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ActiveMQ vs Apache Kafka vs VMware Tanzu Data Solutions 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
Streaming Analytics
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Prashant-Sharma - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Snehasish Das - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
Sushma Polavarapu - PeerSpot reviewer
Create essential reporting scripts with simplicity but has some operational challenges
We mainly create functions and scripts required for reporting The product is not complex; I do not have to create stored procedures, functions, or views. It's just simple to use. There is general room for improvement. I have been using it for five years. I have faced stability issues, mainly…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."
"Message broadcasting: There could be a use case sending the same message to all consumers. So as a producer, I broadcast the message to a topic. Then, whichever consumers are subscribed to the topic can consume the same message."
"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."
"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."
"We value ActiveMQ for its performance, throughput, and low latency, especially in handling large volumes of data and sequential management of topics."
"It’s a JMS broker, so the fact that it can allow for asynchronous communication is valuable."
"The ability to partition data on Kafka is valuable."
"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."
"Excellent speeds for publishing messages faster."
"One of the most valuable features I have found is Kafka Connect."
"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."
"Apache Kafka is actually a distributed commit log. That is different than most messaging and queuing systems before it."
"Good horizontal scaling and design."
"Kafka is an open-source tool that's easy to use in our country, and the command line interface is powerful."
"Very sophisticated routing control and priority messaging capabilities"
"We have been able to set up a messaging system that facilitates data integration between the software modules that we sell."
"It's one of the fastest databases in the market. It's easy to use. From a maintenance perspective it's a good product. The segmentation, or architecture of the product is different than other databases such as Oracle. So even in 10 years, the data distribution for such segments will not affect other segments. The query performance of the product, for complex queries, is very good. It has good integration with Hadoop."
"The most valuable feature for me is that it is open source. The licensing costs are really low and they are transparent."
"It is easy to use. The addition of more queues and more services can be managed very easily."
"We use VMware RabbitMQ to transfer information from one point to another."
"Companies can scale the solution, so long as they have server room."
"The stability of this solution was very good."
 

Cons

"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."
"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."
"There are some stability issues."
"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."
"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."
"I would rate the stability a five out of ten because sometimes it gets stuck, and we have to restart it. We"
"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."
"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."
"Lacks elasticity and the ability to scale down."
"The user interface is one weakness. Sometimes, our data isn't as accessible as we'd like. It takes a lot of work to retrieve the data and the index."
"The solution should be easier to manage. It needs to improve its visualization feature in the next release."
"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."
"The graphical user environment is currently lacking."
"For the original Kafka, there is room for improvement in terms of latency spikes and resource consumption. It consumes a lot of memory."
"The model where you create the integration or the integration scenario needs improvement."
"In the data sharing space, the performance of Apache Kafka could be improved."
"Maintenance is time-consuming."
"they need to interact more with customers. They need to explain the features, especially when there are new releases of Greenplum. I know just from information I've found that it has other features, it can be used to for analytics, for integration with Big Data, Hadoop. They need to focus on this part with the customer."
"The user interface could be improved."
"The product is pretty hard to configure."
"Lacks sufficient inbuilt machine-learning functions for complex use cases."
"Implementation takes a long time."
"Scalability issues are present."
"RabbitMQ is clearly better supported on Linux than it is on Windows. There are idiosyncrasies in the Windows version that are not there on Linux."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"We use the open-source version."
"I think the software is free."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"The solution is open source; it's free to use."
"Running a Kafka cluster can be expensive, especially if you need to scale it up to handle large amounts of data."
"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution."
"Kafka is open-source and it is cheaper than any other product."
"It's quite affordable considering the value it provides."
"It's a bit cheaper compared to other Q applications."
"Apache Kafka is an open-sourced solution. There are fees if you want the support, and I would recommend it for enterprises. There are annual subscriptions available."
"When starting to look at a distributed message system, look for a cloud solution first. It is an easier entry point than an on-premises hardware solution."
"The solution's pricing is cost-effective as it does not involve significant expenses. Licensing is required only for the server, while clients do not need any licensing. Therefore, it proves to be a cost-efficient option."
"It is an open-source product."
"It is the best product with best fit for price/performance customer objectives."
"are using the open-source version, which can be used free of cost."
"It is an open-source platform. Although, we have to pay for additional features."
"Pricing is good compared to other products. It's fine."
"The pricing is okay."
"We are using the open-source version of this solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
34%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
4%
 

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.
What needs improvement with ActiveMQ?
We need to address the non-deterministic load issues. Sometimes, ActiveMQ either restarts automatically or goes into ...
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...
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 do you like most about Apache Kafka?
Apache Kafka is an open-source solution that can be used for messaging or event processing.
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.
How does IBM MQ compare with VMware RabbitMQ?
IBM MQ has a great reputation behind it, and this solution is very robust with great stability. It is easy to use, si...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Greenplum?
It’s an open-source solution. There are no expenses for using it.
 

Also Known As

AMQ
No data available
Greenplum, Pivotal Greenplum, VMware RabbitMQ, VMware Tanzu GemFire, VMware Postgres
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc. 
Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest
General Electric, Conversant, China CITIC Bank, Aridhia, Purdue University
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Apache, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Message Queue (MQ) Software. Updated: May 2025.
851,371 professionals have used our research since 2012.