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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
12th
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 August 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of IBM Event Streams is 3.0%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 21.0%, down from 26.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ21.0%
IBM Event Streams3.0%
Other76.0%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

TM
IBM MQ Specialist / Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Easy to use, stable, has a good interface, and the security is good
I don't know if it's because of experience, but for me, it was easy to install. It's just a matter of having an RPM, then click next, next, and next again. The difficult part comes in when you have to configure the security. That is the most difficult part, but it's not that difficult. It takes less than two hours to install. Two hours max, because I did one yesterday. I installed it on AWS and it was easy to install the software. It was less than an hour for the bare minimum installation. Setting up the security, took close to two hours.
David Pizinger - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Technical Leader at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has faced unexpected VM restarts but continues to deliver messages reliably
I'm not sure if we've utilized IBM MQ's high availability. Our MQ VMs are set up in clusters, and I think our queue managers are set up in pairs. However, I don't know if we actually use any specific high availability features of IBM MQ that are out of the box. We have it architected with high availability because we use F5 load balancers, and everything about our architecture is highly available. I haven't personally used the management tools with IBM MQ, but we do have them, and our middleware folks leverage them. I can't really comment on them because I don't use them myself. I don't think the management tools help optimize message flows, and I'm not really aware of how they help in this. I'm not familiar with dynamic routing for IBM MQ.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The stability has been good."
"I am happy with the product, other than pricing I don't have any other improvements that I can suggest."
"I'm an administrator, and what I like most is the interface, the security, and the storage."
"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."
"The most valuable features of IBM MQ are its guarantee of delivery, ability to handle high volume while maintaining high availability, and robust security measures such as SSL, TLS, and RBAC."
"The features of IBM MQ that have proven most effective for ensuring message delivery reliability are the stability of the system, the resilience and the product, which is definitely of top quality in this segment."
"The major thing we like about it is zero transaction loss."
"Stability-wise, it's very good. People have been using it for 15 to 20 years. MQ and IIB are the most stable products from IBM."
"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."
"There are many things that I like about IBM MQ, such as, its performance and reliability."
"Overall, I am very happy with this product and my only complaint is that the price is high."
"Rock-solid performance really is the most solid feature of it."
 

Cons

"The product's interface needs improvement."
"It would be helpful if they could help us explain why they, as in, the customers, should use the product and the overall benefits."
"In the next release, I would like to see the GUI allow you to configure the security section."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"With MQ, we always have trouble with the initial priming call failing."
"With IBM products, there's less marketing. If they do more demos and more seminars on their products, it will be very useful. On a given day. I get seminar invites for many vendors and products, but for IBM, I may get an invite once or twice a year."
"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."
"In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side."
"It would be nice if we could use the cluster facilities because we are doing active/passive configuration use."
"Price is one thing that could be improved."
"We need to have a better administration console and better monitoring features. Right now, they are not good and could be a lot better."
"It could provide more monitoring tools and some improvement to the UI. I would also like to see more throughput in future versions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing needs to be improved."
"The platform is averagely priced."
"In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side."
"IBM MQ appliance has pricing options, but they are costly."
"IBM MQ has a flexible license model based on the Processor Value Unit (PVU) and I recommend it."
"The price is high."
"To implement such an IBM solution, a company has to pay a lot in term of licensing and consultancy. A pricing model might be a better option."
"It's super expensive, so ask them if they can consolidate some other licensing costs. But, IBM is IBM, so I guess we'll pay for it."
"Small-scale companies may not want to buy IBM MQ because of its high cost."
"IBM products, in general, have high licensing costs and support costs are too high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
21%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

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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

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: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.