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 26.4% mindshare in the category. Apache Kafka is ranked #8 in SA , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 2.8% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of ActiveMQ users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Apache Kafka users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 26 ActiveMQ reviews

6,648 Views
4,133 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 87 Apache Kafka reviews

899 Views
721 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 16 PubSub+ Platform reviews

1,139 Views
841 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, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Message Queue (MQ) Software.

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

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Message Queue (MQ) Software

May 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

Prashant-Sharma

Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Allows for asynchronous communication, enabling services to operate independently but issues with stability

The feature of ActiveMQ which I feel is good is its ability to have DLP, the later queues. If something goes wrong with the platform, it retries. Even if it fails, it goes to DLP, and later we can rescan the same event for processing. The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable.

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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

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

"It provides the best support services."

"It’s a JMS broker, so the fact that it can allow for asynchronous communication is valuable."

"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."

"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."

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

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

"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."

More ActiveMQ pros

"I have seen a return on investment with this solution."

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

"Apache Kafka is effective when dealing with large volumes of data flowing at high speeds, requiring real-time processing."

"Kafka's most valuable feature is its user-friendliness."

"Apache Kafka is scalable. It is easy to add brokers."

"Robust and delivers messages quickly."

"The most valuable feature is that it can handle high volume."

"Kafka provides us with a way to store the data used for analytics. That's the big selling point. There's very good log management."

More Apache Kafka pros

"As of now, the most valuable aspects are the topic-based subscription and the fanout exchange that we are using."

"Some valuable features include reconnecting topics, placing queues, and direct connections to MongoDB. The platform provides a dashboard to monitor the status of messages, such as how many have been processed or delivered, which is helpful for tracking performance."

"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."

"We've built a lot of products into it and it's been quite easy to feed market data onto the systems and put entitlements and controls around that. That was a big win for us when we were consolidating our platforms down. Trying to have one event bus, one messaging bus, for the whole globe, and consolidate everything over time, has been key for us. We've been able to do that through one API, even if it's across the different languages."

"Guaranteed Messaging allows for us to transport messages between on-prem and the cloud without any loss of data."

"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."

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

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."

"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."

"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."

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

"The solution's stability needs improvement."

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

"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."

More ActiveMQ cons

"Data pulling and restart ability need improving."

"There are some latency problems with Kafka."

"Apache Kafka can improve by adding a feature out of the box which allows it to deliver only one message."

"One of the things I am mostly looking for is that once the message is picked up from Kafka, it should not be visible or able to be consumed by other applications, or something along those lines. That feature is not present, but it is not a limitation or anything of the sort; rather, it is a desirable feature. The next release should include a feature that prevents messages from being consumed by other applications once they are picked up by Kafka."

"While the solution scales well and easily, you need to understand your future needs and prep for the peaks."

"More Windows support, I believe, is one area where it can improve."

"Kafka has a lot of monitors, but sometimes it's most important to just have a simple monitor."

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

More Apache Kafka cons

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

"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."

"One of the areas of improvement would be if we could tell the story a bit better about what an event mesh does or why an event mesh is foundational to a large enterprise that has a wide diversity of applications that are homegrown and a small number off the shelf."

"For improvements, I would suggest increasing the max payload size to a limit of 100MB or more. The current max payload size is limited to 5MB."

"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."

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

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

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the open-source version."

"It’s open source, ergo free."

"I think the software is free."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

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

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

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

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

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

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

"I would not subscribe to the Confluent platform, but rather stay on the free open source version. The extra cost wasn't justified."

"Apache Kafka is free."

"The price of the solution is low."

"Kafka is more reasonably priced than IBM MQ."

"Apache Kafka has an open-source pricing."

"It is approximately $600,000 USD."

"It's a premium product, so it is not price-effective for us."

More Apache Kafka pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"We have been really happy with the product licensing rates. It has been free for us, up to a 100,000 transactions per second, and all we have to do is pay for support. Making their product available and accessible to us has not been a problem at all."

"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."

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

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

"The licensing is dependent on the volume that is flowing. If you go for their support services, it will cost some more money, but I think it is worth it, especially if you are just starting your journey."

"The price of PubSub+ Event Broker is reasonable for the capability it offers. However, when compared to others solutions on the market it is expensive."

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

31%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

36%

Computer Software Company

12%

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?

We need to address the non-deterministic load issues. Sometimes, ActiveMQ either restarts automatically or goes into ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for ActiveMQ?

We have a digital ID platform that uses various services running on Kafka. There are two main endpoints where service...

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 do you like most about PubSub+ Event Broker?

The most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was don...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PubSub+ Event Broker?

The price of the solution is expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?

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

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 53% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 11% 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 15% of the time

Amazon SQS vs Apache Kafka

Compared 15% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 14% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 13% of the time

Databricks 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 8% 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

May 2025

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

May 2025

Download Apache Kafka product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

April 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

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May 2025

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