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IBM MQ vs Red Hat AMQ comparison

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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 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)
Red Hat AMQ
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of IBM MQ is 21.4%, down from 24.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat AMQ is 5.2%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ21.4%
Red Hat AMQ5.2%
Other73.4%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

Srinivas Krishnamsetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, At Tiaa Senior Technical Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Asynchronous messaging has streamlined workflow triggers and supports reliable session rollbacks
The best features IBM MQ offers are the topic and subscription, as well as the IBM MQ session and message rollbacks, especially for JMS integration. IBM MQ serves as the underlying foundation for our JMS messages. IBM MQ has positively impacted my organization by enabling asynchronous processing, which means we do not need to wait for any responses from our downstream systems.
SachinJain - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From the time I joined this company I have been working with IBM MQ and until now I haven't seen any severe issues related to it, as most of the time it's running, which is the advantage of IBM MQ."
"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."
"If you want a robust enterprise application that you know is going to be around that you can trust and you are very comfortable with the concept that you are going to pay for that stability and robustness, then IBM MQ is the best choice."
"This product has helped integrate between applications, reduce rework, and costs by reusing working components of existing applications, such as mainframe applications."
"There are a lot of valuable features, such as high availability, and workload balancing."
"One of the most valuable features is the standardization in terms of messaging; if you have MQ, you probably can talk to anybody."
"I think the whole product is useful. Their database and all is very good, and the product is fine. The fact that it ensures message delivery is probably the most important thing. I also like that you're able to trace and track everything. If it doesn't arrive at the destination, it will go back to the queue, and no message will be lost."
"I have a very high impression of the stability of MQ; we haven't had any problems with it."
"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 most valuable feature is stability."
"My impression is that it is average in terms of scalability."
"The most valuable feature for us is the operator-based automation that is provided by Streams for infrastructure as well as user and topic management. This saves a lot of time and effort on our part to provide infrastructure. For example, the deployment of infrastructure is reduced from approximately a week to a day."
"The self-service aspect is very important for us, and AMQ Streams has enabled us to deliver new services faster, going from days to hours."
"From the functionality perspective, 3scale provides a very comparable, if not the same feature set as any leader in the market for API management and the gateway perspective, but with a fraction of the price."
"AMQ is highly scalable and performs well. It can process a large volume of messages in one second. AMQ and OpenShift are a good combination."
"Reliability is the main criterion for selecting this tool for one of the busiest airports in Mumbai."
 

Cons

"It would be nice to have AI features and an updated graphical user interface."
"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."
"However, it would be great if the dashboard had additional features like a board design or picture management features."
"IBM support team is really only concerned with the IBM cloud. They're not supporting any other cloud platforms or suggestions."
"I'm a little concerned about scalability."
"Scaling out MQ is possible, but it's not as easy as some other products."
"There could be a better front-end GUI interface for us, where we can see things more easily."
"It could provide more monitoring tools and some improvement to the UI. I would also like to see more throughput in future versions."
"There is improvement needed to keep the support libraries updated."
"The challenge is the multiple components it has. This brings a higher complexity compared to IBM MQ, which is a single complete unit."
"AMQ could be better integrated with Jira and patch management tools."
"There are some aspects of the monitoring that could be improved on."
"This solution is completely unstable. We lose messages."
"The product needs to improve its documentation and training."
"Red Hat AMQ's cost could be improved, and it could have better integration."
"There are several areas in this solution that need improvement, including clustering multi-nodes and message ordering."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM MQ has a flexible license model based on the Processor Value Unit (PVU) and I recommend it."
"IBM is expensive."
"The licensing fees are paid quarterly and they are expensive."
"99.999 percent availability for less than a penny per message over the past 25 years. IBM MQ is the cheapest software in the IBM software portfolio, and it is one of the best."
"You have to license per application installation and if you expand vertically or horizontally, you will be paying for more licenses. The licenses are approximately $10,000 to $15,000 a license, it can get expensive quite quickly."
"Pricing could be better, as with all IBM products. But their performance in production, along with security and scalability, will pay returns in the long run."
"There is real money involved here. As compared to RabbitMQ, IBM MQ is on the higher side in terms of cost."
"This solution requires a license and we have purchased an enterprise license."
"There is a subscription needed for this solution and there are support plans available."
"Red Hat AMQ's pricing could be improved."
"I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"This is a very cost-effective solution and the pricing is much better than competitors."
"The solution is open-source."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise147
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise2
 

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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

WebSphere MQ
Red Hat JBoss A-MQ, Red Hat JBoss AMQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
E*TRADE, CERN, CenturyLink, AECOM, Sabre Holdings
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM MQ vs. Red Hat AMQ and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.