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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 (8th), In-Memory Data Store Services (1st), Vector Databases (3rd), AI Software Development (16th)
 

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.
KG
Database Admin and Architect at D-EDGE Hospitality Solutions
Performance shines with seamless session caching and minimal configuration
The best features of Redis, from my personal perspective, are the performance, which is very quick, and it's very simple to implement. Since I started using Redis, I feel that the product is saving me some performance tuning time. It's very easy, I have few parameters to tune, and it seems to have performance without a lot of working on the performance, compared to Cassandra, where you have to configure the memory and many other settings. The integration capability of Redis is excellent. Redis is very affordable because it's free.

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."
"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."
"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."
"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."
"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."
"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."
"It provides the best support services."
"It makes operations more efficient. The information processing is very fast, and very responsive. It's all about the technology."
"The ability to fetch and save data quickly is valuable."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's technical support team is good...The solution's initial setup process was straightforward."
"The online interface is very fast and easy to use."
"Redis is a simple, powerful, and fast solution."
"The solution is fast, provides good performance, and is not too expensive."
 

Cons

"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."
"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."
"One potential area would be the complexity of the initial setup."
"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."
"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."
"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."
"There is a lack of documentation on the scalability of the solution."
"If we use a lot of data, it will eventually cost us a lot."
"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 initial setup took some time as our technical team needed to familiarize themselves with Redis."
"Redis should have an option to operate without Docker on a local PC."
"Sometimes, we use Redis as a cluster, and the clusters can sometimes suffer some issues and bring some downtime to your application."
"The initial setup of Redis was difficult, with a rating of two or three out of ten."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s open source, ergo free."
"I think the software is free."
"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."
"The tool is open-source. There are no additional costs."
"Redis is an open-source product."
"Redis is not an overpriced solution."
"Redis is an open-source solution. There are not any hidden fees."
"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
30%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
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: February 2026.
881,360 professionals have used our research since 2012.