ActiveMQ vs Red Hat AMQ comparison

Apache and Red Hat are both solutions in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category. Apache is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6, while Red Hat is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.0. Apache holds a 20.5% mindshare in MQ, compared to Red Hat’s 7.3% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 28 ActiveMQ reviews

4,472 Views
4,248 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Red Hat AMQ

Read 10 Red Hat AMQ reviews

2,020 Views
1,475 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

Red Hat AMQ

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

ActiveMQ and Red Hat AMQ are competing products in the messaging and integration market. Red Hat AMQ generally has an advantage due to its robust support and scalability features.

Features: ActiveMQ provides simplicity and flexibility with multi-protocol support and efficient message filtering. It allows durable subscriptions and features a robust plugin architecture. Red Hat AMQ is recognized for its scalability, advanced security features, and a sophisticated management console, which makes it more suitable for large-scale enterprise deployments.

Room for Improvement: ActiveMQ could enhance its support structures to provide users with more guided assistance. Additionally, improvements in the management console could streamline operations for larger enterprises. Red Hat AMQ might improve pricing structures for smaller businesses and refine documentation to match community support availability and cost-effectiveness of deployment options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Red Hat AMQ offers a guided installation process and robust customer support, which facilitates smooth deployment. Conversely, ActiveMQ's straightforward deployment benefits from community support, which may require extra time for troubleshooting but provides flexibility.

Pricing and ROI: ActiveMQ offers a cost-effective solution with minimal setup costs, making it appealing for organizations with budget constraints. The return on investment is substantial for smaller projects. Red Hat AMQ, while having higher initial costs due to its advanced features and support structures, provides long-term ROI benefits for businesses needing a scalable and reliable messaging platform.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveMQ vs. Red Hat AMQ Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Red Hat AMQ

April 2026

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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

Red Hat AMQ

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

7th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 20.5%, down from 26.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat AMQ is 7.3%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ActiveMQ	20.5%
Red Hat AMQ	7.3%
Other	72.2%

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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SachinJain

Senior Technical Specialist at Intuitive Technology Partners

Efficiently manages high availability and fault tolerance for critical systems with user-friendly management features

I have experience with features such as message persistence and fault tolerance because I configured high availability and fault tolerance for the client environment, including active-active and active-passive configurations. I mainly prefer active-active. I created a security feature for user authentication and authorization in Red Hat AMQ using vault. When you enable the vault, then your whole Red Hat AMQ becomes more secure. Management is straightforward. I configured it and created documentation. The operations team takes care of the operation part. I educate them on how to manage access, so they can easily add new people who join the company or manage the people who leave. The benefits of using Red Hat AMQ include easy configuration and monitoring. On the portal, I can monitor how many packets or alerts have been generated or sent to the end user via Red Hat AMQ along with messages or emails. It also shows utilization in the tool. These features also come with other AMQs such as Amazon and IBM.

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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

"One of the most important features of ActiveMQ is the ability to set up a network of brokers, and the ability to forward the message to another broker in the network, where there is a demand for messages from a consumer."

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

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

"ActiveMQ demonstrates excellent stability and sturdiness."

"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."

"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."

"Depending on the problem, AMQ resolved nearly everything."

More ActiveMQ pros

"My impression is that it is average in terms of scalability."

"From the functionality perspective, 3scale provides a very comparable, if not the same feature set as any leader in the market for API management and the gateway perspective, but with a fraction of the price."

"Red Hat AMQ's best feature is its reliability."

"The most valuable feature for us is the operator-based automation that is provided by Streams for infrastructure as well as user and topic management. This saves a lot of time and effort on our part to provide infrastructure. For example, the deployment of infrastructure is reduced from approximately a week to a day."

"I can organize the tool with microservices, which allows me to use it across different services. It is easy to learn."

"The most valuable feature is stability."

"My impression is that it is average in terms of scalability."

"The solution is very lightweight, easy to configure, simple to manage, and robust since it launched."

More Red Hat AMQ pros

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."

"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 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."

"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."

"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."

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

"The solution's stability needs improvement."

More ActiveMQ cons

"There is improvement needed to keep the support libraries updated."

"Red Hat AMQ's cost could be improved, and it could have better integration."

"There are some aspects of the monitoring that could be improved on. There is a tool that is somewhat connected to Kafka called Service Registry. This is a product by Red Hat that I would like to see integrated more tightly."

"This solution is completely unstable. We lose messages."

"There are several areas in this solution that need improvement, including clustering multi-nodes and message ordering."

"The turnaround of adopting new versions of underlying technologies sometimes is too slow."

"There are some aspects of the monitoring that could be improved on."

"AMQ could be better integrated with Jira and patch management tools."

More Red Hat AMQ cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"I think the software is free."

"We use the open-source version."

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

"It’s open source, ergo free."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

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

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"This is a very cost-effective solution and the pricing is much better than competitors."

"I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."

"There is a subscription needed for this solution and there are support plans available."

"Red Hat AMQ's pricing could be improved."

"The solution is open-source."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software 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	5
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	2

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 ...

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 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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Red Hat AMQ?

The areas for improvement include cost, which is a primary concern. The deployment process is simple, but the cost is very important. Additionally, the management portal should be more user-friendl...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Red Hat AMQ?

For use cases for Red Hat AMQ, let's take banking purposes. This depends upon the firm or the service or product company. For example, let's take HDFC Bank or any other bank. Whenever a customer de...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Red Hat AMQ?

I work primarily with Red Hat. For IBM, I have worked with their channel partner, not directly with IBM. For Amazon, I work with partners only. I am working with one company as a consultant. I also...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 49% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 7% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 6% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

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Apache Kafka vs Red Hat AMQ

Compared 25% of the time

IBM MQ vs Red Hat AMQ

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs Red Hat AMQ

Compared 12% of the time

IBM Event Streams vs Red Hat AMQ

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon SQS vs Red Hat AMQ

Compared 5% of the time

More Red Hat AMQ Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

April 2026

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat AMQ

April 2026

Download Red Hat AMQ product report

Also Known As

AMQ

Red Hat JBoss A-MQ, Red Hat JBoss AMQ

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

To respond to business demands quickly and efficiently, you need a way to integrate the applications and data spread across your enterprise. Red Hat JBoss A-MQ—based on the Apache ActiveMQ open source project—is a flexible, high-performance messaging platform that delivers information reliably, enabling real-time integration and connecting the Internet of Things (IoT).

Red Hat

Sample Customers

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

E*TRADE, CERN, CenturyLink, AECOM, Sabre Holdings

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Red Hat AMQ

April 2026

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. Red Hat AMQ

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