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IBM MQ pros and cons

Vendor: IBM

4.2 out of 5

170 reviews
94% willing to recommend

1,518 followers

Pros & Cons summary

IBM MQ ensures guaranteed delivery and high message throughput, offering robust security and scalability across distributed environments. It integrates seamlessly with protocols like NET and Java, ensuring reliability and high availability. However, high-availability and scalability require improvement, along with memory management and monitoring tools. Pricing is high, and compatibility issues with Kafka and RabbitMQ exist. Limitations in handling large volumes affect efficiency, impacting budget-conscious users in demanding environments.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

IBM MQ is highly reliable, ensuring critical business applications function smoothly without message loss.

The scalability and robustness of IBM MQ make it an excellent choice for handling high transaction volumes while maintaining stability.

IBM MQ offers strong security features, including SSL, TLS, and RBAC, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

The integration capabilities of IBM MQ facilitate communication across different applications and platforms, enhancing operational efficiency.

Setting up and managing IBM MQ is straightforward, with technical support readily available to assist users.

CONS

IBM MQ needs improved integration capabilities with modern messaging platforms like Kafka or RabbitMQ.

High availability and scalability aspects of IBM MQ require enhancements to handle larger volumes and address connection dropouts.

Training and marketing for IBM MQ need to be increased as there is a lack of awareness and interest in its functionalities.

IBM MQ is perceived as expensive, and its pricing compared to competitors like open-source solutions is a concern.

IBM MQ should provide better support for public cloud platforms such as Azure and AWS, as its current compatibility is lacking.

IBM MQ Pros review quotes

SS

Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Apr 1, 2020

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.

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reviewer1302078

Technical Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Apr 1, 2020

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.

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IT Manager at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

Mar 22, 2017

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

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LL

Solutions Director at Thesys Technologies

Jan 4, 2022

A stable and reliable software that offers good integration between different systems.

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reviewer1579410

Head Of Operations at Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Jun 29, 2021

I have found the solution to be very robust. It has a strong reputation, easy to use, simple to configure in our enterprise software, and supports all the protocols that we use.

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RJ

Rahul Jayakumar Lekha

Integration Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Oct 21, 2022

I haven't seen any issues with respect to the message loss.

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reviewer2721285

Information Technology Solution Consultant

Jun 11, 2025

IBM MQ is a choice to create a relation between the Mainframe and distributed servers, allowing applications running on Linux or Windows to interface with Mainframe applications and enable more development of easier and open applications in a distributed environment.

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AA

Abraham Ansah-Cudjoe

Unix/Linux Systems Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Apr 22, 2020

The most valuable feature is the Queue Manager, which lies in the middle between our application and our core banking server.

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reviewer1688772

Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Oct 6, 2021

IBM is still adding some features and coding some other systems on the security end. However, it has the most security features I've seen in a communication solution. Security is the most important thing for our purposes.

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Lead Architect at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Jun 17, 2020

The most valuable feature is that it's a very strong integration platform but it is quite a monolithic solution. It's got everything.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 96)

IBM MQ Cons review quotes

SS

Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Apr 1, 2020

I would like to see it integrate with the newer ways of messaging, such as Kafka. They might say that you have IBM Integration Bus to do that stuff, but it would be great if MQ could, out-of-the-box, listen to public Kafka.

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reviewer1302078

Technical Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Apr 1, 2020

The scalability is the one area where IBM has fallen behind. As much as it is used, there is a limit to the number of people who are skilled in MQ. That is definitely an issue. Places have kept their MQ-skilled people and other places have really struggled to get MQ skills. It's not a widely-known skillset.

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IT Manager at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

Mar 22, 2017

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.

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Free Report: IBM MQ Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about IBM MQ. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.

859,579 professionals have used our research since 2012.

LL

Solutions Director at Thesys Technologies

Jan 4, 2022

Sometimes, not all messages are consumed in the queues. File transfers need improvement.

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reviewer1579410

Head Of Operations at Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Jun 29, 2021

Everything in the solution could be simplified a little. We have trouble with the configuration and cost which is mostly an internal issue, but nevertheless, the errors do come up when there are configuration changes across a specific version. We have slightly different versions, which may have slightly different configurations which cause issues.

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RJ

Rahul Jayakumar Lekha

Integration Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Oct 21, 2022

While there is support for API, it's not like the modern API capabilities.

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reviewer2721285

Information Technology Solution Consultant

Jun 11, 2025

The customer service or technical support from IBM is not as good as we expected; it could be better. They don't meet our standards due to the timing to get a person with knowledge.

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AA

Abraham Ansah-Cudjoe

Unix/Linux Systems Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Apr 22, 2020

The memory management is very poor and it consumes too much memory.

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reviewer1688772

Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Oct 6, 2021

There are many complications with IBM MQ servers.

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Lead Architect at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Jun 17, 2020

It's hard to put in a nutshell, but it's sort of developed as more of an on-premise solution. It hasn't moved much away from that.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 89)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Business Activity Monitoring

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Business Activity Monitoring

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs IBM MQ

ActiveMQ vs IBM MQ

Amazon SQS vs IBM MQ

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs IBM MQ

Red Hat AMQ vs IBM MQ

PubSub+ Platform vs IBM MQ

Amazon MQ vs IBM MQ

TIBCO Enterprise Message Service vs IBM MQ

Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service vs IBM MQ

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