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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
5.9
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (3rd), Managed NoSQL Databases (6th), In-Memory Data Store Services (1st), Vector Databases (2nd), AI Software Development (12th)
 

Featured Reviews

NS
Sr. Manager - Digital at IndiGo
Offers diverse messaging protocols and excellent cloud support
In my current organization, I'm only working with ActiveMQ. I previously worked with IBM WebSphere MQ The features of ActiveMQ and WebSphere MQ fundamentally do the same thing. From my experience, I prefer WebSphere MQ. Both are very sturdy solutions; there is no doubt. Both are sturdy and…
Varuns Ug - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Caching has accelerated complex workflows and delivers low latency for high-traffic microservices
A few features of Redis that I use on a day-to-day basis and feel are among the best are extremely low latency and high throughput. Since Redis is in-memory, it makes it ideal for cases such as caching and rate limiting where response time is critical. TTL expiry support is very useful in Redis as it allows me to automatically evict stale data without manual cleanup, which is something I use heavily in my caching strategy. Another point I can mention is that the rich data structures such as strings, hashes, and even sorted sets are very powerful. I have used strings for caching responses and counters, whereas I have used hashes for storing structured objects. One more feature I can tell you about is atomic operations. Redis guarantees atomicity for operations such as incrementing a counter, which is very useful for rate limiting and avoiding race conditions in distributed systems. Finally, I want to emphasize that Redis is easy to scale and integrate, whether through clustering or using a distributed cache across microservices. Redis has impacted my organization positively by providing default support that is very useful. For metrics, in one of my core systems, introducing Redis as a distributed cache helped me achieve around an 80% cache hit rate, which reduced repeated downstream services. Real API latency also improved from around two seconds to approximately 450 milliseconds for P99. It also helped reduce the load on dependent services and databases, which improved overall system reliability.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The database and message queuing are valuable features."
"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."
"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 brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."
"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."
"It provides the best support services."
"I fully recommend this product, but you need to have some expertise working with JMS and asynchronous tasks."
"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."
"The online interface is very fast and easy to use."
"Redis is a simple service that does what it promises."
"It makes operations more efficient. The information processing is very fast, and very responsive. It's all about the technology."
"Overall, I want to say that Redis truly adds value, especially for low latency and high throughput use cases."
"Redis is a powerful and reliable tool for improving application performance."
"What I like best about Redis is its fast and easy use. It has interesting algorithms like HyperLogLog and provides useful features. It's also good for implementing scalable rate limiting."
"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 use Redis efficiently."
"Redis has multiple valuable features such as being a free and reliable open-source tool."
 

Cons

"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."
"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."
"Even though there is support from many open source communities, there is still weakness in ease-of-use and ease-of-configuration for more complex scenarios."
"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 ran into various stability problems with our implementations over the years."
"Apache ActiveMQ needs some improvement playing with multi-platform message clients."
"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."
"There are some stability issues."
"If we use a lot of data, it will eventually cost us a lot."
"Sometimes, we use Redis as a cluster, and the clusters can sometimes suffer some issues and bring some downtime to your application."
"Managing memory efficiently and troubleshooting issues can sometimes require additional tooling, so these areas can also be improved."
"Redis presents a single point of failure and lacks fault tolerance."
"For the PubSub feature, we had to create our own tools to monitor the events."
"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."
"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."
"There are some points where I feel Redis can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the software is free."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."
"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."
"We use the open-source version."
"Redis is an open-source product."
"The tool is open-source. There are no additional costs."
"Redis is an open-source solution. There are not any hidden fees."
"Redis is not an overpriced solution."
"We saw an ROI. It made the processing of our transactions faster."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
6%
Comms Service Provider
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 Business12
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise10
 

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 ...
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 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.
What needs improvement with Redis?
Overall, Redis is a powerful and reliable tool, but there are a few areas for improvement. One limitation is that Redis is memory-based, so scaling can become expensive compared to disk-based syste...
What is your primary use case for Redis?
My main use case for Redis is caching frequently accessed data to improve performance and reduce database load. For example, I cache API responses and user-related data so that repeated requests ca...
What advice do you have for others considering Redis?
My main advice for those looking into using Redis is to focus on the use case; Redis excels where low latency is critical, such as caching, session management, or real-time features, rather than us...
 

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 IBM, Apache, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Message Queue (MQ) Software. Updated: June 2026.
902,495 professionals have used our research since 2012.