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EMQX vs Redis 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

EMQX
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (9th), IoT Connectivity (1st)
Redis
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (4th), Managed NoSQL Databases (6th), In-Memory Data Store Services (1st), Vector Databases (4th), AI Software Development (13th)
 

Featured Reviews

AP
Senior Software Engineer
Connected millions of iot devices and manage real time pub sub control and flexible access rules
When going with the open-source EMQX version, there are limitations provided. For example, the webhooks use case cannot be scaled to as large a scale compared to the enterprise edition of EMQX. The open-source version helps a great deal with work in the company. The way this resource helps nurture the IoT device paradigm is greatly helpful for developers working newly on this system because the onboarding part of EMQX is very easy and developer-friendly. Someone who wants to dive into it can easily implement and make the system robust based on the technologies it provides. EMQX provides API connections for applications. HTTP calls can be made to EMQX to get updates from the client. Those connections should be made asynchronously. The webhook part handles this well, but when it comes to the API part, when the load and payload of the MQTT topics and messages are very heavy, sometimes unknown errors occur, and logs and errors must be found. When a specific log session is created for that client, the readability of those logs is not good. The platform itself does not need improvement, but when it comes to developer-friendly implementations of EMQX, there are some pain points that need attention. The visibility of logs, error logs, and information logs inside the built-in monitoring needs work because developers, when they implement code or any kind of specific tools, need proper control over the system. Without that control, there is no point in implementing anything at all. The monitoring part needs work. When it comes to the flow chart of how different clients are connected with different devices, there is a feature inside EMQX called Flow. When that Flow is in place, clients (devices) should be controllable from that Flow itself. These are the most important improvements that need to be addressed.
Varuns Ug - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Caching has accelerated complex workflows and delivers low latency for high-traffic microservices
A few features of Redis that I use on a day-to-day basis and feel are among the best are extremely low latency and high throughput. Since Redis is in-memory, it makes it ideal for cases such as caching and rate limiting where response time is critical. TTL expiry support is very useful in Redis as it allows me to automatically evict stale data without manual cleanup, which is something I use heavily in my caching strategy. Another point I can mention is that the rich data structures such as strings, hashes, and even sorted sets are very powerful. I have used strings for caching responses and counters, whereas I have used hashes for storing structured objects. One more feature I can tell you about is atomic operations. Redis guarantees atomicity for operations such as incrementing a counter, which is very useful for rate limiting and avoiding race conditions in distributed systems. Finally, I want to emphasize that Redis is easy to scale and integrate, whether through clustering or using a distributed cache across microservices. Redis has impacted my organization positively by providing default support that is very useful. For metrics, in one of my core systems, introducing Redis as a distributed cache helped me achieve around an 80% cache hit rate, which reduced repeated downstream services. Real API latency also improved from around two seconds to approximately 450 milliseconds for P99. It also helped reduce the load on dependent services and databases, which improved overall system reliability.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"EMQX will boost your product sampling rate and transmission so that you can achieve a large amount of data without any loss while transmitting through the internet."
"EMQX has positively impacted my organization in many ways, particularly by making our main agenda of getting stock details and connecting users to our real-time protocol much easier."
"EMQX is a solid open-source project for making IoT devices connect anywhere in the world."
"EMQX remains live and matured, allowing us to scale it, and we continue using EMQX without requiring to switch to any other offerings as it still works best and is resilient."
"The outcomes from using EMQX are very cost-saving for us because we previously used the MQTT Mosquitto broker, and when I compare Mosquitto with EMQX, EMQX is far better than Mosquitto and other protocols."
"EMQX helped me complete my project perfectly because when I compared it to other platforms, EMQX truly fits my needs and my project, allowing me to explain my output more clearly to my lecturer, and ultimately I received a good grade, so it has been very helpful."
"The best features EMQX offers in my experience are that it can send messages for a large number of customers with a very high message-per-second rate while consuming low resources."
"I use Redis mostly to cache repeated data that is required."
"The solution's technical support team is good...The solution's initial setup process was straightforward."
"It is particularly efficient for cloud-based storage and operations."
"The performance of Redis is very fast."
"What I like best about Redis is its fast and easy use. It has interesting algorithms like HyperLogLog and provides useful features. It's also good for implementing scalable rate limiting."
"Overall, my experience with Redis has been very positive, and it has played a key role in improving performance, scalability, and system responsiveness in our back-end system."
"It makes operations more efficient. The information processing is very fast, and very responsive. It's all about the technology."
"Redis is a powerful and reliable tool for improving application performance."
 

Cons

"EMQX is a good MQTT broker but the historian is simple."
"The visibility of logs, error logs, and information logs inside the built-in monitoring needs work because developers, when they implement code or any kind of specific tools, need proper control over the system."
"To improve EMQX, I think it should reduce costs, save time when sending messages, and improve reliability."
"On EMQX improvement side, I saw certain frameworks such as NanoMQTT and others claiming to be much more performant than EMQX, so maybe the newer version of EMQX can look into those aspects for potential improvements, but I do not have insight on the latest version of EMQX to know whether it has already addressed this or not."
"If you want to improve further, the SSL certificate and TLS certificate have overhead in serverless EMQX."
"Sometimes, we use Redis as a cluster, and the clusters can sometimes suffer some issues and bring some downtime to your application."
"There are some features from MongoDB that I would like to see included in Redis to enhance its overall efficiency, such as the ability to perform remote behaviour. MongoDB is more efficient in handling updates than deletions and is quicker in processing updates, but it can be slower regarding deletions. This can sometimes pose a challenge, especially when dealing with large datasets or frequent data manipulations that involve deletions. In such cases, I often rewrite columns or update values instead of directly deleting data, as it can be more efficient."
"The tool should improve by increasing its size limits and handling dynamic data better. We use the client ID or associate it with a key for static content. The solution will not be easy for a beginner. Unless you understand SQL data, it will be difficult to understand and use Redis. It also needs to be user-friendly."
"Redis could be improved by introducing a GUI to display key-value pair database information, as it is currently a CLI tool with no visual representation."
"It's actually quite expensive."
"The development of clusters could improve. Additionally, it would be helpful if it was integrated with Amazon AWS or Google Cloud."
"Redis could improve its efficiency in handling locally stored data, not just Amazon Cloud or Google Cloud."
"For the PubSub feature, we had to create our own tools to monitor the events."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Redis is not an overpriced solution."
"Redis is an open-source solution. There are not any hidden fees."
"We saw an ROI. It made the processing of our transactions faster."
"The tool is open-source. There are no additional costs."
"Redis is an open-source product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Legal Firm
17%
Media Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for EMQX?
EMQX is an open-source protocol. The cost is mostly the cloud provider cost. EMQX is open-source and MQTT is also an open-source protocol, so the cost is less.
What needs improvement with EMQX?
EMQX is a good MQTT broker but the historian is simple. The historian side of EMQX and MQTT is simple and could be better. It could be more reliable in new versions.
What is your primary use case for EMQX?
EMQX is a unified architecture and unified namespace based on MQTT broker, primarily using EMQX or HiveMQ. We use EMQX for the communication of factory data, sensors, and PLCs. We track data on sen...
What do you like most about Redis?
Redis is better tested and is used by large companies. I haven't found a direct alternative to what Redis offers. Plus, there are a lot of support and learning resources available, which help you u...
What needs improvement with Redis?
Overall, Redis is a powerful and reliable tool, but there are a few areas for improvement. One limitation is that Redis is memory-based, so scaling can become expensive compared to disk-based syste...
What is your primary use case for Redis?
My main use case for Redis is caching frequently accessed data to improve performance and reduce database load. For example, I cache API responses and user-related data so that repeated requests ca...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Redis Enterprise
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
1. Twitter 2. GitHub 3. StackOverflow 4. Pinterest 5. Snapchat 6. Craigslist 7. Digg 8. Weibo 9. Airbnb 10. Uber 11. Slack 12. Trello 13. Shopify 14. Coursera 15. Medium 16. Twitch 17. Foursquare 18. Meetup 19. Kickstarter 20. Docker 21. Heroku 22. Bitbucket 23. Groupon 24. Flipboard 25. SoundCloud 26. BuzzFeed 27. Disqus 28. The New York Times 29. Walmart 30. Nike 31. Sony 32. Philips
Find out what your peers are saying about EMQX vs. Redis and other solutions. Updated: May 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.