ActiveMQ vs IBM MQ comparison

Apache and IBM are both solutions in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category. Apache is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1, while IBM is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.6. Apache holds a 25.4% mindshare in MQ, compared to IBM’s 25.9% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of IBM users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 28 ActiveMQ reviews

5,859 Views
5,390 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

IBM MQ

Read 170 IBM MQ reviews

6,965 Views
5,015 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

IBM MQ

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

IBM MQ and ActiveMQ compete in the enterprise messaging category, where IBM MQ appears to have the upper hand in terms of enterprise-scale features and robustness. However, ActiveMQ's open-source flexibility and cost-effectiveness offer significant advantages in smaller or more agile environments.

Features: IBM MQ is highly valued for its scalability, stability, and robust integration capabilities, especially in enterprises that demand guaranteed message delivery and strong security. It manages large data volumes across diverse platforms. ActiveMQ stands out for its open-source nature, ease of use, and multi-protocol support, particularly suited for containerized environments and applications requiring lightweight, asynchronous communication.

Room for Improvement: IBM MQ could benefit from enhanced management and alerting tools, better API and cloud service integration, and improved high availability and migration features. ActiveMQ users often report challenges with configuring cluster brokers and seek improvements in stability, scalability, and enriched UI and monitoring tools. Each has distinct technical focus areas in need of modernization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM MQ is used across various environments such as on-premises and hybrid clouds, with generally favorable support feedback, despite occasional delays. ActiveMQ is praised for its simplicity in deployment, especially in public cloud scenarios, offering good initial support though lacking the depth of enterprise-level support available with broader infrastructure organizations.

Pricing and ROI: IBM MQ's pricing is considered expensive due to CPU-based licensing fees, but this cost is often justified by its performance, reliability, and security in complex enterprise scenarios. In contrast, ActiveMQ provides significant cost advantages as an open-source solution, appealing to users focused on cost-effectiveness without sacrificing essential functionalities for smaller-scale or cloud-based applications.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveMQ vs. IBM MQ Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. IBM MQ

September 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 867,676 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

IBM MQ

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

170

Ranking in other categories

Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 25.4%, up from 23.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 25.9%, up from 21.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM MQ	25.9%
ActiveMQ	25.4%
Other	48.7%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Q&A Highlights

Miriam Tover

Service Delivery Manager at PeerSpot

Feb 13, 2019

What Is The Biggest Difference Between ActiveMQ and IBM MQ?

ActiveMQ offers very high throughput and low latency compared to IBM MQ. ActiveMQ supports standard messaging protocols like AMQP, STOMP, MQTT etc whereas IBM MQ just comply with JMS and its own protocol. IBM MQ Light supports AMQP though. IBM MQ is much preferred in enterprise environment, probably due to the support. Redhat AMQ offers enterprise support on ActiveMQ. AFAIK documentation wise, they are at par. Both support clustering. But only in ActiveMQ real storage of messages in another broker which is less loaded happens. IBM MQ just enables communication between Queue managers. But I would prefer to put a few more options on the table. 1. RabbitMQ - fully compliant with protocols, supports replication and distribution of messages, throughput in tens of thousands 2. Redis - Light weight single threaded server. Supports pub sub messaging and supports HA via sentinel and clustering for distributed messaging 3. Kafka - Preferred mechanism for data streaming. Throughput in millions. 4. ZeroMQ - Brokerless messaging platform. Very high throughput. 5. NanoMsg - Brokerless. Claims to be advanced than ZeroMQ

See all answers

Featured Reviews

Eyob Alemu

Technical Director at NIDP

Efficient data flow management with high performance and occasional stability improvements

For high traffic volumes where management time on ActiveMQ is minimal and where the rate of flow from the provider is slower than from the consumer, ActiveMQ offers the highest performance based on our experience. It has been efficient for data flow control between two endpoints, despite occasional unexpected glitches. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Read full review

Md Al-Amin

Senior System Analyst at Thakral

Reliable and secure performance consistently enhances message transfer

IBM MQ is more reliable and secure than other software. There is a saying that for the last 30 years IBM MQ has never been hacked. It is more secure and reliable. Whenever the configuration is done, I do not have to touch it again. It works fine, it is stable, and its communication is to the point and accurate. All performance-related aspects are better. Performance-wise, it is scalable, and other features such as DR, DC, replication, and active passive mode are complex to configure, but it remains scalable. The pricing model for IBM MQ could be more flexible for clients.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"I appreciate many features including queue, topic, durable topic, and selectors. I also value a different support for different protocols such as MQTT and AMQP. It has full support for EIP, REST, Message Groups, UDP, and TCP."

"For reliable messaging, the most valuable feature of ActiveMQ for us is ensuring prompt message delivery."

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

"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."

"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."

"I'm impressed, I think that Active MQ is great."

"The initial setup and first deployment of ActiveMQ is fairly simple."

More ActiveMQ pros

"Reliable messaging and throughput are the most valuable."

"The reliability of the queuing is the most valuable feature."

"The most valuable feature of IBM MQ is it has all the features necessary for contemporary messaging, not only for the financial industry but for any application."

"The methodology and the way in which the platform has been produced as a standard is most valuable. There are so many different versions of it now, but the actual basic functionality and the simplicity of it have made it far easier to be implemented in so many different instances. When I worked with the OS/2 or PS/2 machine environment, the messaging mechanisms were based upon IBM MQ. It is so versatile, which is the main reason that I'm a fan of it."

"This product has good security."

"Whenever payments are happening, such as incoming payments to the bank, we need to notify the customer. With MQ we can actually do that asynchronously. We don't want to notify the customer for each and every payment but, rather, more like once a day. That kind of thing can be enabled with the help of MQ."

"The most valuable features are the point to point messaging and the MQ API."

"The features of IBM MQ that have proven most effective for ensuring message delivery reliability are the stability of the system, the resilience and the product, which is definitely of top quality in this segment."

More IBM MQ pros

Cons

"There are some stability issues."

"The UI. It's both a good thing and a bad thing. The UI is too simple. Sometimes you wanna see the messages coming to the queue, and you have to refresh the dashboard, the console of the product."

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

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

"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."

"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."

"The tool needs to improve its installation part which is lengthy. The product is already working on that aspect so that the complete installation gets completed within a month."

"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."

More ActiveMQ cons

"More documentation would be good because some features are not deeply implemented."

"The issue is that they're using a very old clustering model."

"Sometimes, not all messages are consumed in the queues. File transfers need improvement."

"What could be improved is the high-availability. The way MQ works is that it separates the high-availability from the workload balance. The scalability should be easier. If something happens so that the messages are not available on each node, scalability is only possible for the workload balance."

"The pricing needs improvement."

"The initial setup is difficult. Creating your own cluster is difficult. Working with cluster repositories is difficult. Issue management with IBM MQ is difficult."

"The solution should offer a freeware version, free vouchers, or certifications for learning purposes and building knowledge base."

"I wanted to upgrade Windows Server. It's not that easy to move."

More IBM MQ cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

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

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

"I think the software is free."

"We use the open-source version."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"It’s open source, ergo free."

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

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"It would be a 10 out of 10 if it wasn't so expensive."

"It is a licensed product. As compared to an open-source solution, such as RabbitMQ, it is obviously costly. If you're using IBM Message Broker, which is a licensed product, IBM MQ is included in the same license. You don't have to pay separately for IBM MQ. The license cost of IBM MQ is lesser than IBM Message Broker."

"To implement such an IBM solution, a company has to pay a lot in term of licensing and consultancy. A pricing model might be a better option."

"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price a seven. The product is expensive."

"The solution costs are high, it is going to cost a fair bit for annual operating costs and support."

"It's a very expensive product."

"The problem with this product is that it's a little bit expensive."

"I think it's pretty reasonable, but I'm not so too sure of the current pricing strategy from IBM. We use many bundled services, and most often, we go through a service provided by some other third-party implementation. So, I can't really give an honest opinion about that."

More IBM MQ pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Message Queue (MQ) Software solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Answers from the Community

Miriam Tover

Service Delivery Manager at PeerSpot

Feb 13, 2019

What Is The Biggest Difference Between ActiveMQ and IBM MQ?

See 2 answers

Jack Angoe

Technical Lead at Interface Fintech Ltd

Feb 12, 2019

From my Experience so far i will go for RabbitMQ its rock solid and robust with a simple learning curve. Its free and has great documentation available

Read full answer

Winster Jose

Senior Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Feb 13, 2019

Read full answer

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

32%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

36%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare 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	19
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	144

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 selection. Focusing on AI is essential nowadays. AI capabilities require improvement ...

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 is MQ software?

Hi As someone with 45+ years of experience in the Transaction and Message Processing world, I have seen many "MQ" solutions that have come into the market place. From my perspective, while each pro...

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 used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...

See all answers

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, simple to configure and integrates well with our enterprise ecosystem and protocol...

See all answers

Comparisons

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 18% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 6% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 3% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 3% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs IBM MQ

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Kafka vs IBM MQ

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs IBM MQ

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs IBM MQ

Compared 6% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs IBM MQ

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM MQ Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

September 2025

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM MQ

September 2025

Download IBM MQ product report

Also Known As

AMQ

WebSphere MQ

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

IBM MQ is a middleware product used to send or exchange messages across multiple platforms, including applications, systems, files, and services via MQs (messaging queues). This solution helps simplify the creation of business applications, and also makes them easier to maintain. IBM MQ is security-rich, has high performance, and provides a universal messaging backbone with robust connectivity. In addition, it also integrates easily with existing IT assets by using an SOA (service oriented architecture).

IBM MQ can be deployed:

On-premises
In the cloud
Hybrid cloud

IBM MQ supports the following APIs:

MQI (Message Queue Interface)
REST
.NET
MQTT
JMS
IBM MQ Light

IBM MQ Features

Some of the most powerful IBM MQ features include:

High availability
Stability and scalability
Flexible deployment options
Uniform clusters
Automated and intelligent workload balancing
Broad language, API, and messaging protocol support
Administrative features that simplify messaging management
Open standards development tools
Simple management tools

IBM MQ Benefits

Some of the benefits of using IBM MQ include:

Multi-style messaging: IBM MQ supports simple multi-style messaging, making it easy to connect diverse systems with support for message queuing, transactions, and more.
Reduced risk: With IBM MQ you will never lose a message, and messages are never delivered more than once.
Cloud-native: Because IBM MQ has a minimal infrastructure, it is suitable to be cloud-native, and therefore has the capability to always remain on.
Available anywhere: Using IBM MQ, you have access to secure messaging anywhere, at any time.
Secure: IBM MQ makes sure to keep your data safe by using TLS secured communications, providing access identity management, message-level security, and more measures to protect your information.
Easy for application programmers: To use IBM MQ, application programmers do not need to have any knowledge of communications programming.
Technical support: IBM MQ has a large user community and also provides support 24/7 as needed.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by IBM MQ users who are currently using the solution.

PeerSpot user Sunil S., a manager at a financial services firm, explains that they never lose messages are never lost in transit, mentioning that he can store messages and forward them as required: "Whenever payments are happening, such as incoming payments to the bank, we need to notify the customer. With MQ we can actually do that asynchronously. We don't want to notify the customer for each and every payment but, rather, more like once a day. That kind of thing can be enabled with the help of MQ."

Another PeerSpot reviewer, Luis L. who is a solutions director at Thesys Technologies, says that IBM MQ is a valuable solution and is "A stable and reliable software that offers good integration between different systems."

The head of operations at a financial services firm notes that "I have found the solution to be very robust. It has a strong reputation, is easy to use, simple to configure in our enterprise software, and supports all the protocols that we use."

In addition, a Software Engineer at a financial services firm praises the security benefits of it and states that “it has the most security features I've seen in a communication solution. Security is the most important thing for our purposes."

IBM

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc.

Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. IBM MQ

September 2025

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. IBM MQ

Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveMQ vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our ActiveMQ vs. IBM MQ report.

See our list of best Message Queue (MQ) Software vendors.

We monitor all Message Queue (MQ) Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.