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IBM Event Streams vs IBM MQ comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 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

IBM Event Streams
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM MQ
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of IBM Event Streams is 2.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 22.7%, down from 24.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ22.7%
IBM Event Streams2.2%
Other75.1%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

Ismail El-Dahshan - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at areebah
Easy to set up with good support and good routing scenarios
The triggering and the events that they have triggered as well as the route of the message according to the events are very useful. The triggering scenarios and routing scenarios are all good. It's a very useful solution for financial institutions. The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The stability has been good. I've found the product to be scalable. Technical support is responsive.
MK
SWIFT manager at Raiffeisen Bank Aval
Reliable payment processing is achieved with minimal disruption
Currently, we have some disadvantages; it's a bit difficult to use IBM ID to access support from the IBM site. To get nice support from IBM, we need to use IBM ID, and it's a bit complicated to integrate it with IBM support. Support can be better because sometimes we need explanations for some behaviors of the product, and it's not easy to reach the proper person in IBM support. They could add some new features into IBM MQ to make it better. A graphical user interface in addition to MQ Explorer could be useful, but we are satisfied with MQ Explorer as well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The system efficiently processes and calculates the data flow within the cluster using DLP functionality."
"The triggering scenarios and routing scenarios are all good, making it a very useful solution for financial institutions."
"I am happy with the product, other than pricing I don't have any other improvements that I can suggest."
"The stability has been good."
"I'm an administrator, and what I like most is the interface, the security, and the storage."
"IBM MQ is robust compared to other products in the market and also gives you support from the IBM team, allowing us to connect to the IBM technical team in case of any production fault or errors."
"IBM MQ is very stable, which is important for our core banking application."
"We had our MQ running in production for almost 800-900 days without any issues, i.e., for more than three years, we didn't even have to restart, and still everything runs so smoothly."
"It's ability to scale, it's ability to do guaranteed delivery and it's ability to do point-to-point of what we subscribe are the most valuable features."
"It is useful for exchanging information between applications."
"I haven't seen any issues with respect to the message loss."
"Its integration capabilities and the security features are the most valuable features of this product."
"IBM MQ is used heavily in all of the companies I have worked for, mostly in the financial industry, as it is easy to set up and has good instrumentation."
 

Cons

"It would be helpful if they could help us explain why they, as in, the customers, should use the product and the overall benefits."
"The product's interface needs improvement."
"In the next release, I would like to see the GUI allow you to configure the security section."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"It would be helpful if they could help us explain why they, as in, the customers, should use the product and the overall benefits."
"If we have IBM MQ or one of the applications go down, our entire plant is down. Then sometimes, it's 2-3 hours or something before someone calls us back."
"IBM MQ is still in a premature state. It is in a research phase, so it is very early to make specific suggestions about improvements."
"I'm not sure that current version has event-driven mechanism requests that people go for. I would like the latest version to come with both type of event mechanisms: an email server and a POP server. If that is not there, then that would be a great addition."
"If it was a little bit more user friendly, or more gen-x friendly maybe, that would be the best benefit."
"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."
"The monitoring could be improved. It's a pain to monitor the throughput through the MQ. The maximum throughput for a queue or single channel isn't clear. We could also use some professional services by IBM to assess and tune the performance."
"Price is one thing that could be improved."
"We have used technical support. Not for the solution, but for problems or issues. I would say that they are okay. If you want me to rate between one to ten, I would rate them four."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform is averagely priced."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"Small-scale companies may not want to buy IBM MQ because of its high cost."
"It is a very expensive product compared to the open source products in the market."
"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."
"IBM MQ appliance has pricing options, but they are costly."
"IBM products, in general, have high licensing costs and support costs are too high."
"It's a very expensive product."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, and we are on an annual subscription."
"Licensing for this software is on a yearly basis. The standard fee includes the maintenance and updates that are released periodically."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

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Also Known As

No data available
WebSphere MQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

American Airlines, UBank, Bitly, Eurobits, Active International, Bison, Contextor, Constance Hotels, Resorts & Golf, Creval, Deloitte, ExxonMobil, FaceMe, FacePhi, Fitzsoft, Fuga Technologies, Guardio, Honeywell, Japanese airline, Jenzabar, KONE
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Event Streams vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.