IBM MQ vs TIBCO Enterprise Message Service comparison

IBM and TIBCO are both solutions in the Business Activity Monitoring category. IBM is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.5, while TIBCO is ranked #2. IBM holds a 29.8% mindshare in BAM, compared to TIBCO’s 15.1% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of TIBCO users who would recommend it.

IBM MQ

Read 172 IBM MQ reviews

6,471 Views
582 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

TIBCO Enterprise Message Se...

Read 5 TIBCO Enterprise Message Service reviews

553 Views
332 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM MQ

TIBCO Enterprise Message Se...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM MQ and TIBCO Enterprise Message Service based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Business Activity Monitoring solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM MQ vs. TIBCO Enterprise Message Service Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM MQ vs. TIBCO Enterprise Message Service

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 Business Activity Monitoring

1st

Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

172

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (1st)

TIBCO Enterprise Message Se...

Ranking in Business Activity Monitoring

2nd

Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Business Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of IBM MQ is 29.8%, down from 40.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TIBCO Enterprise Message Service is 15.1%, down from 24.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Business Activity Monitoring Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM MQ	29.8%
TIBCO Enterprise Message Service	15.1%
Other	55.1%

Business Activity Monitoring

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.

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Ray Ochieng

Integration Lead at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

A value-for-money solution with the requisite features to facilitate efficient communication within an organization

We have been struggling with the stability of TIBCO Enterprise Message Service (EMS), but now I don't know how to differentiate whether the issues are caused by the infrastructure or the product itself. So, I am hesitant to provide a rating because I suspect that it might be due to my setup or environment. I really don't know how to evaluate the product independently. We have faced challenges with EMS, but I am unsure if it is related to infrastructure or the product itself. Even if I reach out for support, I am uncertain if the issue will be resolved since it could be partly related to the product. It's a tough situation.

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 solution is easy to use and has good performance."

"The clusterization which results in persistence is the most valuable feature."

"There are a lot of extensible options for security, i.e., various things you can do. It's pretty easy to navigate."

"Combined with IBM MQ, this product is our primary data store."

"We have found the MQ messaging topologies valuable."

"The most valuable features are RDQM and queue sharing."

"Overall the solution operates well and has good integration."

"The message queue and the integration with any development platform/language, i.e., NET and Java, are the most valuable features."

More IBM MQ pros

"TIBCO Enterprise Message Service's most valuable features are rapid zero-code integration and its large number of adapters and plugins."

"I like TIBCO's ability to create versioned queues and persistent messages."

"The Enterprise Messaging Server will store the message and wait for other subscribers to come onto the network."

"It allows us to achieve synchronous as well as asynchronous communication with the added advantage of making the communication reliable."

"The initial setup is straightforward and the product documentation is very good."

"The setup was done by TIBCO. It has been stable and has a server."

"It is very useful tool. It is also very easy to learn and implement."

"We have implanted the core middleware solution for the organization using this product and it is responsible for communication between different applications."

Cons

"the level of training as well as product marketing for this product are not that great. You rarely find a good training institute that provides training. Many of the architects in several organization are neither aware of the product nor interested in using it. IBM should provide good training on products like this."

"In terms of volume, it is not able to handle a huge volume. We also have limitations of queues related to IBM MQ. We often need to handle a very big volume, but currently we do have limitations. If those kinds of limitations could be relaxed, it would help us to work better."

"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."

"I can't say pricing is good."

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

"MQ needs instruments for connection with new modern queues like Kafka or RabbitMQ."

"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."

"I believe the stability of the product has decreased since we began using it initially."

More IBM MQ cons

"TIBCO also has its proprietary line of cloud-based applications, but specifically, these two products are not cloud compatible."

"I would like to see better integration with Java and Apache Kafka."

"An area for improvement would be integration with the API layer."

"Overall, my experience with the support team has been disappointing."

"Since all the communications goes through this product, it acts as a single point of failure."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The problem with this product is that it's a little bit expensive."

"The price is high."

"Our costs haven't increased but they also have not improved."

"The price of the solution could be reduced, and we are on an annual subscription."

"It is a licensed product. As compared to an open-source solution, such as RabbitMQ, it is obviously costly. If you're using IBM Message Broker, which is a licensed product, IBM MQ is included in the same license. You don't have to pay separately for IBM MQ. The license cost of IBM MQ is lesser than IBM Message Broker."

"I think the pricing is reasonable, especially with IIB as a part of it."

"IBM MQ appliance has pricing options, but they are costly."

"It would be a 10 out of 10 if it wasn't so expensive."

More IBM MQ pricing and cost advice

"The cost of licensing is very high. One should go for the product only if they need to ensure message reliability and they cannot afford to lose messages."

"In our case, we didn't pay for each product separately. We simply paid for all those companies that provided the components."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

35%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

43%

Computer Software Company

Energy/Utilities Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

No data available

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...

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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...

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Comparisons

ActiveMQ vs IBM MQ

Compared 38% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs IBM MQ

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs IBM MQ

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Kafka vs IBM MQ

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon SQS vs IBM MQ

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM MQ Competitors

TIBCO FTL vs TIBCO Enterprise Message Service

Compared 22% of the time

TIBCO Rendezvous vs TIBCO Enterprise Message Service

Compared 14% of the time

Amazon SNS vs TIBCO Enterprise Message Service

Compared 13% of the time

More TIBCO Enterprise Message Service Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM MQ

October 2025

Download IBM MQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Business Activity Monitoring

October 2025

Download TIBCO Enterprise Message Service product report

Also Known As

WebSphere MQ

Enterprise Message Service

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

TIBCO Enterprise Message Service is a standards-based messaging solution that can serve as the backbone of an SOA by providing Java Message Service (JMS) compliant communications across a wide range of platforms and application technologies.

TIBCO

Sample Customers

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

BNL, SunGard, TUI Group, UTi Worldwide, Yellow Pages Group

Buyer's Guide

IBM MQ vs. TIBCO Enterprise Message Service

September 2025

Free Report: IBM MQ vs. TIBCO Enterprise Message Service

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