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ActiveMQ vs Redis comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (2nd)
Redis
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (5th), Managed NoSQL Databases (9th), In-Memory Data Store Services (1st), Vector Databases (3rd), AI Software Development (17th)
 

Featured Reviews

MD
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.
reviewer2005650 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Optimize AI projects with reliable data processing while addressing scaling challenges
There are a few areas where Redis could improve. The pub-sub capabilities could be optimized to handle network sessions better, as there are challenges with maintaining sessions between clients and systems. Data persistence and recovery face issues with compatibility across major versions, making upgrades possible but downgrades not active. There's a need for better migration tools to support data movements in a hybrid environment. Concerns exist about licensing and community engagement due to changes in Redis and its forks.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For reliable messaging, the most valuable feature of ActiveMQ for us is ensuring prompt message delivery."
"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."
"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."
"The initial setup and first deployment of ActiveMQ is fairly simple."
"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes."
"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."
"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 in-memory data makes it fast."
"The best thing about Redis is its ability to handle large amounts of data without frequently hitting the database. You can store data in temporary memory, especially for high-volume data."
"The online interface is very fast and easy to use."
"The solution's technical support team is good...The solution's initial setup process was straightforward."
"Redis is a simple, powerful, and fast solution."
"I use Redis mostly to cache repeated data that is required."
"Redis acts as an in-memory search tool that improves the speed of operations."
"The most valuable features of Redis are its ease of use and speed. It does not have access to the disc and it is fast."
 

Cons

"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."
"There are some stability issues."
"The solution can improve the other protocols to equal the AMQ protocol they offer."
"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."
"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."
"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."
"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."
"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."
"The initial setup of Redis was difficult, with a rating of two or three out of ten."
"The initial setup took some time as our technical team needed to familiarize themselves with Redis."
"There is room for AWS to provide more options for server types or a way to configure more or less memory for them."
"It's actually quite expensive."
"There is a lack of documentation on the scalability of the solution."
"Sometimes, we use Redis as a cluster, and the clusters can sometimes suffer some issues and bring some downtime to your application."
"In future releases, I would like Redis to provide its users with an option like schema validation. Currently, the solution lacks to offer such functionality."
"The tool should improve by increasing its size limits and handling dynamic data better. We use the client ID or associate it with a key for static content. The solution will not be easy for a beginner. Unless you understand SQL data, it will be difficult to understand and use Redis. It also needs to be user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."
"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"We use the open-source version."
"The tool is open-source. There are no additional costs."
"Redis is an open-source solution. There are not any hidden fees."
"We saw an ROI. It made the processing of our transactions faster."
"Redis is an open-source product."
"Redis is not an overpriced solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
University
6%
 

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 Business11
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
 

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 do you like most about Redis?
Redis is better tested and is used by large companies. I haven't found a direct alternative to what Redis offers. Plus, there are a lot of support and learning resources available, which help you u...
What needs improvement with Redis?
The disadvantage of Redis is that it's a little bit hard to have too many clusters or too many nodes and create the clusters. The sync between the nodes is easier to implement with Couchbase, for e...
What is your primary use case for Redis?
Redis is used for a part of a booking engine for travel, specifically for the front part to get some sessions and information about the sessions. If a customer or user is using the sites in differe...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AMQ
Redis Enterprise
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc. 
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Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveMQ vs. Redis and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,899 professionals have used our research since 2012.