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BMC Helix Monitor vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 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

BMC Helix Monitor
Ranking in Event Monitoring
7th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Event Monitoring
13th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (8th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Streaming Analytics (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

Jijil GHosh - PeerSpot reviewer
An agentless tool that offers great scalability and a straightforward setup phase
The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that BMC Helix Monitor is an agentless tool, because of which you don't need to deploy agents on each and every system in your IT environment. If you want to install an agent on each and every system, manpower is needed, while there is no such need when one uses BMC Helix Monitor. BMC Helix Monitor provides you with details on asset relationships. If a particular printer is connected to a core network printer or a particular desktop is connected to the servers, the product scans and gives you a free structure of relationship, which doesn't need any human intervention, making it an automated process. BMC Helix Monitor gives you the entire information about your assets, because of which you can sit in one place and keep track of whether a particular asset is online or offline.
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 service operations monitoring features are valuable."
"The product's initial setup phase is easy."
"It is evolving more and more into artificial intelligence."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that BMC Helix Monitor is an agentless tool, because of which you don't need to deploy agents on each and every system in your IT environment."
"The most useful features has been the WAN optimization and probably the HybridEdge, which requires some third-party adapters or plugins. The idea that we can position Solace as a protocol-agnostic message transport fabric is key to our company having all manners of asynchronous messaging protocols from MQ, Kafka, JMS, etc. I really like the WAN optimization: Send once over a WAN, then distribute locally as many times as there are subscribers."
"The event portal and the diversity of deployment options in a hybrid landscape are the most valuable features."
"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."
"When we went to add another installation in our private cloud, it was easy. We received support from Solace and the install was seamless with no issues."
"This solution reduces the latency to access changes in real-time and the effort required to onboard a new subscriber. It also reduces the maintenance of each of those interfaces because now the publisher and subscribers are decoupled. Event Broker handles all the communication and engagement. We can just push one update, then we don't have to know who is consuming it and what's happening to that publication downstream. It's all done by the broker, which is a huge benefit of using Event Broker."
"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."
"As of now, the most valuable aspects are the topic-based subscription and the fanout exchange that we are using."
 

Cons

"The initial setup of the solution is complex."
"I feel that the tool's stability has some scope for improvement."
"The product must provide more information and dashboards."
"The solution's GUI and some patching-related information are areas with shortcomings where enhancements are needed, though I believe they are areas that fall under BMC's roadmap for the future."
"The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls."
"If you create one event in the past, you cannot resend it."
"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."
"The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively."
"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."
"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."
"One of the areas of improvement would be if we could tell the story a bit better about what an event mesh does or why an event mesh is foundational to a large enterprise that has a wide diversity of applications that are homegrown and a small number off the shelf."
"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product’s price could be improved."
"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."
"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 price of the solution is expensive."
"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."
"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."
"The licensing is dependent on the volume that is flowing. If you go for their support services, it will cost some more money, but I think it is worth it, especially if you are just starting your journey."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
14%
Insurance Company
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
33%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BMC Helix Monitor?
The service operations monitoring features are valuable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Helix Monitor?
The product’s price could be improved. The company is quite flexible with pricing. Legacy products need to revise their pricing strategy without losing their position in the market. The legacy mode...
What needs improvement with BMC Helix Monitor?
I feel that the tool's stability has some scope for improvement.
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 expensive compared to Kafka. That's the only concern I can mention; otherwise, it was a...
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 company uses Solace. We use it and customize it based on our needs. Based on my e...
 

Also Known As

Helix Monitor
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Grupo Moura, Goodman, Aspect, Telefónica Colombia, Fujitsu
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 BMC Helix Monitor vs. PubSub+ Platform and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.