IBM MQ vs Red Hat AMQ comparison

IBM and Red Hat are both solutions in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category. IBM is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.5, while Red Hat is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.0. IBM holds a 25.5% mindshare in MQ, compared to Red Hat’s 9.5% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

IBM MQ

Read 172 IBM MQ reviews

6,471 Views
4,724 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Red Hat AMQ

Read 10 Red Hat AMQ reviews

2,285 Views
1,645 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

IBM MQ

Red Hat AMQ

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

IBM MQ and Red Hat AMQ compete in the enterprise messaging solutions category, providing reliable messaging services. IBM MQ appears to hold the upper hand due to its strong emphasis on stability and security, key factors for enterprise-level deployments.

Features: IBM MQ is renowned for its reliability and robust data transfer capacities. It offers high throughput with assured delivery and stands out for its scalability and data security. Red Hat AMQ emphasizes flexibility and scalability, supporting multiple protocols and integrating seamlessly with the Red Hat ecosystem, making it ideal for open-source environments.

Room for Improvement: IBM MQ users seek improved monitoring tools, enhanced clustering, and modernized interfaces, along with better integration with new technologies like Kafka. Red Hat AMQ could enhance message ordering and clustering across nodes and improve technical support and documentation to boost developer productivity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM MQ is extensively used across on-premises and private clouds, appreciated for its stability but noted for complex setups. Its customer support is knowledgeable but varies in response time. Red Hat AMQ is praised for its lightweight nature and easy integration within the Red Hat ecosystem, though it requires improvement in technical support responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: IBM MQ is often seen as costly due to its enterprise-level features, appealing to those valuing data security and performance, while Red Hat AMQ is more budget-friendly, offering competitive pricing, especially when bundled with OpenShift. Both products deliver good ROI, with IBM MQ ensuring data protection and stability and Red Hat AMQ providing flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM MQ vs. Red Hat AMQ Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM MQ vs. Red Hat AMQ

September 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 MQ

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

172

Ranking in other categories

Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (1st)

Red Hat AMQ

Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of IBM MQ is 25.5%, up from 22.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat AMQ is 9.5%, up from 8.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM MQ	25.5%
Red Hat AMQ	9.5%
Other	65.0%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Featured Reviews

David Pizinger

Enterprise Technical Leader at Kyndryl

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.

Read full review

SachinJain

Senior Technical Specialist at Intuitive Technology Partners

Efficiently manages high availability and fault tolerance for critical systems with user-friendly management features

I have experience with features such as message persistence and fault tolerance because I configured high availability and fault tolerance for the client environment, including active-active and active-passive configurations. I mainly prefer active-active. I created a security feature for user authentication and authorization in Red Hat AMQ using vault. When you enable the vault, then your whole Red Hat AMQ becomes more secure. Management is straightforward. I configured it and created documentation. The operations team takes care of the operation part. I educate them on how to manage access, so they can easily add new people who join the company or manage the people who leave. The benefits of using Red Hat AMQ include easy configuration and monitoring. On the portal, I can monitor how many packets or alerts have been generated or sent to the end user via Red Hat AMQ along with messages or emails. It also shows utilization in the tool. These features also come with other AMQs such as Amazon and IBM.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best features of IBM MQ were stability and straightforward application functionality; it has vendor support, which was a significant advantage, and in case of any production issues, we definitely get vendor support, whereas with Kafka and others, we have to rely on open community and our research."

"A stable and reliable software that offers good integration between different systems."

"I haven't seen any severe issues related to it. Most of the time it's running. That is the advantage of IBM MQ."

"This product has good security."

"The solution is fast with end data compared to other messaging tools."

"The reliability of the queuing is the most valuable feature."

"We have implemented business to business transactions over MQ messaging. The guaranteed and once only delivery ensures business integrity."

"What is quite useful is the asynchronous function which means we don't lose everything in the bank. Although we use a lot of things synchronously, asynch is the best thing so that no banking information is ever lost, even when the network goes down and comes up."

More IBM MQ pros

"My impression is that it is average in terms of scalability."

"I can organize the tool with microservices, which allows me to use it across different services. It is easy to learn."

"The most valuable feature is stability."

"This product is well adopted on the OpenShift platform. For organizations like ours that use OpenShift for many of our products, this is a good feature."

"The benefits of using Red Hat AMQ include easy configuration and monitoring; on the portal, I can monitor how many packets or alerts have been generated or sent to the end user via Red Hat AMQ along with messages or emails, and it also shows utilization in the tool."

"The solution is very lightweight, easy to configure, simple to manage, and robust since it launched."

"Reliability is the main criterion for selecting this tool for one of the busiest airports in Mumbai."

"Red Hat AMQ's best feature is its reliability."

More Red Hat AMQ pros

Cons

"I can't say pricing is good."

"I would like to see message duplication included."

"The memory management is very poor and it consumes too much memory."

"The initial setup is difficult. Creating your own cluster is difficult. Working with cluster repositories is difficult. Issue management with IBM MQ is difficult."

"Presenting and maybe having some different options for different user experiences based on the administrative duties that you have to do as an app manager or configure the server or security would be an improvement."

"It could provide more monitoring tools and some improvement to the UI. I would also like to see more throughput in future versions."

"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."

"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."

More IBM MQ cons

"Red Hat AMQ's cost could be improved, and it could have better integration."

"The product needs to improve its documentation and training."

"AMQ could be better integrated with Jira and patch management tools."

"The challenge is the multiple components it has. This brings a higher complexity compared to IBM MQ, which is a single complete unit."

"This product needs better visualization capabilities in general."

"The turnaround of adopting new versions of underlying technologies sometimes is too slow."

"There are several areas in this solution that need improvement, including clustering multi-nodes and message ordering."

"There is improvement needed to keep the support libraries updated."

More Red Hat AMQ cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM products, in general, have high licensing costs and support costs are too high."

"Licensing for this software is on a yearly basis. The standard fee includes the maintenance and updates that are released periodically."

"I think IBM needs to look at its pricing. The prices of IBM products should be simple. The old way of pricing should now be moving on to the cloud to be pay as you go, a plan-based kind of pricing."

"The license for IBM MQ is commercial and not cheap. You get a multi-platform solution, which is important because it lets you connect systems on mainframes, personal solutions, Unix, Linux, etc."

"In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side."

"IBM's licensing model seems more reasonable than some competitors. They charge based on usage, which is good."

"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price a seven. The product is expensive."

"The pricing seems good according to the functionality that the solution provides."

More IBM MQ pricing and cost advice

"The solution is open-source."

"I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."

"There is a subscription needed for this solution and there are support plans available."

"This is a very cost-effective solution and the pricing is much better than competitors."

"Red Hat AMQ's pricing could be improved."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

35%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	19
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	146

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	2

Questions from the Community

What is MQ software?

Hi As someone with 45+ years of experience in the Transaction and Message Processing world, I have seen many "MQ" solutions that have come into the market place. From my perspective, while each pro...

See all answers

What are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?

Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Red Hat AMQ?

The areas for improvement include cost, which is a primary concern. The deployment process is simple, but the cost is very important. Additionally, the management portal should be more user-friendl...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Red Hat AMQ?

For use cases for Red Hat AMQ, let's take banking purposes. This depends upon the firm or the service or product company. For example, let's take HDFC Bank or any other bank. Whenever a customer de...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Red Hat AMQ?

I work primarily with Red Hat. For IBM, I have worked with their channel partner, not directly with IBM. For Amazon, I work with partners only. I am working with one company as a consultant. I also...

See all answers

Comparisons

ActiveMQ vs IBM MQ

Compared 38% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs IBM MQ

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Kafka vs IBM MQ

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs IBM MQ

Compared 6% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs IBM MQ

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM MQ Competitors

ActiveMQ vs Red Hat AMQ

Compared 38% of the time

Apache Kafka vs Red Hat AMQ

Compared 26% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs Red Hat AMQ

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon MQ vs Red Hat AMQ

Compared 4% of the time

IBM Event Streams vs Red Hat AMQ

Compared 4% of the time

More Red Hat AMQ Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM MQ

October 2025

Download IBM MQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat AMQ

September 2025

Download Red Hat AMQ product report

Also Known As

WebSphere MQ

Red Hat JBoss A-MQ, Red Hat JBoss AMQ

Overview

IBM MQ is a middleware product used to send or exchange messages across multiple platforms, including applications, systems, files, and services via MQs (messaging queues). This solution helps simplify the creation of business applications, and also makes them easier to maintain. IBM MQ is security-rich, has high performance, and provides a universal messaging backbone with robust connectivity. In addition, it also integrates easily with existing IT assets by using an SOA (service oriented architecture).

IBM MQ can be deployed:

On-premises
In the cloud
Hybrid cloud

IBM MQ supports the following APIs:

MQI (Message Queue Interface)
REST
.NET
MQTT
JMS
IBM MQ Light

IBM MQ Features

Some of the most powerful IBM MQ features include:

High availability
Stability and scalability
Flexible deployment options
Uniform clusters
Automated and intelligent workload balancing
Broad language, API, and messaging protocol support
Administrative features that simplify messaging management
Open standards development tools
Simple management tools

IBM MQ Benefits

Some of the benefits of using IBM MQ include:

Multi-style messaging: IBM MQ supports simple multi-style messaging, making it easy to connect diverse systems with support for message queuing, transactions, and more.
Reduced risk: With IBM MQ you will never lose a message, and messages are never delivered more than once.
Cloud-native: Because IBM MQ has a minimal infrastructure, it is suitable to be cloud-native, and therefore has the capability to always remain on.
Available anywhere: Using IBM MQ, you have access to secure messaging anywhere, at any time.
Secure: IBM MQ makes sure to keep your data safe by using TLS secured communications, providing access identity management, message-level security, and more measures to protect your information.
Easy for application programmers: To use IBM MQ, application programmers do not need to have any knowledge of communications programming.
Technical support: IBM MQ has a large user community and also provides support 24/7 as needed.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by IBM MQ users who are currently using the solution.

PeerSpot user Sunil S., a manager at a financial services firm, explains that they never lose messages are never lost in transit, mentioning that he can store messages and forward them as required: "Whenever payments are happening, such as incoming payments to the bank, we need to notify the customer. With MQ we can actually do that asynchronously. We don't want to notify the customer for each and every payment but, rather, more like once a day. That kind of thing can be enabled with the help of MQ."

Another PeerSpot reviewer, Luis L. who is a solutions director at Thesys Technologies, says that IBM MQ is a valuable solution and is "A stable and reliable software that offers good integration between different systems."

The head of operations at a financial services firm notes that "I have found the solution to be very robust. It has a strong reputation, is easy to use, simple to configure in our enterprise software, and supports all the protocols that we use."

In addition, a Software Engineer at a financial services firm praises the security benefits of it and states that “it has the most security features I've seen in a communication solution. Security is the most important thing for our purposes."

IBM

To respond to business demands quickly and efficiently, you need a way to integrate the applications and data spread across your enterprise. Red Hat JBoss A-MQ—based on the Apache ActiveMQ open source project—is a flexible, high-performance messaging platform that delivers information reliably, enabling real-time integration and connecting the Internet of Things (IoT).

Red Hat

Sample Customers

Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation

E*TRADE, CERN, CenturyLink, AECOM, Sabre Holdings

Buyer's Guide

IBM MQ vs. Red Hat AMQ

September 2025

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