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Avada Software Infrared360 vs IBM MQ 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

Avada Software Infrared360
Ranking in Business Activity Monitoring
6th
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
13th
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (72nd), Server Monitoring (42nd)
IBM MQ
Ranking in Business Activity Monitoring
1st
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
172
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Business Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of Avada Software Infrared360 is 7.0%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 29.8%, down from 40.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Activity Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM MQ29.8%
Avada Software Infrared3607.0%
Other63.2%
Business Activity Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

WK
Role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems
* We now have the possibility of getting a central perspective on all tenants. * We have defined access roles for developers. Therefore, they can 'read in' their queues on the development and testing stages. With special roles, they may also write. This improves our development and testing cycle. * For operative systems, we have restricted the access. Still, selected people can react if something is happening in the various BOQs.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems."
"Monitoring that ties into our incident management system"
"We have easily created use case testing harnesses for specific flows that incorporate various message types."
"It allows non-technical users to inspect their individual components within the total infrastructure without disturbing other components and without bothering the technical teams."
"The administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities."
"It's what we use for monitoring our MQ system, so the features that they provide are just really, really good."
"Combined with IBM MQ, this product is our primary data store."
"Assists with our apps and has great message processing."
"IBM MQ is more reliable and secure than other software."
"The solution is easy to use and has good performance."
"The most valuable features of IBM MQ are its guarantee of delivery, ability to handle high volume while maintaining high availability, and robust security measures such as SSL, TLS, and RBAC."
"The best thing about IBM MQ solution is that it's guaranteed delivery and it's fast."
"The best features of IBM MQ were stability and straightforward application functionality; it has vendor support, which was a significant advantage, and in case of any production issues, we definitely get vendor support, whereas with Kafka and others, we have to rely on open community and our research."
"We use queue managers/concentrators for message flow going upstream and downstream on applications with enterprise licenses."
 

Cons

"One area where they could improve is with their documentation. Some sections are not up to date with new release information and providing additional samples in some areas would be very helpful."
"The user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic. The competing products have similar problems."
"We desire a dashboard that could accumulate BOQ lengths per tenant on one screen for all tenants."
"Some of the graphics in the interface could be improved. It's pretty basic. Some interfaces are not up to what you're used to seeing on other, more Windows-like tools."
"We are still working with the FTE/MFT subscription monitoring and reporting functionality. That is an area in which we would like to see further development taking place."
"The UI can be cumbersome - but we are still using the Viper interface and we have not had the time to check out the Alloy interface which is supposed to be much improved."
"They have provided a Liberty Profile in the Web Console for administration, and that could be further enhanced. It is not fit for use by an enterprise. They have to get rid of their WebSphere process and develop a front-end on Node.js or the like."
"There are many complications with IBM MQ servers."
"the level of training as well as product marketing for this product are not that great. You rarely find a good training institute that provides training. Many of the architects in several organization are neither aware of the product nor interested in using it. IBM should provide good training on products like this."
"Scaling is difficult with IBM MQ."
"It's not always easy for applications to connect to IBM MQ, but I think it's fine in general."
"They could integrate monitoring into the solution, a bit more than they do now. Currently, they have opened the REST API so you can get statistic and accounting information and details from MQ and build your own monitoring, if you want. IBM can improve the solution in this direction."
"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."
"What could be improved is the high-availability. The way MQ works is that it separates the high-availability from the workload balance. The scalability should be easier. If something happens so that the messages are not available on each node, scalability is only possible for the workload balance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Start small, then increase licensing later as per your demand."
"Because the licensing is at the QMGR level, you need to have at least a small cushion of licenses for occasional enterprise needs."
"Our internal budget calculation model incorporates the pricing per endpoint for any new projects. However, as our footprint for distributed queue managers shrinks as part of our shared middleware hub deployment, the initial licensing and support costs have been reduced over the last five years."
"Avada Software's licensing metric is very good because the license fees are based on the number of connections (which have not increased for us very much over the years) rather than the CPU processing power (which increases significantly whenever our hardware is upgraded) or the number of users (which has increased for us a lot since our original purchase)."
"Small-scale companies may not want to buy IBM MQ because of its high cost."
"Licensing for this software is on a yearly basis. The standard fee includes the maintenance and updates that are released periodically."
"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."
"In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side."
"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 pricing needs improvement."
"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."
"I think it's pretty reasonable, but I'm not so too sure of the current pricing strategy from IBM. We use many bundled services, and most often, we go through a service provided by some other third-party implementation. So, I can't really give an honest opinion about that."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
34%
Printing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Performing Arts
7%
Financial Services Firm
35%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise146
 

Questions from the Community

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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" 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...
 

Also Known As

Infrared360
WebSphere MQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

USBank, Southwest Airlines, Visiting Nurse Services of New York, Aon Hewitt, Parker Hannifin,  Cantonal Bank of Zurich (ZKB), Hagemeyer NA, and many others
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about Avada Software Infrared360 vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,019 professionals have used our research since 2012.