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ActiveMQ vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

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
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (12th), Streaming Analytics (13th)
 

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 PubSub+ Platform is 4.5%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ActiveMQ25.4%
PubSub+ Platform4.5%
Other70.1%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

Eyob Alemu - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
BhanuChidigam - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs well, high availability, and helpful support
We use approximately four people for the maintenance of the solution. My advice to others is this solution has high throughput and is used for many stock exchanges. For business critical use cases, such as processing financial transactions at a quick speed, I would recommend this solution. I rate PubSub+ Event Broker an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"I'm impressed, I think that Active MQ is great."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."
"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 provides the best support services."
"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."
"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."
"It’s a JMS broker, so the fact that it can allow for asynchronous communication is valuable."
"When we went to add another installation in our private cloud, it was easy. We received support from Solace and the install was seamless with no issues."
"We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code."
"We've built a lot of products into it and it's been quite easy to feed market data onto the systems and put entitlements and controls around that. That was a big win for us when we were consolidating our platforms down. Trying to have one event bus, one messaging bus, for the whole globe, and consolidate everything over time, has been key for us. We've been able to do that through one API, even if it's across the different languages."
"As of now, the most valuable aspects are the topic-based subscription and the fanout exchange that we are using."
"Some valuable features include reconnecting topics, placing queues, and direct connections to MongoDB. The platform provides a dashboard to monitor the status of messages, such as how many have been processed or delivered, which is helpful for tracking performance."
"The topic hierarchy is pretty flexible. Once you have the subject defined just about anybody who knows Java can come onboard. The APIs are all there."
"When it comes to granularity, you can literally do anything regarding how the filtering works."
"The most useful features has been the WAN optimization and probably the HybridEdge, which requires some third-party adapters or plugins. The idea that we can position Solace as a protocol-agnostic message transport fabric is key to our company having all manners of asynchronous messaging protocols from MQ, Kafka, JMS, etc. I really like the WAN optimization: Send once over a WAN, then distribute locally as many times as there are subscribers."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."
"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."
"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."
"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 product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."
"The section on observability pertains to understanding the functioning of an event crash. Instead of focusing on how the crash occurs, attention is given to the observable aspects, such as a memory pipeline where one person pushes messages and another reads them. However, this pipeline often encounters issues, such as the reader being unavailable, causing the system to become stuck and preventing the messages from moving forward. This can lead to the pipeline being permanently stalled."
"The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively."
"The integrations could improve in PubSub+ Event Broker."
"Some of the feature's gaps with some of the open-source vendors have been closed in a lot of ways. Being more agile and addressing those earlier could be an area for improvement."
"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."
"A challenge we currently have is Solace's ability to integrate with single sign-on in our Active Directory and other single sign-on tools and platforms that any company would have. It's important for the platforms to work. Typically, they support only LDAP-based connectivity to our SQL Servers."
"The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."
"We use the open-source version."
"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"The price of PubSub+ Event Broker is reasonable for the capability it offers. However, when compared to others solutions on the market it is expensive."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The licensing is dependent on the volume that is flowing. If you go for their support services, it will cost some more money, but I think it is worth it, especially if you are just starting your journey."
"Having a free version is critical for our technology operations use case. This is primarily because our technology operations team is a cost center in our company. They are not profit drivers and having a free version for installation will probably meet our needs. Even for production, it'll support up to a 100,000 messages per second. I don't think in technology operations that we have that many events and alerts from our detection tools. Even if I have 20 or 30 event detection products out there, they're only going to publish the things which are critical or warnings. I don't think we'll ever reach a 100,000 messages per second."
"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."
"There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
32%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise12
 

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.
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 needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
Regarding improving the PubSub+ Platform, I'm not sure about the pricing aspect, but I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka. That's the only concern I can mention; otherwise, it was a...
What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?
My typical use case for the PubSub+ Platform is as an event-driven solution for communication between two components.
What advice do you have for others considering PubSub+ Event Broker?
I have experience working with Kafka, PubSub+ Platform, and IBM MQ, all three of them. We are customers, meaning my company uses Solace. We use it and customize it based on our needs. Based on my e...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AMQ
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc. 
FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet 
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.