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 8.5, and holds a 22.0% mindshare in the category. Apache Kafka is ranked #7 in SA , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 4.2% 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

4,376 Views
4,157 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 90 Apache Kafka reviews

4,467 Views
1,340 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 18 PubSub+ Platform reviews

2,672 Views
828 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: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Message Queue (MQ) Software

March 2026

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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:

Mindshare comparison

Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ActiveMQ	22.0%
IBM MQ	22.7%
Red Hat AMQ	8.4%
Other	46.9%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Apache Kafka	4.2%
Apache Flink	10.9%
Databricks	9.0%
Other	75.9%

Streaming Analytics

Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
PubSub+ Platform	2.0%
ServiceNow IT Operations Management	11.8%
OpsRamp	9.4%
Other	76.8%

Event Monitoring

Featured Reviews

MoumitaDas

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.

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Bruno da Silva

Senior Manager at Timestamp, SA

Have worked closely with the team to deploy streaming and transaction pipelines in a flexible cloud environment

The interface of Apache Kafka could be significantly better. I started working with Apache Kafka from its early days, and I have seen many improvements. The back office functionality could be enhanced. Scaling up continues to be a challenge, though it is much easier now than it was in the beginning.

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reviewer2714190

freelancer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Offers a seamless way to decouple applications, providing impressive performance and flexibility

Regarding improving the PubSub+ Platform, I'm not sure about the pricing aspect, but I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka. That's the only concern I can mention; otherwise, it was as impressive as Kafka, better than Kafka based on my experience working on the Solace and Kafka white paper.

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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 fully recommend this product, but you need to have some expertise working with JMS and asynchronous tasks."

"The installation was straightforward."

"The installation was pretty straightforward, and it was also easy setting up HA using an NFS share for hosting the KahaDB."

"Depending on the problem, AMQ resolved nearly everything."

"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes."

"It's a very easy-to-use product, documentation is sufficient, and anyone with a bit of knowledge about technology, like Java, can quickly set it up and it could be up and running in minutes."

"It is cost effective and is a much cheaper solution compared to Weblogic or IBM MQ."

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

More ActiveMQ pros

"Apache Kafka is a mature product and can handle a massive amount of data in real time for data consumption."

"I believe that the speed, and especially the performance, are very good features."

"The solution is very easy to set up."

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

"The stream processing is a very valuable aspect of the solution for us."

"This solution is robust and delivers messages quickly."

"There are numerous possibilities that can be explored. While it may be challenging to fully comprehend the potential advantages, one key aspect is the ability to establish a proper sequence of events rather than simply dealing with a jumbled group of occurrences. These events possess their own timestamps, even if they were not initially provided with one, and are arranged in a chronological order that allows for a clear understanding of the progression of the events."

"Kafka allows you to handle huge amounts of data and classify it into different categories. If you have huge amounts of data, Kafka is a very good solution for data classification."

More Apache Kafka pros

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

"It is a product that is more like a switch or router, where you install it, then it keeps on working."

"The topic hierarchy is pretty flexible. Once you have the subject defined just about anybody who knows Java can come onboard. The APIs are all there."

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

"I rate the PubSub+ Platform a 9 out of 10."

"With all these new features in place it increases our productivity by something like 50 percent."

"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."

"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."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."

"Apache ActiveMQ needs some improvement playing with multi-platform message clients."

"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."

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

"Even though there is support from many open source communities, there is still weakness in ease-of-use and ease-of-configuration for more complex scenarios."

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

"We have had problems with the message selector as when the queue size reaches a certain level, the message selector does not have enough time to run and finish before the JMS reply timeout."

More ActiveMQ cons

"The management tool could be improved."

"The solution can improve by having automation for developers. We have done many manual calculations and it has been difficult but if it was automated it would be much better."

"GUI for Kafka infrastructure monitoring and deployment"

"Apache Kafka has performance issues that cause it to lag."

"Kafka requires non-trivial expertise with DevOps to deploy in production at scale."

"They need to have a proper portal to do everything because, at this moment, Kafka is lagging in this regard."

"Too much dependency on the zookeeper and leader selection is still the bottleneck for Kafka implementation."

"Kafka can allow for duplicates, which isn't as helpful in some of our scenarios."

More Apache Kafka cons

"The deployment process is complex."

"A challenge we currently have is Solace's ability to integrate with single sign-on in our Active Directory and other single sign-on tools and platforms that any company would have."

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

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

"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."

"I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka."

"We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building."

"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the open-source version."

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

"It’s open source, ergo free."

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

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

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

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

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

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

"Kafka is more reasonably priced than IBM MQ."

"Licensing issues are not applicable. Apache licensing makes it simple with almost zero cost for the software itself."

"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution."

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

"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."

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

"Apache Kafka has an open-source pricing."

More Apache Kafka pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

23%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Retailer

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	17

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	49

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	14

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 selec...

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...

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 Apache Kafka?

The long-term data storage feature in Apache Kafka depends on the setting, but I believe the maximum duration is seve...

See all answers

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

I do not know about the pricing of PubSub+ Platform because I did not manage the instance.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?

Additional in-line information about certain things on PubSub+ Platform could be more beneficial for new users who ar...

See all answers

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

I describe the main use cases for PubSub+ Platform as wanting to use it as a messaging queue pipeline for managing th...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 51% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 9% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 6% of the time

StormMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 2% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 13% of the time

Databricks vs Apache Kafka

Compared 12% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Pulsar vs Apache Kafka

Compared 6% of the time

SAS Event Stream Processing vs Apache Kafka

Compared 3% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 7% of the time

Software AG Universal Messaging vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Apache Flink vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Stream Analytics vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 5% of the time

More PubSub+ Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

April 2026

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

April 2026

Download Apache Kafka product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

March 2026

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 is designed for real-time message publishing and outstanding interoperability. With features like intuitive administration and topic filtering, it offers both stability and high performance for scalable deployments across diverse scenarios.

PubSub+ Platform enhances data integration with its event mesh and seamless protocol compatibility, providing a comprehensive solution for organizations tracking shipments, generating reports, and managing transactions. Its granular topic filtering and WAN optimization ensure high utility in event-driven applications and cloud deployments. Users highlight the platform's intuitive administration and ease of management, though some seek improved integration with third-party tools and enhanced observability. Concerns include scalability for large payloads and training resource availability. Despite its interface complexity, PubSub+ remains valuable for trading and market data distribution.

What are the key features of PubSub+ Platform?

Real-time messaging: Facilitates seamless communication across platforms.
Flexible topic hierarchy: Supports dynamic topic taxonomy for efficient data management.
Event mesh: Enhances integration and interoperability with diverse protocols.
Intuitive administration: Simplifies system management and configuration.
WAN optimization: Ensures efficient connectivity for global deployment.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Messaging stability: Offers consistent performance in dynamic environments.
Scalability: Provides seamless expansion to accommodate growing data volumes.
Security: Maintains robust protection for sensitive information.
Support and configuration: Accessible, reliable support, and UI-driven setup streamline the management.

PubSub+ Platform is widely implemented for asynchronous messaging in industries like finance for trading and market data, logistics for shipment tracking, and tech operations management. It enables companies to modernize applications while ensuring data accuracy and efficiency across global systems.

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

March 2026

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