IBM Event Streams vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

IBM and Solace are both solutions in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category. IBM is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.0, while Solace is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.0. IBM holds a 1.0% mindshare in MQ, compared to Solace’s 4.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Solace users who would recommend it.

IBM Event Streams

Read 3 IBM Event Streams reviews

218 Views
145 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 17 PubSub+ Platform reviews

1,106 Views
610 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Event Streams

PubSub+ Platform

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

IBM Event Streams and PubSub+ Platform compete in the event streaming domain, offering reliable, scalable messaging systems. PubSub+ Platform appears to have the advantage due to its robust features and high-performance metrics, justifying a potentially higher cost.

Features: IBM Event Streams integrates seamlessly with Kafka, ensures strong message durability, and handles data efficiently. PubSub+ Platform supports multi-protocol message streaming, dynamic event broker scaling, and advanced analytics, offering extensive support for diverse messaging environments and comprehensive event management.

Ease Of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Event Streams offers straightforward cloud and on-premises deployment with comprehensive documentation and technical support. PubSub+ Platform provides flexible deployment options including cloud, hybrid, and enterprise, backed by robust customer service. Its customizable deployment better aligns with varied business needs compared to IBM Event Streams' Kafka-first focus.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Event Streams is competitively priced with options for predictable costs, facilitating favorable ROI for enterprises invested in Kafka-based systems. PubSub+ Platform, although more expensive, yields high ROI through advanced integration capabilities and scalability, suitable for organizations requiring comprehensive event management. While IBM Event Streams is cost-efficient for Kafka users, PubSub+ Platform's broader capabilities may justify its higher price.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Event Streams vs. PubSub+ Platform Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Event Streams vs. PubSub+ Platform

June 2025

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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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

PubSub+ Platform

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

8th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (13th), Streaming Analytics (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of IBM Event Streams is 1.0%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 4.7%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Featured Reviews

Ismail El-Dahshan

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.

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BhanuChidigam

Sofware Engineering Manager at Wells Fargo

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.

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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'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."

"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."

"When it comes to granularity, you can literally do anything regarding how the filtering works."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"In the next release, I would like to see the GUI allow you to configure the security section."

"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."

"If you create one event in the past, you cannot resend it."

"A challenge we currently have is Solace's ability to integrate with single sign-on in our Active Directory and other single sign-on tools and platforms that any company would have. It's important for the platforms to work. Typically, they support only LDAP-based connectivity to our SQL Servers."

"The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls."

"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."

"I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka."

"The deployment process is complex."

"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."

"The integrations could improve in PubSub+ Event Broker."

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform is averagely priced."

"The pricing needs to 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."

"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."

"The price of PubSub+ Event Broker is reasonable for the capability it offers. However, when compared to others solutions on the market it is expensive."

"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

13%

Retailer

10%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Financial Services Firm

34%

Computer Software Company

11%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Event Streams?

The system efficiently processes and calculates the data flow within the cluster using DLP functionality.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Event Streams?

The platform is averagely priced. I rate the pricing a six out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Event Streams?

The product's interface needs improvement. Additionally, there could be a management console to create and manage clusters.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Apache Kafka vs IBM Event Streams

Compared 60% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs IBM Event Streams

Compared 40% of the time

More IBM Event Streams Competitors

Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 29% of the time

IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 23% of the time

ActiveMQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 11% of the time

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon SQS vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

More PubSub+ Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Message Queue (MQ) Software

June 2025

Download IBM Event Streams product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

June 2025

Download PubSub+ Platform product report

Also Known As

No data available

PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal

Overview

Built on open source Apache Kafka, IBM Event Streams is an event-streaming platform that helps you build smart applications that can react to events as they happen. IBM Event Streams is based on years of operational expertise IBM has gained from running Apache Kafka event streams for enterprises

IBM

PubSub+ Platform supports real-time shipment tracking, IT event management in multiclouds, and connects legacy and cloud-native systems for application modernization. It's utilized for trading, streaming market data, and app-to-app messaging, enhancing event-driven architectures with reliable message queuing.

Organizations adopt PubSub+ to efficiently transport events across hybrid and cloud environments, managing audit trails and long processing tasks. The platform aids integration through dynamic data publication, event mesh capabilities, and WAN optimization. Features like seamless integration, protocol agnosticism, and flexible topic hierarchy enhance versatility. Solace Admin Utility simplifies configuration and management, while the event portal allows hybrid deployment.

What are the key features of PubSub+ Platform?

Dynamic Data Publication: Enables flexible and responsive data handling.
Event Mesh Capabilities: Facilitates efficient event transportation.
WAN Optimization: Enhances data transfer across networks.
Protocol Agnosticism: Supports a wide range of protocols for integration.
Flexible Topic Hierarchy: Allows detailed and organized data exchange.
Solace Admin Utility: Provides intuitive configuration and management.
Granular Topic Filtering: Offers precise data filtering options.
Guaranteed Messaging: Ensures reliable message delivery.

What benefits or ROI should users consider?

Seamless Integration: Reduces complexity in connecting systems.
Performance and Scaling: Supports high-load environments efficiently.
Asynchronous Messaging: Improves application performance.
Robust Support System: Provides guidance and problem resolution.

PubSub+ is implemented in industries requiring real-time data handling and integration between disparate systems. Financial institutions use it for trading and streaming market data, while logistics companies benefit from real-time shipment tracking. Enterprises apply it to modernize operations by connecting legacy systems with cloud-native applications, enhancing their architecture and ensuring data reliability across environments.

Solace

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

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

Buyer's Guide

IBM Event Streams vs. PubSub+ Platform

June 2025

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