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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
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
IoT Connectivity (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 19.8%, down from 26.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of EMQX is 2.8%, 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%
EMQX2.8%
Other77.4%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

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.
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

"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."
"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."
"ActiveMQ is a great messaging system for synchronizing call and "fire and forget" types of calls."
"Loose coupling of components by the use of messaging queues allows for completely separate component life cycles and ownership within the organization."
"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."
"We value ActiveMQ for its performance, throughput, and low latency, especially in handling large volumes of data and sequential management of topics."
"For us, initial setup was VERY easy since we were using the Apache-provided Docker image for ActiveMQ, which alleviates a lot of the traditional pains involved with installing new software."
"It is cost effective and is a much cheaper solution compared to Weblogic or IBM MQ."
"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."
"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 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 is a solid open-source project for making IoT devices connect anywhere in the world."
 

Cons

"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."
"Because this is an open-source project, there is no support. We don't have any help or anything like that."
"Message management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."
"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."
"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."
"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."
"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."
"Configuring ActiveMQ brokers for working in a cluster is difficult and has many constraints."
"To improve EMQX, I think it should reduce costs, save time when sending messages, and improve reliability."
"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."
"EMQX is a good MQTT broker but the historian is simple."
"If you want to improve further, the SSL certificate and TLS certificate have overhead in serverless EMQX."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"We use the open-source version."
"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."
"I think the software is free."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
5%
Legal Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Media Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

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.
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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: May 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.