IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

IBM and Solace are both solutions in the Event Monitoring category. IBM is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.0, while Solace is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.3. IBM holds a 3.5% mindshare in EM, compared to Solace’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Solace users who would recommend it.

IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact

Read 5 IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact reviews

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380 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 18 PubSub+ Platform reviews

2,323 Views
70 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact

PubSub+ Platform

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact and PubSub+ Platform compete in the network management and event processing sector. PubSub+ Platform seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced scalability and real-time data processing capabilities.

Features: IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact offers strong event correlation, automation of IT workflows, and integration capabilities with diverse IT systems. PubSub+ Platform provides high-performance data streaming, event mesh technology, and support for multiple communication patterns.

Room for Improvement: IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact could improve its event streaming capabilities and real-time data processing. Enhancements in user interface customization and ease of scaling could benefit users. PubSub+ Platform might benefit from strengthened integrations with legacy systems, enhanced customization options for users, and an expanded community support system.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact provides a robust deployment model suited for existing IT infrastructures and offers responsive customer support. PubSub+ Platform offers seamless and flexible deployment options, including cloud-native solutions, and is known for its proactive and efficient customer service.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact involves significant initial investment but offers strong long-term ROI through its network visibility and automation. PubSub+ Platform presents competitive pricing and delivers ROI through rapid deployment and effective real-time data streaming solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact vs. PubSub+ Platform Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact vs. PubSub+ Platform

December 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 Tivoli NetCool Impact

Ranking in Event Monitoring

9th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

PubSub+ Platform

Ranking in Event Monitoring

12th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (8th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Streaming Analytics (14th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact is 3.5%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 1.5%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Event Monitoring Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact	3.5%
PubSub+ Platform	1.5%
Other	95.0%

Event Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Hennie Du Toit

Principal Specialist Architecture and Governance at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Event management strengthens with automation but needs better event flooding handling

Better handling of event flooding in IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact would be beneficial. If there are massive issues with power, for example, and we get millions of events, then it struggles to deal with that. Better root cause correlation and faster processing for IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact would be helpful. If there can be more end-to-end functionality, such as observability tools built in natively, that would be great. With correlation, IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact has many functions, but we've built them custom-built. Functions such as automated logging, automated dispatching, and automated notification of engineers could be native in the tool.

Read full review

reviewer2714190

freelancer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Offers a seamless way to decouple applications, providing impressive performance and flexibility

Regarding improving the PubSub+ Platform, I'm not sure about the pricing aspect, but I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka. That's the only concern I can mention; otherwise, it was as impressive as Kafka, better than Kafka based on my experience working on the Solace and Kafka white paper.

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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 great at being able to fetch almost any kind of file."

"The stability has been very good for IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact, rated around eight or nine."

"It is easy to integrate with other models such as Oracle, other systems, external systems, and to reach events."

"This product allows us to make use of open-source products, including running Java code."

"The most valuable feature that comes with Netcool/Impact is the ISPF APA support. It is inherent to Netcool/Impact, so I can use the ISPF of any other product, which I can invoke and consume through Impact, and do integrations, which is great. I run the Netcool desktop application so I can integrate with other applications in the ticketing system. It's a great ability being able to invoke ISPF and integrate."

"The topic hierarchy is pretty flexible. Once you have the subject defined just about anybody who knows Java can come onboard. The APIs are all there."

"The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable. It can be used for any kind of business where you've got multiple users who need information. Any company, such as LinkedIn, with a huge number of subscribers and any business, such as publishing, supermarket, airline, or shipping can use it."

"Going from something where we had outages and capacity issues constantly to a system that was able to scale with the massive market data and messaging spikes that happened during the initial stages of the COVID crisis in March, we were able to scale with 40 plus percent growth in our platform over the course of days."

"The event portal and the diversity of deployment options in a hybrid landscape are the most valuable features."

"This solution reduces the latency to access changes in real-time and the effort required to onboard a new subscriber. It also reduces the maintenance of each of those interfaces because now the publisher and subscribers are decoupled. Event Broker handles all the communication and engagement. We can just push one update, then we don't have to know who is consuming it and what's happening to that publication downstream. It's all done by the broker, which is a huge benefit of using Event Broker."

"The valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the speed of processing, publishing, and consumption."

"In my assessment of Solace against other products — as I was responsible for evaluating various products and bringing the right tool into companies in the past — I worked with multiple platforms like RabbitMQ, Confluent, Kafka, and various other tools in the market. But I found the event mesh capability to be a very interesting as well as fulfilling capability, towards what we want to achieve from a digital-integration-strategy point of view... It's distributed, yet it is intelligently connected. It can also span and I can plug and play any number of brokers into the event mesh, so it's a great deal. That's a differentiator."

"The best features of PubSub+ Platform include being highly scalable, allowing us to handle billions and billions of events, and configuring and managing PubSub+ Platform is straightforward and simple while being highly reliable."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"Better handling of event flooding in IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact would be beneficial. If there are massive issues with power, for example, and we get millions of events, then it struggles to deal with that."

"IBM is not investing in the development of the on-premise version of this solution."

"For improvement, I'd say the dashboard and the overall GUI could use some work. Although, I don't think that there's much improvement that Netcool really needs to achieve in this area, because when we're talking GUI, Impact is able to integrate with any third-party system and it comes with ISPF APA. It's more beneficial than Netcool/OMNIbus in this respect, and it's quite easy to handle."

"Stability-wise, this product needs to be improved."

"The solution is somewhat complicated. It's not exactly straightforward."

"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."

"We've pointed out some things with the DMR piece, the event mesh, in edge cases where we could see a problem. Something like 99 percent of users wouldn't ever see this problem, but it has to do with if you get multiple bad clients sending data over a WAN, for example. That could then impact other clients."

"The deployment process is complex."

"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."

"The section on observability pertains to understanding the functioning of an event crash. Instead of focusing on how the crash occurs, attention is given to the observable aspects, such as a memory pipeline where one person pushes messages and another reads them. However, this pipeline often encounters issues, such as the reader being unavailable, causing the system to become stuck and preventing the messages from moving forward. This can lead to the pipeline being permanently stalled."

"A challenge we currently have is Solace's ability to integrate with single sign-on in our Active Directory and other single sign-on tools and platforms that any company would have. It's important for the platforms to work. Typically, they support only LDAP-based connectivity to our SQL Servers."

"The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively."

"We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building. A current workaround is using the message's header, where the business data can be put into this header and be used for a dynamic topic lookup. I want to see this in action when there are a couple of hundred cases live. E.g., how does it perform? From an administration perspective, is the ease of use there?"

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is yearly, and although I'm happy with the pricing I do think it could be better."

"Licensing of IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact depends on the number of nodes on the element that you are monitoring."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."

"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."

"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."

"We are looking for something that will add value and fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only."

"We have been really happy with the product licensing rates. It has been free for us, up to a 100,000 transactions per second, and all we have to do is pay for support. Making their product available and accessible to us has not been a problem at all."

"The price of PubSub+ Event Broker is reasonable for the capability it offers. However, when compared to others solutions on the market it is expensive."

"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

26%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Retailer

10%

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	14

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact?

IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact is our event management tool, specifically the umbrella fault management tool set. All of our events across the network correlate the data for us, and we have certain use ...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact?

We remain a partner with IBM Tivoli and continue using their products. We use IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact's AIOps functionality. We experienced some skills issues, but currently receive assistance fr...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PubSub+ Event Broker?

I do not know about the pricing of PubSub+ Platform because I did not manage the instance.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?

Additional in-line information about certain things on PubSub+ Platform could be more beneficial for new users who are just starting to use this technology. The analytics tools integrated within Pu...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?

I describe the main use cases for PubSub+ Platform as wanting to use it as a messaging queue pipeline for managing the data stream events in our IoT platform while I was working at an IoT-based com...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus vs IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact

Compared 100% of the time

More IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact Competitors

Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 12% of the time

IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 10% of the time

Software AG Universal Messaging vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Flink vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

More PubSub+ Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact

December 2025

Download IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

December 2025

Download PubSub+ Platform product report

Also Known As

Tivoli NetCool Impact

PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal

Overview

IBM Tivoli Netcool Impact is an enterprise and network management software that automates the support of business-critical functions. The software helps to enrich events with business context, provides an integrated view of data from multiple sources in context and enables custom automations.

IBM

PubSub+ Platform is designed for real-time message publishing and outstanding interoperability. With features like intuitive administration and topic filtering, it offers both stability and high performance for scalable deployments across diverse scenarios.

PubSub+ Platform enhances data integration with its event mesh and seamless protocol compatibility, providing a comprehensive solution for organizations tracking shipments, generating reports, and managing transactions. Its granular topic filtering and WAN optimization ensure high utility in event-driven applications and cloud deployments. Users highlight the platform's intuitive administration and ease of management, though some seek improved integration with third-party tools and enhanced observability. Concerns include scalability for large payloads and training resource availability. Despite its interface complexity, PubSub+ remains valuable for trading and market data distribution.

What are the key features of PubSub+ Platform?

Real-time messaging: Facilitates seamless communication across platforms.
Flexible topic hierarchy: Supports dynamic topic taxonomy for efficient data management.
Event mesh: Enhances integration and interoperability with diverse protocols.
Intuitive administration: Simplifies system management and configuration.
WAN optimization: Ensures efficient connectivity for global deployment.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Messaging stability: Offers consistent performance in dynamic environments.
Scalability: Provides seamless expansion to accommodate growing data volumes.
Security: Maintains robust protection for sensitive information.
Support and configuration: Accessible, reliable support, and UI-driven setup streamline the management.

PubSub+ Platform is widely implemented for asynchronous messaging in industries like finance for trading and market data, logistics for shipment tracking, and tech operations management. It enables companies to modernize applications while ensuring data accuracy and efficiency across global systems.

Solace

Sample Customers

Claranet, Consolidated Communications, Telus, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Telekom Srbija, Bendigo Community Telco, Capgemini, Schweizerische Bundesbahnen (SBB)

FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet

Buyer's Guide

IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact vs. PubSub+ Platform

December 2025

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