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IBM MQ vs Redis comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.1
IBM MQ is valued for reliability and cost savings, with returns within two years despite unclear direct financial impact.
Sentiment score
7.2
Redis enhances ROI by improving performance, reducing costs, increasing productivity, and ensuring reliable, scalable, and efficient service.
It's a product which integrates the external systems with internal systems or among the systems themselves, making it an essential technology component required to integrate multiple systems.
Dev lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
It improved API latency from two seconds to 450 milliseconds for P99.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
We reduced the database read load by around 30 to 40 percent and improved API response time by 20 to 30 percent, specifically for frequently accessed endpoints.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
IBM MQ support is responsive with quick issue resolution, but some users experience delays in accessing skilled assistance.
Sentiment score
5.8
Redis is stable and reliable, with helpful support, strong documentation, and often minimal need for direct assistance.
We cannot hold on to the project for a long time just to wait for IBM to fix the issues.
Dev lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The response time for IBM MQ support could be better because when we are using IBM MQ and something goes wrong, support is required as the resource availability of the IBM product is very limited.
Senior System Analyst at Thakral
With containerized flavors of these products, we are having a tough time dealing with PMRs because the versions are new to IBM.
Software Engineer IV at Royal Cyber Inc.
The documentation and community support for Redis are very strong, making troubleshooting quicker.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Since Redis is quite stable and well-documented, we have not needed much support, but when required, the response has been helpful.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
IBM MQ is scalable and suitable for enterprises, though some note challenges with modernization and automation compared to cloud-native solutions.
Sentiment score
7.8
Redis excels in horizontal and vertical scaling, offering clustering, sharding, and compatibility with Azure and AWS for enterprise adaptability.
IBM MQ handles many thousands of messages in a second, indicating good scalability.
Senior Software Test Analyst at CoCre8 Technology Solutions
In our environment, we do not have horizontal scaling for IBM MQ, but as demand increases, we would just vertically scale it.
Software Engineer IV at Royal Cyber Inc.
We've got 12 VMs running, and it's very easy to scale.
Enterprise Technical Leader at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Data migration and changes to application-side configurations are challenging due to the lack of automatic migration tools in a non-clustered legacy system.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I scale Redis horizontally using clustering and sharding, where data is distributed across multiple nodes to handle higher traffic and larger data sets.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
With features such as clustering and replication, it can handle high traffic and a large database very effectively.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
IBM MQ is praised for stability, reliability, efficient message handling, and performance across complex environments despite occasional external issues.
Sentiment score
7.8
Redis is stable, handles heavy loads, offers high availability, and uses persistence mechanisms, making it a trusted choice.
We have never had any downtime or crashes since it's been running.
Senior Software Test Analyst at CoCre8 Technology Solutions
The transaction is always guaranteed with IBM MQ, which is the main reason I have been working with it for fifteen years while dealing with financial transactions or messages.
Software Engineer IV at Royal Cyber Inc.
Otherwise, they're completely stable.
Enterprise Technical Leader at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Redis is fairly stable.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

IBM MQ users seek enhanced security, cloud integration, intuitive interfaces, performance improvements, lower pricing, and active-active clustering.
Redis users face challenges with scalability, GUI, documentation, security, and seek enhancements in monitoring, analytics, and multi-tenancy features.
Having a graphical user interface would improve usability.
Senior Software Test Analyst at CoCre8 Technology Solutions
The pricing model for IBM MQ could be more flexible for clients.
Senior System Analyst at Thakral
They don't meet our standards due to the timing to get a person with knowledge.
Information Technology Solution Consultant
Data persistence and recovery face issues with compatibility across major versions, making upgrades possible but downgrades not active.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Redis itself does not enforce consistency with the primary database, so developers need to carefully design cache invalidation strategies.
Software Engineer at ValueMomentum
One issue is cache invalidation. Keeping cache data consistent with the source of truth can be tricky, especially in distributed systems.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
 

Setup Cost

IBM MQ's pricing is high compared to open-source alternatives, though enterprise agreements and flexible licensing can reduce costs.
Redis pricing depends on memory, cluster size, and infrastructure, with higher costs than SQL due to RAM usage.
It's not cheap.
Enterprise Technical Leader at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It's possible to get some training, but the cost of this learning is expensive.
SWIFT manager at Raiffeisen Bank Aval
The price of IBM MQ is definitely on the higher side.
Dev lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Since we use an open-source version of Redis, we do not experience any setup costs or licensing expenses.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The costs are primarily driven by memory consumption and cluster size, since Redis operates in-memory.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
The pricing is reasonable for the performance provided.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
 

Valuable Features

IBM MQ offers reliable message delivery, scalability, integration, security, and ease of use, ensuring data integrity across diverse platforms.
Redis offers low latency, high throughput, and scalability with rich data structures, ideal for real-time applications and caching.
These are financial transactions, so we do not want to lose the message at any cost.
Software Engineer IV at Royal Cyber Inc.
There is a saying that for the last 30 years IBM MQ has never been hacked.
Senior System Analyst at Thakral
It's time-tested, very stable, highly resilient, and has all the features to troubleshoot even if something goes wrong.
Dev lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
It functions similarly to a foundational building block in a larger system, enabling native integration and high functionality in core data processes.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
First is its in-memory preference, as Redis is extremely fast, making it ideal for caching and session management where low latency is critical.
Software Engineer at ValueMomentum
Real API latency improved from around two seconds to approximately 450 milliseconds for P99.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM MQ
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Queue (MQ) Software (1st), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (1st)
Redis
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (4th), Managed NoSQL Databases (6th), In-Memory Data Store Services (1st), Vector Databases (4th), AI Software Development (13th)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Varuns Ug - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Caching has accelerated complex workflows and delivers low latency for high-traffic microservices
A few features of Redis that I use on a day-to-day basis and feel are among the best are extremely low latency and high throughput. Since Redis is in-memory, it makes it ideal for cases such as caching and rate limiting where response time is critical. TTL expiry support is very useful in Redis as it allows me to automatically evict stale data without manual cleanup, which is something I use heavily in my caching strategy. Another point I can mention is that the rich data structures such as strings, hashes, and even sorted sets are very powerful. I have used strings for caching responses and counters, whereas I have used hashes for storing structured objects. One more feature I can tell you about is atomic operations. Redis guarantees atomicity for operations such as incrementing a counter, which is very useful for rate limiting and avoiding race conditions in distributed systems. Finally, I want to emphasize that Redis is easy to scale and integrate, whether through clustering or using a distributed cache across microservices. Redis has impacted my organization positively by providing default support that is very useful. For metrics, in one of my core systems, introducing Redis as a distributed cache helped me achieve around an 80% cache hit rate, which reduced repeated downstream services. Real API latency also improved from around two seconds to approximately 450 milliseconds for P99. It also helped reduce the load on dependent services and databases, which improved overall system reliability.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
University
6%
 

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 Business11
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise10
 

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 do you like most about Redis?
Redis is better tested and is used by large companies. I haven't found a direct alternative to what Redis offers. Plus, there are a lot of support and learning resources available, which help you u...
What needs improvement with Redis?
Overall, Redis is a powerful and reliable tool, but there are a few areas for improvement. One limitation is that Redis is memory-based, so scaling can become expensive compared to disk-based syste...
What is your primary use case for Redis?
My main use case for Redis is caching frequently accessed data to improve performance and reduce database load. For example, I cache API responses and user-related data so that repeated requests ca...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

WebSphere MQ
Redis Enterprise
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
1. Twitter 2. GitHub 3. StackOverflow 4. Pinterest 5. Snapchat 6. Craigslist 7. Digg 8. Weibo 9. Airbnb 10. Uber 11. Slack 12. Trello 13. Shopify 14. Coursera 15. Medium 16. Twitch 17. Foursquare 18. Meetup 19. Kickstarter 20. Docker 21. Heroku 22. Bitbucket 23. Groupon 24. Flipboard 25. SoundCloud 26. BuzzFeed 27. Disqus 28. The New York Times 29. Walmart 30. Nike 31. Sony 32. Philips
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM MQ vs. Redis and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.