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IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 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 Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus
Ranking in Event Monitoring
3rd
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Event Monitoring
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (9th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Streaming Analytics (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus is 7.4%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 2.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus7.4%
PubSub+ Platform2.6%
Other90.0%
Event Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Ahmed Salman - PeerSpot reviewer
Performance & Monitoring Supervisor at Saudi Telecom Company
Aids in network performance monitoring and management
I am working as a customer, mainly using IntelliQ and another product, IBM NetCool, Watson AI. These products are used for monitoring network performance and management.  The primary use case involves network performance monitoring, and it is compatible only with IBM DB2 IBM Tivoli NetCool…
Deepankar Bbhowmick - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Messaging design has become visual and reliable and now supports fast microservice communication
The unique functions I appreciate about PubSub+ Platform are that it allows me to design my solution in a graphical manner, which is not available in many other products, and the design can also be pushed to the actual infrastructure layer, making it quite advantageous. Mesh technology is useful in scenarios where different geographies have to be connected, although such situations are not commonly found. It is beneficial but not a super-used feature of PubSub+ Platform. The event replay function is quite mature in PubSub+ Platform, allowing me to replay messages that are days in the past, which is a good feature. The main benefits PubSub+ Platform provides for the end-user include building a robust and scalable system with very low network latency, which improves the customer experience, whether using mobile phones or applications. This type of messaging framework is extremely important, and Solace is a very good product in that space. Nowadays, most applications are built using microservices technology, with small microservices interchanging messages via PubSub+ Platform. Without it, realizing a scalable system would not be possible; for example, one cannot have Netflix or similar services that require quick data transit and a good user experience, ensuring that data cannot be lost in transit. The analytics part of PubSub+ Platform is quite useful as it can connect with many analytical software tools, mainly for analysis of system logs, such as Splunk, DataDog, or Prometheus. It has the flexibility to connect with any of these and supports OpenTelemetry, which is not available in many other products, making traceability very easy. I can see how a message travels from a source system to the target system, end-to-end, along with what happens to that message along the path, making the analytics quite good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's good for managed systems. The end query on the user interface is good. You can view lots of charts and graphs."
"It is customer-centric; customers can access the event list from their location or desktop and view the event, with no need to go and connect to any other server and run events to have a view of all the events happening in the environment."
"The most valuable feature is the event management capability."
"It is customer-centric. Customers can access the event list from their location or desktop and view the event. There is no need to go and connect to any other server and run events to have a view of all the events happening in the environment. We get a good response from customers about this feature and the main architecture of NetCool. Its processing is very good. Deduplication and correlation functionalities are good in this solution as compared to other solutions. A big advantage of NetCool is that it also supports multi-layered protocols. We can receive multiple events from different protocols like UDP, HTTP, and those events can be captured in NetCool."
"Offers very good event/alert drill-down and statistical reporting capabilities."
"IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus supports legacy protocols like CORBA, Huawei, and other telecom protocols, which I find beneficial."
"This is an amazing product and you will fall in love with it."
"This solution is highly scalable; we have hundreds of probes running on more than thousands of devices, gathering millions of alarms and creating thousands of tickets, and yet we have never seen any performance issue."
"Because we use it as a message broker, it makes information flow very seamless."
"When it comes to granularity, you can literally do anything regarding how the filtering works."
"One of the main reasons for using PubSub+ is that it is a proper event manager that can handle events in a reactive way."
"The best features of PubSub+ Platform are its real-time simulation, real-time event data streaming, and integration with any IoT applications."
"Solace has been incident free in HA deployment for seven years."
"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 most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was done manually with a file, and it can be done instantly live."
 

Cons

"The solution needs to invest in the development of a knowledge base and use of AI services for providing event resolution and intervention directions."
"IBM support is a bust; Zenoss support is good."
"They could enhance the visibility to give us a unified view of our entire IT infrastructure."
"Based on my experience and my colleagues' feedback, IBM can improve IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus in automation with respect to using AI, as it lacks considerably compared to other tools."
"The cost of the product is quite high. They should work to adjust their pricing models."
"A lot can be improved in this product considering the performance."
"Areas that could be better include the fact that the solution is only on-premises, lacks AI capabilities, and support response times could be quicker."
"Yes often problems appear after resolving a previous one."
"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."
"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?"
"One of the areas of improvement would be if we could tell the story a bit better about what an event mesh does or why an event mesh is foundational to a large enterprise that has a wide diversity of applications that are homegrown and a small number off the shelf."
"Make it open source :-) with limited features so that this is not a barrier for using the technology in some places where they will only use open source technology despite then just paying for support (and paid features) on any used open source technology in the organization, as its a misnomer in my view the amount of large companies claiming to only use open source but then using products that are paid versions with additional features included."
"I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka."
"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 ease of management could be approved. The GUI is very good, but to configure and manage these devices programmatically in the software version is not easy."
"The ease of management could be approved. The GUI is very good, but to configure and manage these devices programmatically in the software version is not easy. For example, if I would like to spin up a new software broker, then I could in theory use the API, but it would require a considerable amount of development effort to do so. There should be a tool, or something that Solace supports, that we could use for this, e.g., a platform like Terraform where we could use infrastructure as code to configure our source appliances."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You have to have the right level of budget to afford this solution."
"It is a costly solution."
"Its license cost is a little bit more than other solutions. Our customers expect a standard market price that is comparative to other products. For each and every NetCool OMNIbus component, we have to purchase a separate license. These components are not free with the product."
"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."
"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."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
12%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
Construction Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus?
I would rate the pricing for IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus as three, where one is a high price and ten is a low price.
What needs improvement with IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus?
Based on my experience and my colleagues' feedback, IBM can improve IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus in automation with respect to using AI, as it lacks considerably compared to other tools. The integrat...
What is your primary use case for IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus?
My current use case for IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus is for monitoring the networks.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PubSub+ Event Broker?
Pricing-wise for PubSub+ Platform, I find it a little expensive, so I would rate it at six.
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
Potential areas for improvement in PubSub+ Platform are its authentication mechanisms, which could be slightly better. While simple authentication using basic methods is easy, moving to more robust...
What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?
PubSub+ Platform is primarily used for guaranteed delivery of messages from across systems, for microservice-based development, and for high-speed data consumption purposes. Guaranteed transmission...
 

Also Known As

Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Consolidated Communications, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Capgemini
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 
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus vs. PubSub+ Platform and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.