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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
4th
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
12th
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (73rd), Server Monitoring (43rd)
IBM MQ
Ranking in Business Activity Monitoring
1st
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
170
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Business Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of Avada Software Infrared360 is 7.2%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 39.0%, down from 42.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities."
"It allows non-technical users to inspect their individual components within the total infrastructure without disturbing other components and without bothering the technical teams."
"Monitoring that ties into our incident management system"
"It's what we use for monitoring our MQ system, so the features that they provide are just really, really good."
"It has role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems."
"We have easily created use case testing harnesses for specific flows that incorporate various message types."
"The most valuable feature is that it's a very strong integration platform but it is quite a monolithic solution. It's got everything."
"We have found the MQ messaging topologies valuable."
"I think the whole product is useful. Their database and all is very good, and the product is fine. The fact that it ensures message delivery is probably the most important thing. I also like that you're able to trace and track everything. If it doesn't arrive at the destination, it will go back to the queue, and no message will be lost."
"The first things are its simplicity and its robustness. Compared to any other product, it's the most robust I've worked with. And it's extremely easy to manage."
"IBM MQ deals mainly with the queuing mechanism. It passes the data and it publishes it. These two abilities are the most valuable features."
"The high availability and session recovery are the most valuable features because we need the solution live all day."
"IBM is still adding some features and coding some other systems on the security end. However, it has the most security features I've seen in a communication solution. Security is the most important thing for our purposes."
"The feature I find most effective for ensuring message delivery without loss is the backup threshold. This feature allows for automatic retries of transactional messages within a specified threshold."
 

Cons

"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."
"We desire a dashboard that could accumulate BOQ lengths per tenant on one screen for all tenants."
"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."
"Presenting and maybe having some different options for different user experiences based on the administrative duties that you have to do as an app manager or configure the server or security would be an improvement."
"I couldn't find a lot of information on the system API side."
"The GUI part could be better."
"Should have more integration in the monitoring tools."
"The clustering capabilities have provided some difficulties when it comes to resiliency. This has been a challenge for managing the environment."
"I would like to see it integrate with the newer ways of messaging, such as Kafka. They might say that you have IBM Integration Bus to do that stuff, but it would be great if MQ could, out-of-the-box, listen to public Kafka."
"The initial setup is difficult. Creating your own cluster is difficult. Working with cluster repositories is difficult. Issue management with IBM MQ is difficult."
"In IBM MQ, the channel connection is an area where my company faces some limitations. At times, we hit limitations on the connection, meaning the connection is fully occupied."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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)."
"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."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, and we are on an annual subscription."
"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 problem with this product is that it's a little bit expensive."
"IBM is expensive."
"IBM MQ is expensive and they charge based on the CPU."
"The pricing needs improvement."
"IBM MQ is an expensive solution compared to other solutions. However, if you pay less you will not receive the same experience or features."
"There is a different platform price between Windows, z/OS, and iSeries."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
35%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Printing Company
8%
Performing Arts
6%
Financial Services Firm
37%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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" 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: July 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.