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IBM MQ vs TIBCO FTL comparison

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Executive Summary

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 Oriented Middleware (MOM)
1st
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)
TIBCO FTL
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
7th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) category, the mindshare of IBM MQ is 16.0%, down from 24.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TIBCO FTL is 5.6%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ16.0%
TIBCO FTL5.6%
Other78.4%
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
 

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.
reviewer963342 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Architect
Static and dynamic TCP have been the most useful
It's an ESB for both server-side as well as with eFTL, we are exposing messages to clients over web/mobile From the current direct socket architecture, we moved to an FTL based messaging layer which allowed us to not worry about individual functions but work on a single message/framework.…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has always delivered and met all of our application requirements."
"Ease of use and ease of setup; I'm an admin type, and I can set things up from the command line, and I can set things up through a GUI, and it's easy to work with."
"It's reliable."
"We have stability in our environment because of the product, as we can keep adding solutions to the mixture and it still performs as is, providing a more stable process."
"I haven't seen any issues with respect to the message loss."
"From the infrastructure point of view, it's a great improvement and it's more flexible to the latest hardware."
"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."
"MQ is reliable and more structured and it's helped us a lot in pushing the data."
"It's fast, we are pumping in nearly 5GB of data in a day, and it just works."
 

Cons

"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."
"The licensing fees should be more cost-effective so that we can better pitch the product to our clients. With the pricing as it is, they tend to move away from IBM products."
"Right now, this limits us from using the product."
"We are not really happy with their support. They don't have the skills to very efficiently answer our questions, so our relationship with them is difficult."
"It just needs a better installation."
"I can't say pricing is good."
"IBM MQ won’t support large streams of data but Kafka will support large streams of data."
"Scaling is difficult with IBM MQ."
"The UI is clunky for administration, eFTL at times is not fully stable and have observed a few crashes, and the content matcher could be improved for or conditions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Use the new and lightweight version (Liberty) to lower licensing costs. It is also easier to upgrade/maintain."
"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price a seven. The product is expensive."
"It's super expensive, so ask them if they can consolidate some other licensing costs. But, IBM is IBM, so I guess we'll pay for it."
"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."
"IBM MQ is expensive and they charge based on the CPU."
"It would be a 10 out of 10 if it wasn't so expensive."
"IBM is 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise147
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...
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...
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

WebSphere MQ
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
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Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Solace, TIBCO and others in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM). Updated: August 2026.
911,952 professionals have used our research since 2012.