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 26.1% mindshare in MQ, compared to IBM’s 27.1% 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

6,463 Views
5,881 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

IBM MQ

Read 170 IBM MQ reviews

7,811 Views
5,468 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

IBM MQ

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

IBM MQ and ActiveMQ are prominent messaging solutions competing in the messaging service domain. IBM MQ holds the upper hand for enterprises needing robust data management, while ActiveMQ offers a cost-effective choice for smaller applications and microservices transitions.

Features: IBM MQ guarantees message delivery and is platform-compatible with robust stability, ideal for large-scale secure data handling. ActiveMQ is highly flexible, supporting multiple messaging protocols and easy deployment in Docker environments.

Room for Improvement: IBM MQ needs cost reduction, better interfaces, and enhanced monitoring. ActiveMQ requires improved stability, simpler clustering, and enhanced monitoring tools to better support implementation scaling.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM MQ suits on-premises to hybrid deployments with reliable performance needing minimal support. ActiveMQ is cost-free, fitting on-premises and public cloud usage, popular in test environments and smaller firms for easy adoption.

Pricing and ROI: IBM MQ is expensive but justifies its cost with enterprise-grade capabilities. ActiveMQ is open-source, offering reliable performance without licensing costs at a fraction of IBM MQ's expense.

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

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. IBM MQ

July 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 861,490 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 July 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 26.1%, up from 22.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 27.1%, up from 20.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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

"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."

"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."

"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."

"We value ActiveMQ for its performance, throughput, and low latency, especially in handling large volumes of data and sequential management of topics."

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

"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."

"ActiveMQ demonstrates excellent stability and sturdiness."

More ActiveMQ pros

"A stable and reliable software that offers good integration between different systems."

"RabbitMQ and Kafka require more steps for setup than IBM MQ. Installation of the IBM product is very simple."

"We use our routing feature when the request is coming from the business application. The request goes to the distributive side and it is routed to the right claim instance."

"IBM MQ is a choice to create a relation between the Mainframe and distributed servers, allowing applications running on Linux or Windows to interface with Mainframe applications and enable more development of easier and open applications in a distributed environment."

"IBM is still adding some features and coding some other systems on the security end. However, it has the most security features I've seen in a communication solution. Security is the most important thing for our purposes."

"I like the MQ's simplicity and rock-solid stability. I've never experienced a failure in two decades caused by the product itself. It has only failed due to human error."

"This product has good security."

"The most valuable feature of IBM MQ is transaction processing."

More IBM MQ pros

Cons

"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."

"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's stability needs improvement."

"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."

"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."

"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."

"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. That model includes a single point of failure in that storage medium."

"I would rate the stability a five out of ten because sometimes it gets stuck, and we have to restart it. We"

More ActiveMQ cons

"The licensing fees should be more cost-effective so that we can better pitch the product to our clients. With the pricing as it is, they tend to move away from IBM products."

"We are looking at the latest version, and we hope that resilience, high availability, and monitoring will be improved. It can have some more improvements in the heterogeneous messaging feature. The current solution is on-premises, so good integration with public cloud messaging solutions would be useful."

"I have used the support from IBM MQ. There is some room for improvement."

"IBM MQ could improve capacity, monitoring, and automatization."

"The memory management is very poor and it consumes too much memory."

"IBM MQ could improve by adding more protocols or APIs for a standard application, such as MuleSoft."

"We have had scalability issues with some projects in the past."

"The installation of product upgrades and patches is very difficult. It requires the use of the IBM Installation Manager (IM)."

More IBM MQ cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"I think the software is free."

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

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

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

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

"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's super expensive, so ask them if they can consolidate some other licensing costs. But, IBM is IBM, so I guess we'll pay for it."

"We have a special contract with IBM MQ that give us a certain price."

"It is a very expensive product compared to the open source products in the market."

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

"IBM MQ has a flexible license model based on the Processor Value Unit (PVU) and I recommend it."

"99.999 percent availability for less than a penny per message over the past 25 years. IBM MQ is the cheapest software in the IBM software portfolio, and it is one of the best."

"Licensing for this software is on a yearly basis. The standard fee includes the maintenance and updates that are released periodically."

"IBM MQ is expensive and they charge based on the CPU."

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

861,490 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

33%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

36%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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.

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 5% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 4% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 3% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs IBM MQ

Compared 9% of the time

Apache Kafka vs IBM MQ

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs IBM MQ

Compared 7% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs IBM MQ

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs IBM MQ

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM MQ Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

July 2025

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM MQ

July 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

July 2025

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. IBM MQ

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

DOWNLOAD NOW

861,490 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.