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Aurea CX Messenger vs IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of Aurea CX Messenger is 1.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 25.9%, up from 21.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 4.5%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM MQ25.9%
PubSub+ Platform4.5%
Aurea CX Messenger1.2%
Other68.4%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

Radhey Rajput - PeerSpot reviewer
Lightweight and efficient solution
It's very good and lightweight. But, it does not provide web service communication. But it is excellent for internal connections One valuable feature is the messaging broker. If there is a disruption, it restores the messages. And when the application is running, it delivers all the messages. The…
Md Al-Amin - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable and secure performance consistently enhances message transfer
IBM MQ is more reliable and secure than other software. There is a saying that for the last 30 years IBM MQ has never been hacked. It is more secure and reliable. Whenever the configuration is done, I do not have to touch it again. It works fine, it is stable, and its communication is to the point and accurate. All performance-related aspects are better. Performance-wise, it is scalable, and other features such as DR, DC, replication, and active passive mode are complex to configure, but it remains scalable. The pricing model for IBM MQ could be more flexible for clients.
BhanuChidigam - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs well, high availability, and helpful support
We use approximately four people for the maintenance of the solution. My advice to others is this solution has high throughput and is used for many stock exchanges. For business critical use cases, such as processing financial transactions at a quick speed, I would recommend this solution. I rate PubSub+ Event Broker an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The features that I have found most valuable are that it is very easy to develop. Most of it is graphical, but we also have the option to add any custom call that you need."
"The solution is highly scalable, this is very important for us. It can handle a lot of messages."
"SDM: User-friendly tool which allows for a seamless approach to performing hotfixes, if required."
"ESB: Provides all kind of possibilities to resolve business needs. A lot of ready to use services plus custom Java services. I used a lot of them all."
"The Messenger Broker is a really good feature."
"The solution offers excellent stability."
"We use our routing feature when the request is coming from the business application. The request goes to the distributive side and it is routed to the right claim instance."
"The solution is stable."
"Currently, we are not using many advanced features. We are only using point-to-point MQ. I have previously used features like context-based authentication, SSL authentication, and high availability. These are good and pretty cool features. They make your business reliable. For critical business needs, everyone uses only IBM MQ. It is the first choice because of its reliability. There is a one-send-and-one-delivery feature. It also has a no-message-loss feature, and because of that, only IBM MQ is used in banking or financial sectors."
"The most valuable feature is the stability. It's perfect in this way."
"The product helps us monitor messages with other queues, view duplicated messages and control undelivered messages."
"The thing that I like about MQ most is its reliability. It's one of those types of products that just works. You don't have to tinker around with it too much."
"Data integrity, reliability and security are valuable features that IBM MQ possesses."
"I have found the solution to be very robust. It has a strong reputation, easy to use, simple to configure in our enterprise software, and supports all the protocols that we use."
"As of now, the most valuable aspects are the topic-based subscription and the fanout exchange that we are using."
"We've built a lot of products into it and it's been quite easy to feed market data onto the systems and put entitlements and controls around that. That was a big win for us when we were consolidating our platforms down. Trying to have one event bus, one messaging bus, for the whole globe, and consolidate everything over time, has been key for us. We've been able to do that through one API, even if it's across the different languages."
"I rate the PubSub+ Platform a 9 out of 10."
"We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code."
"Going from something where we had outages and capacity issues constantly to a system that was able to scale with the massive market data and messaging spikes that happened during the initial stages of the COVID crisis in March, we were able to scale with 40 plus percent growth in our platform over the course of days."
"In my assessment of Solace against other products — as I was responsible for evaluating various products and bringing the right tool into companies in the past — I worked with multiple platforms like RabbitMQ, Confluent, Kafka, and various other tools in the market. But I found the event mesh capability to be a very interesting as well as fulfilling capability, towards what we want to achieve from a digital-integration-strategy point of view... It's distributed, yet it is intelligently connected. It can also span and I can plug and play any number of brokers into the event mesh, so it's a great deal. That's a differentiator."
"When it comes to granularity, you can literally do anything regarding how the filtering works."
"The topic hierarchy is pretty flexible. Once you have the subject defined just about anybody who knows Java can come onboard. The APIs are all there."
 

Cons

"You should not hurry with upgrades without testing the whole product completely."
"The improvement is that it should be on the cloud and use web services."
"The solution needs to improve support for new, more recent protocols on the API."
"I don't know if the last version has the cloud option, but maybe that could be good. That could be something that is included."
"Aurea CX Messenger could improve by making better use of the new APIs"
"It should include/add more services with the product as per market demand. It should include custom Java services developed by any organization or provide a platform where users/developers can share ideas/custom services, etc."
"I would like to see message duplication included."
"IBM MQ's pricing is higher than its competitors'."
"IBM MQ could streamline its complexity to be more like Kafka without the channel complexities of clusters, making it more straightforward."
"IBM could revamp the interface. The API is huge, but some developers find it limiting because of the cost. They tend to wrap the API course into the JMS, which means they're missing out on some good features. They should work a little bit on the API exposure."
"It needs a User Interface which is better than the aging MQ Explorer. The existing solution MQ Explorer is outdated."
"You should be able to increase the message size. It should be dynamic. Each queue has a limitation of 5,000."
"It would be nice to have AI features and an updated graphical user interface."
"If they could come up with monitoring dashboards that would be good. We are using external monitoring tools, apart from our IBM MQ, to monitor IBM MQ. If we could get monitoring tools or dashboards to keep everything simple for the user to understand, that would be good."
"We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building. A current workaround is using the message's header, where the business data can be put into this header and be used for a dynamic topic lookup. I want to see this in action when there are a couple of hundred cases live. E.g., how does it perform? From an administration perspective, is the ease of use there?"
"The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls."
"The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively."
"Some of the feature's gaps with some of the open-source vendors have been closed in a lot of ways. Being more agile and addressing those earlier could be an area for improvement."
"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."
"The ease of management could be approved. The GUI is very good, but to configure and manage these devices programmatically in the software version is not easy. For example, if I would like to spin up a new software broker, then I could in theory use the API, but it would require a considerable amount of development effort to do so. There should be a tool, or something that Solace supports, that we could use for this, e.g., a platform like Terraform where we could use infrastructure as code to configure our source appliances."
"If you create one event in the past, you cannot resend it."
"The section on observability pertains to understanding the functioning of an event crash. Instead of focusing on how the crash occurs, attention is given to the observable aspects, such as a memory pipeline where one person pushes messages and another reads them. However, this pipeline often encounters issues, such as the reader being unavailable, causing the system to become stuck and preventing the messages from moving forward. This can lead to the pipeline being permanently stalled."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Much better than Oracle SOA Suite."
"You pay nothing for licensing, because the commercial model is a subscription. Other environments, such as QA and Development, are included in the subscription"
"The pricing is not so high."
"The pricing seems good according to the functionality that the solution provides."
"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."
"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."
"Our costs haven't increased but they also have not improved."
"The price of IBM MQ could improve by being less expensive."
"It would be a 10 out of 10 if it wasn't so expensive."
"The licensing fees are paid quarterly and they are expensive."
"IBM MQ is an expensive solution compared to other solutions. However, if you pay less you will not receive the same experience or features."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version."
"We have been really happy with the product licensing rates. It has been free for us, up to a 100,000 transactions per second, and all we have to do is pay for support. Making their product available and accessible to us has not been a problem at all."
"The price of PubSub+ Event Broker is reasonable for the capability it offers. However, when compared to others solutions on the market it is expensive."
"We are looking for something that will add value and fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only."
"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."
"There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Insurance Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Media Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
4%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise144
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is MQ software?
Hi As someone with 45+ years of experience in the Transaction and Message Processing world, I have seen many "MQ" sol...
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...
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, si...
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
Regarding improving the PubSub+ Platform, I'm not sure about the pricing aspect, but I heard that it is quite expensi...
What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?
My typical use case for the PubSub+ Platform is as an event-driven solution for communication between two components.
What advice do you have for others considering PubSub+ Event Broker?
I have experience working with Kafka, PubSub+ Platform, and IBM MQ, all three of them. We are customers, meaning my c...
 

Also Known As

CX Messenger Enterprise, Aurea Sonic ESB, Aurea Sonic, Aurea Sonic MQ
WebSphere MQ
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Heathrow, HomeServe, Paypal, Freedom Mortgage
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet 
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Apache, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Message Queue (MQ) Software. Updated: August 2025.
868,229 professionals have used our research since 2012.