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Amazon MQ vs IBM MQ comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

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

Amazon MQ
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM MQ
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of Amazon MQ is 3.9%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 21.3%, down from 25.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ21.3%
Amazon MQ3.9%
Other74.8%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

RamilCerrada - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution architect at SM Supermalls
Has provided consistent functionality across on-premise and cloud while simplifying cloud integration
I have experience with on-premise setups using ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, but with regards to AWS, I use it via cloud only. There's a free tier with Amazon MQ based on their website, which is a six-month free trial of a single instance, allowing per month usage of either ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ, five gig of Amazon EFS storage, and for ActiveMQ, it's 20 gig of Amazon EBS storage for RabbitMQ. I did not purchase Amazon MQ through AWS Marketplace. Amazon MQ has published information about having 650 hours of free trial usage. This can be found via the AWS website by searching for AWS MQ. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Amazon MQ an eight out of ten.
David Pizinger - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Technical Leader at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has faced unexpected VM restarts but continues to deliver messages reliably
I'm not sure if we've utilized IBM MQ's high availability. Our MQ VMs are set up in clusters, and I think our queue managers are set up in pairs. However, I don't know if we actually use any specific high availability features of IBM MQ that are out of the box. We have it architected with high availability because we use F5 load balancers, and everything about our architecture is highly available. I haven't personally used the management tools with IBM MQ, but we do have them, and our middleware folks leverage them. I can't really comment on them because I don't use them myself. I don't think the management tools help optimize message flows, and I'm not really aware of how they help in this. I'm not familiar with dynamic routing for IBM MQ.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon MQ is important for being collaborative, allowing for centralized information."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its managed service aspect. It's simple to implement and use. It requires minimal effort to maintain business operations."
"We have found Amazon MQ to provide scalability, robustness, and security."
"Since we utilize AWS, it's easy to integrate Amazon MQ and work with other third-party software, as they have standard communications via API or native language."
"The initial Amazon MQ setup is very easy both when you do it on your own or use the self-managed instance."
"Amazon MQ is managed by AWS and is easy to use."
"Amazon MQ is a very scalable solution."
"Amazon MQ is a secure solution."
"I would recommend IBM MQ to others that are using major transaction processing."
"The technical support has been pretty good; every time I've used it, they were knowledgeable and responsive, and I'm quite happy with their level of service."
"Reliability is the most valuable feature. MQ is used to support critical business applications."
"The system integration is good."
"It's a great tool."
"Now, it's real time, where we can effectively handle millions of transactions an hour, once we implemented MQ."
"The reliability is a benefit."
"Stability and reliability are the most valuable features; it's very reliable and very stable, and you can do a fast recovery in case of any failure."
 

Cons

"Amazon MQ is a good solution for small and medium-sized enterprises. It's open-source software, which means it's cheaper than its competitors."
"The product should improve its monitoring capabilities. It needs to improve the pricing also."
"The solution needs improvement in the back end and security."
"If Amazon provided a templating engine, it would be great."
"In community support, especially with distributed systems and integration, there is a need for better system organization."
"Depending on your use cases, Amazon MQ can be cheap or expensive."
"Amazon MQ isn't a cheap tool."
"Monitoring capabilities are not yet fully developed, since it's a message broker service, so it focuses more on the health of Apache."
"IBM support team is really only concerned with the IBM cloud. They're not supporting any other cloud platforms or suggestions."
"The worst part is the monitoring or admin, especially in the ACE or Broker. There is always a problem of transparency. In MQ you can observe any process and you know exactly what's going on behind the scenes, but with the ACE or Broker, it's a problem monitoring the HTTP inputs. It's like a black box."
"It needs a User Interface which is better than the aging MQ Explorer. The existing solution MQ Explorer is outdated."
"In some cases, when a file got transferred, it has same name on both sides. That could have something to do with the product or it could have to do with something else."
"There are things within the actual product itself that can be improved, such as limitations on message length, size, etc. There is no standardized message length outside of IBM. Each of the implementations of the MQ series or support of that functionality varies between various suppliers, and because of that, it is very difficult to move from one to the other. We have IBM MQ, but we couldn't use it because the platform that was speaking to MQ didn't support the message length that was standard within IBM MQ. So, we had to use a different product to do exactly the same thing. So, perhaps, there could be more flexibility in the standards around the message queue. If we had been able to increase the message queue size within the IBM MQ implementation, we wouldn't have had to go over to another competing product because the system that was using MQ messaging required the ability to hold messages that were far larger than the IBM MQ standard. So, there could be a bit more flexibility in the structuring. It has as such nothing to do with the IBM implementation of MQ. It is just that the standard that is being put out onto the market doesn't actually stipulate those types of things."
"So we're on MQ version 8, and I was at a recent event for MQ 9 and it looks like they've already added some of the features I was looking."
"It's hard to put in a nutshell, but it's sort of developed as more of an on-premise solution. It hasn't moved much away from that."
"Technical support is average. In terms of efficiency and response time, it's average, comparable to any other vendor."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As a client or as an end user, I would say that Google Cloud Storage or Google Cloud are cheaper than Amazon MQ."
"Depending on your use cases, Amazon MQ can be cheap or expensive."
"There is a different platform price between Windows, z/OS, and iSeries."
"Most of our customers are quite happy with the solution but they have an issue with the cost. They want to move to cheaper solutions."
"You have to license per application installation and if you expand vertically or horizontally, you will be paying for more licenses. The licenses are approximately $10,000 to $15,000 a license, it can get expensive quite quickly."
"The license for IBM MQ is commercial and not cheap. You get a multi-platform solution, which is important because it lets you connect systems on mainframes, personal solutions, Unix, Linux, etc."
"The fee for this solution is on the higher end of the scale."
"I rate the product price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, and we are on an annual subscription."
"Pricing could be better, as with all IBM products. But their performance in production, along with security and scalability, will pay returns in the long run."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon MQ?
Amazon MQ needs to have data collected on performance to analyze trends for improvement. Additionally, some tools can suggest how to improve performance in terms of speed, time, and processing, whi...
What is your primary use case for Amazon MQ?
I have some experience working with Amazon MQ.
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon MQ?
I have experience with on-premise setups using ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, but with regards to AWS, I use it via cloud only. There's a free tier with Amazon MQ based on their website, which is a six-mon...
What is MQ software?
Hi As someone with 45+ years of experience in the Transaction and Message Processing world, I have seen many "MQ" solutions that have come into the market place. From my perspective, while each pro...
What are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?
Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...
How does IBM MQ compare with VMware RabbitMQ?
IBM MQ has a great reputation behind it, and this solution is very robust with great stability. It is easy to use, simple to configure and integrates well with our enterprise ecosystem and protocol...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
WebSphere MQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SkipTheDishes, Malmberg, Dealer.com, Bench Accounting
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MQ vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.