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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
6th
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
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (6th), 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 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 service operations monitoring features are valuable."
"The product's initial setup phase is easy."
"It is evolving more and more into artificial intelligence."
"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."
"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."
"The event portal and the diversity of deployment options in a hybrid landscape are the most valuable features."
"The valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the speed of processing, publishing, and consumption."
"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."
"Some valuable features include reconnecting topics, placing queues, and direct connections to MongoDB. The platform provides a dashboard to monitor the status of messages, such as how many have been processed or delivered, which is helpful for tracking performance."
"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."
"One of the main reasons for using PubSub+ is that it is a proper event manager that can handle events in a reactive way."
 

Cons

"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."
"I feel that the tool's stability has some scope for improvement."
"The initial setup of the solution is complex."
"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."
"The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls."
"The deployment process is complex."
"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."
"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."
"The integrations could improve in PubSub+ Event Broker."
"For improvements, I would suggest increasing the max payload size to a limit of 100MB or more. The current max payload size is limited to 5MB."
"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?"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product’s price could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"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."
"Having a free version is critical for our technology operations use case. This is primarily because our technology operations team is a cost center in our company. They are not profit drivers and having a free version for installation will probably meet our needs. Even for production, it'll support up to a 100,000 messages per second. I don't think in technology operations that we have that many events and alerts from our detection tools. Even if I have 20 or 30 event detection products out there, they're only going to publish the things which are critical or warnings. I don't think we'll ever reach a 100,000 messages per second."
"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
7%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
35%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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 do you like most about PubSub+ Event Broker?
The most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was done manually with a file, and it can be done instantly live.
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively. Additionally, providing a comprehensive dashboard t...
 

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: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.