ActiveMQ vs MuleSoft Anypoint Platform comparison

Apache and Salesforce are both solutions in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category. Apache is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5, while Salesforce is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.2. Apache holds a 22.4% mindshare in MQ, compared to Salesforce’s 7.7% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Salesforce users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 28 ActiveMQ reviews

4,451 Views
4,184 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform

Read 60 MuleSoft Anypoint Platform reviews

10,232 Views
1,535 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform and ActiveMQ compete in the API management and messaging categories, respectively. While MuleSoft offers a comprehensive suite suitable for complex settings, ActiveMQ's simplicity and affordability provide an advantage for smaller-scale operations.

Features: MuleSoft Anypoint Platform offers a unified API management platform with over 200 connectors and the ability to visually configure integrations, making it highly adaptable for different organizational needs. ActiveMQ, an open-source messaging solution, is known for its lightweight nature, affordability, and support for multiple protocols like JMS, AMQP, and MQTT, ideal for small applications requiring reliable messaging systems.

Room for Improvement: MuleSoft Anypoint Platform faces high pricing and complex setup challenges, with users seeking better integration flexibility and user-friendly documentation. ActiveMQ needs enhancements in advanced clustering, stability, and documentation for complex scenarios. Both products can improve in areas of customization and community support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: MuleSoft provides flexible deployment options in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, with structured support tiers. ActiveMQ focuses on easy deployment, particularly on-premises, and provides community-driven support, which may lead to longer resolution times for complex issues.

Pricing and ROI: MuleSoft's pricing is high but offers significant ROI for enterprises due to reduced maintenance efforts and API-led microservices capabilities. ActiveMQ is cost-effective as an open-source tool with no licensing fees, appealing to budget-conscious users seeking reliable messaging solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveMQ vs. MuleSoft Anypoint Platform Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. MuleSoft Anypoint Platform

December 2025

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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

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business-to-Business Middleware (1st), Workload Automation (4th), Cloud Data Integration (4th), Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 22.4%, down from 25.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is 7.7%, down from 11.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ActiveMQ	22.4%
MuleSoft Anypoint Platform	7.7%
Other	69.9%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Featured Reviews

MoumitaDas

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.

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Greg O

Senior Validation Engineer at Weir Group PLC

Integration workflows have become transparent and secure while error tracking is streamlined

The best features in MuleSoft Anypoint Platform for me are transparency between logging in or deploying and using different environments. Managing different environments for the transparency of error logins or how to trace traceability is very important. It's very easy to use and sort, so you can see where everything has gone right and everything has gone wrong. I'm aware of the drag-and-drop interface in MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, and it's very, very quick. It's very time-saving and very efficient. The security features on MuleSoft Anypoint Platform help maintain data integrity in my organization; I would say it's second to none. It's one of the best out there that I have worked with because of the encryption and decryption, and there are a lot of security aspects. I would assess the platform's data mapping and transformation capabilities as amazing. Automation has been straightforward; the transformation and mapping have been easy to use, easy to source, and from the source to the target. I would say it has been very good.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"There is a vibrant community, and it is one of the strongest points of this product. We always get answers to our problems. So, my experience with the community support has been good."

"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."

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

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

"It provides the best support services."

"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."

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

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

More ActiveMQ pros

"The solution is scalable, and its performance is quite good."

"Initially, we faced challenges managing numerous scheduled jobs and duplicate entries in our SAP system. To address this, we developed a reusable component in Mule that all applications could use to interact with SAP."

"We are very satisfied with the DevOps support."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is a huge list of available connectors for a lot of different platforms, which we can use very easily."

"It's easy to use and comes as a bundle package with the Anypoint Platform, removing the need for any complex setup."

"The tool is very capable and offers a high performance. The tool supports batch processing and ETL processing."

"Customers can make use of Runtime Fabric, an RTF environment."

"The solution's deployment and proxy processes are very good."

More MuleSoft Anypoint Platform pros

Cons

"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."

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

"There are some stability issues."

"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."

"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."

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

"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."

More ActiveMQ cons

"Adding connectors for new upcoming applications would add extra value to this product."

"It has different types of subscriptions. For platinum or lower subscriptions, there are not too many things that can be done. We don't see many features. They should release a basic version that has logging and monitoring features. These features should come with Mule Anypoint Platform for free instead of making customers pay separately for these features. Its dashboard can be improved to have a lot of charts so that it is easy to visualize information. The utilization part can be improved. The dashboard is good currently, but it can be better. Other solutions like Elastic have a good dashboard, and they allow you to administer the product from the UI. Currently, for RTF, there is a different dashboard or utility. It would be good to include the same utility in the cloud solution. It would be good if there is a centralized repository that includes the links to the information about various troubleshooting issues. The documentation is there currently, and it is good, but the troubleshooting information is too scattered. We have to go to different links to find troubleshooting information. This kind of centralized repository would be helpful for new customers who are implementing this solution. It will be helpful to see different kinds of issues that can occur."

"There is not much information on the internet...The transforming message is an area in the solution that needs to be improved."

"Over the years, Mule Anypoint Platform has undergone significant improvements. When I first started using it, the API gateway capabilities were fairly basic."

"The solution is very costly. The solution should provide a package with fewer capabilities at a lower price for specific companies that don’t have a big IT budget. Not every customer requires all the capabilities of the software. It will be a good fit in the market, and they will easily sell it more."

"The platform's data integration tools need improvement on the processing side."

"The initial setup should be made easy and the documentation should have some guidance."

"The product is expensive."

More MuleSoft Anypoint Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the software is free."

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

"We use the open-source version."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

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

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

"It’s open source, ergo free."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"Mule is not the cheapest integration platform out there, but it deserves the price we are paying."

"Licensing can be complex as is the case with most iPaaS/cloud offerings."

"Making changes in Anypoint MQ is expensive."

"Price-wise, it is a good product since it is reasonably priced."

"The product's price seems to be competent in comparison to other products in the market."

"The solution has a high price."

"MuleSoft Anypoint Platform really needs to work on its pricing model because it's very complicated."

"The licensing is core-based. My customers tell me that it's very expensive compared to the cost of other integration suites."

More MuleSoft Anypoint Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

30%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

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	22
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	30

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 advice do you have for others considering Mule Anypoint Platform?

I architected solutions using Oracle SOA/OSB, Spring Boot, MuleSoft Anypoint Platform on cloud / on-premises and hybrid modes; What I see is though if you are an enterprise and have enough money th...

See all answers

How does TIBCO BusinessWorks compare with Mule Anypoint Platform?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether TIBCO BusinessWorks or Mule Anypoint platform integration and connectivity software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Mule...

See all answers

What can Mule Anypoint Platform be used for and what do you use it for most often?

This is a very flexible solution that comes with multiple uses. My organization mostly uses Mule Anypoint Platform for API management, as it lets us build new APIs easily and design new interfaces...

See all answers

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Compared 51% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

January 2026

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform

January 2026

Download MuleSoft Anypoint Platform product report

Also Known As

AMQ

Data Integrator, Anypoint 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

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform provides API management and integration capabilities with scalability, ensuring seamless connectivity across systems.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform offers API management and integration capabilities within a user-friendly interface. With a range of connectors and the ability to handle integration patterns, it enables data integration across environments with support for API-led connectivity. High scalability, observability, batch processing, and tooling are key features, enhancing performance while simplifying deployment.

What are the standout features of MuleSoft Anypoint Platform?

API Management: Comprehensive tools for managing APIs effectively.
Integration Capabilities: Facilitates diverse integration patterns.
Connectors: Extensive library for connecting various systems.
Observability: Enhances monitoring and performance tracking.
Batch Processing: Manages large volumes of data efficiently.

What benefits and ROI should users expect?

Scalability: Adaptable to growing data demands across platforms.
Performance: Simplifies complex deployments and improves processing.
Flexibility: Supports multiple environments, from cloud to on-premises.
User-Friendly: Streamlines integration processes with robust tools.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is employed by organizations for API management and seamless integration across systems in industries like retail and e-commerce. It connects enterprise applications in environments such as SAP and Salesforce. Users leverage it for data transformation and synchronization, achieving efficient real-time processing and a middleware layer across systems.

Salesforce

Sample Customers

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

VMware, Gucci, MasterCard, Target, Time Inc, Hershey's, Tesla, Spotify, Office Depot, Intuit, CBS, Amtrak, Salesforce, Gap, Ralph Lauren

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. MuleSoft Anypoint Platform

December 2025

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