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ActiveMQ vs EMQX 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

ActiveMQ
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
EMQX
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
IoT Connectivity (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 19.8%, down from 26.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of EMQX is 2.6%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ActiveMQ19.8%
EMQX2.6%
Other77.6%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

NS
Sr. Manager - Digital at IndiGo
Offers diverse messaging protocols and excellent cloud support
In my current organization, I'm only working with ActiveMQ. I previously worked with IBM WebSphere MQ The features of ActiveMQ and WebSphere MQ fundamentally do the same thing. From my experience, I prefer WebSphere MQ. Both are very sturdy solutions; there is no doubt. Both are sturdy and…
AP
Senior Software Engineer
Connected millions of iot devices and manage real time pub sub control and flexible access rules
When going with the open-source EMQX version, there are limitations provided. For example, the webhooks use case cannot be scaled to as large a scale compared to the enterprise edition of EMQX. The open-source version helps a great deal with work in the company. The way this resource helps nurture the IoT device paradigm is greatly helpful for developers working newly on this system because the onboarding part of EMQX is very easy and developer-friendly. Someone who wants to dive into it can easily implement and make the system robust based on the technologies it provides. EMQX provides API connections for applications. HTTP calls can be made to EMQX to get updates from the client. Those connections should be made asynchronously. The webhook part handles this well, but when it comes to the API part, when the load and payload of the MQTT topics and messages are very heavy, sometimes unknown errors occur, and logs and errors must be found. When a specific log session is created for that client, the readability of those logs is not good. The platform itself does not need improvement, but when it comes to developer-friendly implementations of EMQX, there are some pain points that need attention. The visibility of logs, error logs, and information logs inside the built-in monitoring needs work because developers, when they implement code or any kind of specific tools, need proper control over the system. Without that control, there is no point in implementing anything at all. The monitoring part needs work. When it comes to the flow chart of how different clients are connected with different devices, there is a feature inside EMQX called Flow. When that Flow is in place, clients (devices) should be controllable from that Flow itself. These are the most important improvements that need to be addressed.

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 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."
"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."
"ActiveMQ is a good solution; it is low cost, high performance, and scalable."
"The main function I find valuable in ActiveMQ is facilitating message transfer within the client's internal network. ActiveMQ handles the message transfer from the internal network to the cloud. Regarding multi-protocols, we use different approaches based on client capabilities. Some clients connect for real-time data transfer, using database queries for periodic updates every ten minutes. We collect data from multiple clients, ensuring we get real-time sensor values where possible and periodic updates for others."
"Depending on the problem, AMQ resolved nearly everything."
"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes."
"It’s a JMS broker, so the fact that it can allow for asynchronous communication is valuable."
"The outcomes from using EMQX are very cost-saving for us because we previously used the MQTT Mosquitto broker, and when I compare Mosquitto with EMQX, EMQX is far better than Mosquitto and other protocols."
"EMQX helped me complete my project perfectly because when I compared it to other platforms, EMQX truly fits my needs and my project, allowing me to explain my output more clearly to my lecturer, and ultimately I received a good grade, so it has been very helpful."
"EMQX will boost your product sampling rate and transmission so that you can achieve a large amount of data without any loss while transmitting through the internet."
"EMQX has positively impacted my organization because we didn't get any issues about MQTT; it just works."
"EMQX has positively impacted my organization in many ways, particularly by making our main agenda of getting stock details and connecting users to our real-time protocol much easier."
"The best features EMQX offers in my experience are that it can send messages for a large number of customers with a very high message-per-second rate while consuming low resources."
"EMQX is a solid open-source project for making IoT devices connect anywhere in the world."
"EMQX remains live and matured, allowing us to scale it, and we continue using EMQX without requiring to switch to any other offerings as it still works best and is resilient."
 

Cons

"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."
"There is need for more protocols and maybe they should provide documentation on the internet as well."
"The solution's stability needs improvement."
"The solution can improve the other protocols to equal the AMQ protocol they offer."
"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."
"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."
"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."
"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."
"If you want to improve further, the SSL certificate and TLS certificate have overhead in serverless EMQX."
"I think EMQX can be improved by providing a uniform UI and login feature that we can use in the dashboard."
"On EMQX improvement side, I saw certain frameworks such as NanoMQTT and others claiming to be much more performant than EMQX, so maybe the newer version of EMQX can look into those aspects for potential improvements, but I do not have insight on the latest version of EMQX to know whether it has already addressed this or not."
"EMQX is a good MQTT broker but the historian is simple."
"The visibility of logs, error logs, and information logs inside the built-in monitoring needs work because developers, when they implement code or any kind of specific tools, need proper control over the system."
"To improve EMQX, I think it should reduce costs, save time when sending messages, and improve reliability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"I think the software is free."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"We use the open-source version."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
5%
Media Company
20%
Legal Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
No data available
 

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 selection. Focusing on AI is essential nowadays. AI capabilities require improvement ...
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-passive configuration. On a scale of one to ten, I rate ActiveMQ a ten out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for EMQX?
We have seen specific outcomes such as cost savings since switching to EMQX, as we are using it for trial purposes and have some licenses based on our usage, meaning we do not need to pay for what ...
What needs improvement with EMQX?
I think EMQX can be improved by providing a uniform UI and login feature that we can use in the dashboard. Additionally, it seems to be a single tenant setup. If we are using a multi-tenant structu...
What is your primary use case for EMQX?
My main use case for EMQX is using it as a broker for MQTT. In our projects, we use EMQX as an MQTT broker because we are an IoT-based company where devices are provisioned or connected to our clou...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AMQ
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc. 
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveMQ vs. EMQX and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.