optimization and probably the HybridEdge, which requires some third-party adapters or plugins. The idea that we can position Solace as a protocol-agnostic message transport fabric is key to our company having all manners of asynchronous messaging protocols from MQ, Kafka, JMS, etc. I really like the WAN optimization: Send once over a WAN, then distribute locally as many times as there are subscribers."

"One of the main reasons for using PubSub+ is that it is a proper event manager that can handle events in a reactive way."

"We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code."

"The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable. It can be used for any kind of business where you've got multiple users who need information. Any company, such as LinkedIn, with a huge number of subscribers and any business, such as publishing, supermarket, airline, or shipping can use it."

"The event portal and the diversity of deployment options in a hybrid landscape are the most valuable features."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"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."

"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 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."

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

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

"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."

"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."

More ActiveMQ cons

"Maintaining and configuring Apache Kafka can be challenging, especially when you want to fine-tune its behavior."

"would like to see real-time event-based consumption of messages rather than the traditional way through a loop. The traditional messaging system works by listing and looping with a small wait to check to see what the messages are. A push system is where you have something that is ready to receive a message and when the message comes in and hits the partition, it goes straight to the consumer versus the consumer having to pull. I believe this consumer approach is something they are working on and may come in an upcoming release. However, that is message consumption versus message listening."

"Apache Kafka can improve by making the documentation more user-friendly. It would be beneficial if we could explain to customers in more detail how the solution operates but the documentation get highly technical quickly. For example, if they had a simple page where we can show the customers how it works without the need for the customer to have a computer science background."

"The third party is not very stable and sometimes you have problems with this component. There are some developments in newer versions and we're about to try them out, but I'm not sure if it closes the gap."

"The product is good, but it needs implementation and on-going support. The whole cloud engagement model has made the adoption of Kafka better due to PaaS (Amazon Kinesis, a fully managed service by AWS)."

"The solution can improve its cloud support."

"Pulsar gives more scalability to an even grouping, but Apache Kafka is used more if you want to send something in a time series-based. If this does not matter to you then Pulsar could be more customizable. Apache Kafka is nothing but a streaming system with local storage."

"For the original Kafka, there is room for improvement in terms of latency spikes and resource consumption. It consumes a lot of memory."

More Apache Kafka cons

"We've pointed out some things with the DMR piece, the event mesh, in edge cases where we could see a problem. Something like 99 percent of users wouldn't ever see this problem, but it has to do with if you get multiple bad clients sending data over a WAN, for example. That could then impact other clients."

"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."

"We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building. A current workaround is using the message's header, where the business data can be put into this header and be used for a dynamic topic lookup. I want to see this in action when there are a couple of hundred cases live. E.g., how does it perform? From an administration perspective, is the ease of use there?"

"If you create one event in the past, you cannot resend it."

"The integrations could improve in PubSub+ Event Broker."

"The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively."

"The ease of management could be approved. The GUI is very good, but to configure and manage these devices programmatically in the software version is not easy. For example, if I would like to spin up a new software broker, then I could in theory use the API, but it would require a considerable amount of development effort to do so. There should be a tool, or something that Solace supports, that we could use for this, e.g., a platform like Terraform where we could use infrastructure as code to configure our source appliances."

"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"It’s open source, ergo free."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

"I think the software is free."

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

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

"We use the open-source version."

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

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

"This is an open-source solution and is free to use."

"The solution is open source."

"Running a Kafka cluster can be expensive, especially if you need to scale it up to handle large amounts of data."

"Kafka is more reasonably priced than IBM MQ."

"It's a bit cheaper compared to other Q applications."

"Apache Kafka has an open-source pricing."

"Apache Kafka is free."

More Apache Kafka pricing and cost advice

"We are looking for something that will add value and fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only."

"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."

"Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"Having a free version is critical for our technology operations use case. This is primarily because our technology operations team is a cost center in our company. They are not profit drivers and having a free version for installation will probably meet our needs. Even for production, it'll support up to a 100,000 messages per second. I don't think in technology operations that we have that many events and alerts from our detection tools. Even if I have 20 or 30 event detection products out there, they're only going to publish the things which are critical or warnings. I don't think we'll ever reach a 100,000 messages per second."

"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."

"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."

"There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

34%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

29%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

34%

Computer Software Company

11%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

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?

With ActiveMQ there should be more options. If you work with other technologies, for example, Java, there are many op...

See all answers

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 ...

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...

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

What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?

Regarding improving the PubSub+ Platform, I'm not sure about the pricing aspect, but I heard that it is quite expensi...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?

My typical use case for the PubSub+ Platform is as an event-driven solution for communication between two components.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering PubSub+ Event Broker?

I have experience working with Kafka, PubSub+ Platform, and IBM MQ, all three of them. We are customers, meaning my c...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 53% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 17% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

EMQX 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 14% of the time

Amazon SQS vs Apache Kafka

Compared 13% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs Apache Kafka

Compared 2% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 23% of the time

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon SQS vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Databricks vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon EventBridge vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 4% of the time

More PubSub+ Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

June 2025

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

June 2025

Download Apache Kafka product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

June 2025

Download PubSub+ Platform product report

Also Known As

AMQ

No data available

PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal

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

PubSub+ Platform supports real-time shipment tracking, IT event management in multiclouds, and connects legacy and cloud-native systems for application modernization. It's utilized for trading, streaming market data, and app-to-app messaging, enhancing event-driven architectures with reliable message queuing.

Organizations adopt PubSub+ to efficiently transport events across hybrid and cloud environments, managing audit trails and long processing tasks. The platform aids integration through dynamic data publication, event mesh capabilities, and WAN optimization. Features like seamless integration, protocol agnosticism, and flexible topic hierarchy enhance versatility. Solace Admin Utility simplifies configuration and management, while the event portal allows hybrid deployment.

What are the key features of PubSub+ Platform?

Dynamic Data Publication: Enables flexible and responsive data handling.
Event Mesh Capabilities: Facilitates efficient event transportation.
WAN Optimization: Enhances data transfer across networks.
Protocol Agnosticism: Supports a wide range of protocols for integration.
Flexible Topic Hierarchy: Allows detailed and organized data exchange.
Solace Admin Utility: Provides intuitive configuration and management.
Granular Topic Filtering: Offers precise data filtering options.
Guaranteed Messaging: Ensures reliable message delivery.

What benefits or ROI should users consider?

Seamless Integration: Reduces complexity in connecting systems.
Performance and Scaling: Supports high-load environments efficiently.
Asynchronous Messaging: Improves application performance.
Robust Support System: Provides guidance and problem resolution.

PubSub+ is implemented in industries requiring real-time data handling and integration between disparate systems. Financial institutions use it for trading and streaming market data, while logistics companies benefit from real-time shipment tracking. Enterprises apply it to modernize operations by connecting legacy systems with cloud-native applications, enhancing their architecture and ensuring data reliability across environments.

Solace

Sample Customers

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

Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest

FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet

Buyer's Guide

Message Queue (MQ) Software

June 2025

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