Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Amazon SQS vs IBM MQ comparison

 

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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.8
Amazon SQS enhances performance and reliability, increasing productivity by reducing programming effort and labor costs, despite initial investment.
Sentiment score
6.4
IBM MQ is reliable, cost-effective, enhances stability, and supports integration, though measuring returns may be challenging for public services.
Using Amazon SQS has led to increased productivity and reduced man-hour costs.
It's a product which integrates the external systems with internal systems or among the systems themselves, making it an essential technology component required to integrate multiple systems.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Amazon SQS customer service satisfaction varies, influenced by purchased support level, with premium options offering improved experiences.
Sentiment score
6.9
IBM MQ support is praised for helpfulness, yet some report delays and suggest improvements in response times and escalation.
They meet their tasks effectively.
We cannot hold on to the project for a long time just to wait for IBM to fix the issues.
The response time for IBM MQ support could be better because when we are using IBM MQ and something goes wrong, support is required as the resource availability of the IBM product is very limited.
With containerized flavors of these products, we are having a tough time dealing with PMRs because the versions are new to IBM.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon SQS excels in scalability and integration, though users note configuration needs and potential message duplicates.
Sentiment score
7.5
IBM MQ's scalability supports various environments with high performance, yet some users find complexity and cost challenging.
Amazon SQS is highly scalable, automatically managing itself based on the load.
I can easily scale up or down with Amazon SQS without any issues.
IBM MQ handles many thousands of messages in a second, indicating good scalability.
In our environment, we do not have horizontal scaling for IBM MQ, but as demand increases, we would just vertically scale it.
We've got 12 VMs running, and it's very easy to scale.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Users highly trust Amazon SQS for its stability, reliability, and performance, often preferring it over RabbitMQ and Kafka.
Sentiment score
8.1
IBM MQ is highly rated for its stability and reliability, with minimal issues primarily linked to external factors.
With Amazon SQS, such maintenance is not needed, making it more reliable and secure.
The stability of Amazon SQS is very good, as I find it to be very stable.
We have never had any downtime or crashes since it's been running.
The transaction is always guaranteed with IBM MQ, which is the main reason I have been working with it for fifteen years while dealing with financial transactions or messages.
Otherwise, they're completely stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon SQS users seek better documentation, integrations, security, pricing, UI, performance, message handling, and monitoring tools.
IBM MQ users seek enhanced security, modern UI, better cloud integration, and improved scalability with cost-effective and intuitive solutions.
It would be beneficial if there was a provision to configure and retain messages for longer than a week.
Having a graphical user interface would improve usability.
The pricing model for IBM MQ could be more flexible for clients.
They don't meet our standards due to the timing to get a person with knowledge.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon SQS offers a cost-effective pay-as-you-use model, but high-scale usage can increase costs compared to alternatives.
IBM MQ's licensing costs are high, especially for large deployments, but it's valued for performance despite cheaper alternatives.
On a scale of one to ten, where one is very cheap, I would rate the pricing as one.
It's not cheap.
It's possible to get some training, but the cost of this learning is expensive.
The price of IBM MQ is definitely on the higher side.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon SQS enables scalable, reliable messaging with easy AWS integration, supporting FIFO and standard queues for efficient processing.
IBM MQ ensures reliable, secure messaging with high scalability, supporting diverse applications, ideal for banking and financial sectors.
If there's a failure in the system after consuming a message, SQS's settings ensure the message is not deleted until confirmation.
If we compare with other solutions such as RabbitMQ for messaging, Amazon SQS is easier to use and easier to create the queue.
These are financial transactions, so we do not want to lose the message at any cost.
There is a saying that for the last 30 years IBM MQ has never been hacked.
It's time-tested, very stable, highly resilient, and has all the features to troubleshoot even if something goes wrong.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon SQS
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
31
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
172
Ranking in other categories
Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of Amazon SQS is 7.8%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 25.5%, up from 22.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM MQ25.5%
Amazon SQS7.8%
Other66.7%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

Hari Prakash Pokala - PeerSpot reviewer
Valuable AWS services enhance data analysis yet could benefit from flexible data streams
I am using multiple services such as AWS Lambda, S3, EC2, ECS, and the SNS SQS services, along with QuickSight reports and some of the VPC concepts.  We have an email notification system integrated with Spring Branch. Once a batch job completes, SNS and SQS trigger events, sending notification…
David Pizinger - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Message Queue (MQ) Software solutions are best for your needs.
871,358 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
35%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise146
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon SQS?
The retention period for messages could be improved. Currently, messages are retained for four or seven days. It would be beneficial if there was a provision to configure and retain messages for lo...
What is your primary use case for Amazon SQS?
I primarily use Amazon SQS ( /products/amazon-sqs-reviews ) for asynchronous messaging. It is part of our distributed system design, where we use it for asynchronous communication by posting a mess...
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

EMS, NASA, BMW, Capital One
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon SQS vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
871,358 professionals have used our research since 2012.