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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.
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

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."
"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."
"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."
"ActiveMQ demonstrates excellent stability and sturdiness."
"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."
"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."
"The initial setup and first deployment of ActiveMQ is fairly simple."
"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 product offers fast access to my database."
"It is particularly efficient for cloud-based storage and operations."
"The online interface is very fast and easy to use."
"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."
"Redis acts as an in-memory search tool that improves the speed of operations."
"The solution's technical support team is good...The solution's initial setup process was straightforward."
"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."
"Redis is a simple service that does what it promises."
 

Cons

"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."
"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."
"From the TPS point of view, it's like 100,000 transactions that need to be admitted from different devices and also from the different minor small systems. Those are best fit for Kafka. We have used it on the customer side, and we thought of giving a try to ActiveMQ, but we have to do a lot of performance tests and approval is required before we can use it for this scale."
"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 need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."
"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."
"One potential area would be the complexity of the initial setup."
"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."
"There is a lack of documentation on the scalability of the solution."
"For the PubSub feature, we had to create our own tools to monitor the events."
"Redis could be improved by introducing a GUI to display key-value pair database information, as it is currently a CLI tool with no visual representation."
"The initial setup of Redis was difficult, with a rating of two or three out of ten."
"There are some features from MongoDB that I would like to see included in Redis to enhance its overall efficiency, such as the ability to perform remote behaviour. MongoDB is more efficient in handling updates than deletions and is quicker in processing updates, but it can be slower regarding deletions. This can sometimes pose a challenge, especially when dealing with large datasets or frequent data manipulations that involve deletions. In such cases, I often rewrite columns or update values instead of directly deleting data, as it can be more efficient."
"Redis should have an option to operate without Docker on a local PC."
"The initial setup took some time as our technical team needed to familiarize themselves with Redis."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
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.
881,036 professionals have used our research since 2012.