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ActiveMQ vs Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ActiveMQ19.8%
IBM MQ21.0%
VMware Tanzu Data Solutions9.3%
Other49.900000000000006%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache Kafka4.0%
Apache Flink8.9%
Databricks8.1%
Other79.0%
Streaming Analytics
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PubSub+ Platform2.5%
SCOM9.9%
ServiceNow IT Operations Management8.4%
Other79.2%
Event Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

MD
Software Engineer III at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Integration capabilities enhance message handling without human interaction
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 clusters, but AP is not providing such options currently. It only provides time, request response timing, the number of requests that need to be handled, and protocol types. The configuration needs to be broadened inside AP to perform in a better way. Sometimes issues arise in production with ActiveMQ due to the number of requests. For example, if you have configured one thousand requests at a time and it receives one thousand and one messages at a time, it breaks. The configuration aspect is tricky. When configurations are proper, ActiveMQ almost has zero errors.
Varuns Ug - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Event-driven workflows have improved payment processing and reduced latency across services
One area for improvement in Apache Kafka is operational complexity. Running and maintaining an Apache Kafka cluster at scale involves handling partitions, replications, retention policies, rebalancing, and monitoring, which requires strong expertise. Debugging and observability can be complex in large systems, as troubleshooting issues such as consumer lag, offset management problems, or uneven partition distribution can become challenging. The learning curve is relatively steep, requiring a good understanding of concepts such as partition, consumer group, offset commit, and delivery guarantees to avoid subtle production issues. One area where Apache Kafka could improve is the developer experience around debugging and tracing events end to end. In distributed systems, when an event passes through multiple topics and consumer services, troubleshooting can become time-consuming. Better built-in observability for tracing event flows across services would be very useful.
Deepankar Bbhowmick - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Messaging design has become visual and reliable and now supports fast microservice communication
The unique functions I appreciate about PubSub+ Platform are that it allows me to design my solution in a graphical manner, which is not available in many other products, and the design can also be pushed to the actual infrastructure layer, making it quite advantageous. Mesh technology is useful in scenarios where different geographies have to be connected, although such situations are not commonly found. It is beneficial but not a super-used feature of PubSub+ Platform. The event replay function is quite mature in PubSub+ Platform, allowing me to replay messages that are days in the past, which is a good feature. The main benefits PubSub+ Platform provides for the end-user include building a robust and scalable system with very low network latency, which improves the customer experience, whether using mobile phones or applications. This type of messaging framework is extremely important, and Solace is a very good product in that space. Nowadays, most applications are built using microservices technology, with small microservices interchanging messages via PubSub+ Platform. Without it, realizing a scalable system would not be possible; for example, one cannot have Netflix or similar services that require quick data transit and a good user experience, ensuring that data cannot be lost in transit. The analytics part of PubSub+ Platform is quite useful as it can connect with many analytical software tools, mainly for analysis of system logs, such as Splunk, DataDog, or Prometheus. It has the flexibility to connect with any of these and supports OpenTelemetry, which is not available in many other products, making traceability very easy. I can see how a message travels from a source system to the target system, end-to-end, along with what happens to that message along the path, making the analytics quite good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."
"I'm impressed, I think that Active MQ is great."
"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."
"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."
"The most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."
"ActiveMQ is a good solution; it is low cost, high performance, and scalable."
"It’s a JMS broker, so the fact that it can allow for asynchronous communication is valuable."
"Kafka was at the base of our system architecture."
"When comparing it with other messaging and integration platforms, this is one of the best rated."
"The high availability is valuable. It is robust, and we can rely on it for a huge amount of data."
"The solution is scalable, and we have over a thousand users using this solution and will most likely increase the number of users because we have tested 100,000 messages per second, which is impressive."
"Kafka is an open-source tool that's easy to use in our country, and the command line interface is powerful."
"Apache Kafka has helped our organization handle larger volumes without affecting the infrastructure load."
"The most valuable feature is the documentation, which is good and clear."
"Kafka is an open-source tool that's easy to use in our country, and the command line interface is powerful."
"The event portal and the diversity of deployment options in a hybrid landscape are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was done manually with a file, and it can be done instantly live."
"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."
"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."
"When we went to add another installation in our private cloud, it was easy. We received support from Solace and the install was seamless with no issues."
"Solace has been incident free in HA deployment for seven years."
"The valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the speed of processing, publishing, and consumption."
 

Cons

"There are some stability issues."
"Apache ActiveMQ needs some improvement playing with multi-platform message clients."
"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."
"Another area of improvement is the monitoring console, which is kind of rudimentary."
"I do not recommend ActiveMQ over Apache Kafka partly because I don't know who provides support for the solution."
"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."
"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."
"Because this is an open-source project, there is no support. We don't have any help or anything like that."
"GUI for Kafka infrastructure monitoring and deployment"
"The solution could always add a few more features to enhance its usage."
"Managing Apache Kafka can be a challenge, but there are solutions. I used the newest release, as it seems they have removed Zookeeper, which should make it easier. Confluent provides a fully managed Kafka platform, in which the cluster does not need to be managed."
"I would like to see real-time event-based consumption of messages rather than the traditional way through a loop."
"The management tool could be improved."
"If the graphical user interface was easier for the Kafka administration it would be much better. Right now, you need to use the program with the command-line interface. If the graphical user interface was easier, it could be a better product."
"The speed isn't as fast as RabbitMQ, even though the solution touts itself as very quick."
"Kafka has a lot of monitors, but sometimes it's most important to just have a simple monitor."
"It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."
"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."
"Some of the feature's gaps with some of the open-source vendors have been closed in a lot of ways. Being more agile and addressing those earlier could be an area for improvement."
"The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls."
"If you create one event in the past, you cannot resend it."
"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."
"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."
"I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"I think the software is free."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"We use the open-source version."
"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"It is open source software."
"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution."
"It's quite affordable considering the value it provides."
"This is an open-source solution and is free to use."
"The cost can vary depending on the provider and the specific flavor or version you use. I'm not very knowledgeable about the pricing details."
"We use the free version."
"Apache Kafka is free."
"We are using the free version of Apache Kafka."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
5%
Healthcare Company
4%
 

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 Business32
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise51
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with ActiveMQ?
Pricing is something to consider with ActiveMQ, though cloud pricing is not costly and depends upon the compute selec...
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 advice do you have for others considering ActiveMQ?
We have not deployed ActiveMQ's flexible clustering as that requirement is not present for us. We only use active-pas...
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...
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.
What needs improvement with Apache Kafka?
The long-term data storage feature in Apache Kafka depends on the setting, but I believe the maximum duration is seve...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PubSub+ Event Broker?
Pricing-wise for PubSub+ Platform, I find it a little expensive, so I would rate it at six.
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
Potential areas for improvement in PubSub+ Platform are its authentication mechanisms, which could be slightly better...
What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?
PubSub+ Platform is primarily used for guaranteed delivery of messages from across systems, for microservice-based de...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AMQ
No data available
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

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 
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Apache, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Message Queue (MQ) Software. Updated: May 2026.
895,990 professionals have used our research since 2012.