We compared IBM MQ and ActiveMQ based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
IBM MQ is highly praised for its reliability, scalability, security, and integration capabilities, along with positive remarks on customer service and pricing. On the other hand, ActiveMQ is valued for its efficient messaging, integration, and versatility, with notable customer service. However, areas for improvement include documentation, interface, and stability/performance issues.
Features: IBM MQ is praised for its reliability, scalability, security, and ease of integration, while ActiveMQ offers reliable messaging, seamless integration, efficient message handling, versatile configuration, and robust support for messaging protocols.
Pricing and ROI: IBM MQ is praised for its reasonable and cost-effective pricing structure, manageable setup costs, and user-friendly licensing process. On the other hand, ActiveMQ is commended for its favorable pricing structure, minimal setup costs, and positive user experiences with the licensing process., IBM MQ has been praised for enhancing efficiency, improving communication and integration, streamlining workflows, and reducing downtime. Users appreciated its reliability, scalability, and ease of use. This resulted in cost savings and increased productivity. On the other hand, ActiveMQ was commended for its reliability, performance, and ease of use. It improved messaging capabilities, increased efficiency, and offered seamless integration. Both products seem to have provided positive ROI.
Room for Improvement: IBM MQ has been identified by users as needing enhancements in certain areas, while ActiveMQ could benefit from improved documentation, a more intuitive user interface, and increased stability and performance.
Deployment and customer support: IBM MQ and ActiveMQ have different user experiences when it comes to the duration required for establishing new tech solutions. While some IBM MQ users reported a range of three months to one week for deployment and setup, ActiveMQ users reported spending several months on deployment and an additional week on setup, but some were able to complete both in just one week., IBM MQ's customer service is highly regarded for its promptness, effectiveness, expertise, and reliability. Users appreciate the help they receive from the support team. ActiveMQ's customer service is praised for being responsive, helpful, and exceeding expectations. Users value the prompt resolution of concerns and the knowledge of the support team.
The summary above is based on 29 interviews we conducted recently with IBM MQ and ActiveMQ users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"It’s a JMS broker, so the fact that it can allow for asynchronous communication is valuable."
"The most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."
"Message broadcasting: There could be a use case sending the same message to all consumers. So as a producer, I broadcast the message to a topic. Then, whichever consumers are subscribed to the topic can consume the same message."
"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."
"I am impressed with the tool’s latency. Also, the messages in ActiveMQ wait in a queue. The messages will start to move when the system reopens after getting stuck."
"It provides the best support services."
"I appreciate many features including queue, topic, durable topic, and selectors. I also value a different support for different protocols such as MQTT and AMQP. It has full support for EIP, REST, Message Groups, UDP, and TCP."
"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."
"The most valuable feature is that it's a very strong integration platform but it is quite a monolithic solution. It's got everything."
"It runs everywhere, from the mainframe in the US to the PCs in the Gobi desert attached to an analog modem."
"The usability of the solution is very good."
"It is stable, reliable, and scalable."
"I think the whole product is useful. Their database and all is very good, and the product is fine. The fact that it ensures message delivery is probably the most important thing. I also like that you're able to trace and track everything. If it doesn't arrive at the destination, it will go back to the queue, and no message will be lost."
"I like the architecture it provides seamlessly for assured delivery."
"I appreciate the level of control we have over queue managers, queues, and the messaging itself. That provides good security. So, the control and scalability of messaging are important to me."
"The reliability of the queuing is the most valuable feature."
"From the TPS point of view, it's like 100,000 transactions that need to be admitted from different devices and also from the different minor small systems. Those are best fit for Kafka. We have used it on the customer side, and we thought of giving a try to ActiveMQ, but we have to do a lot of performance tests and approval is required before we can use it for this scale."
"The clustering for sure needs improvement. When we were using it, the only thing available was an active/passive relationship that had to be maintained via shared file storage. That model includes a single point of failure in that storage medium."
"It would be great if it is included as part of the solution, as Kafka is doing. Even though the use case of Kafka is different, If something like data extraction is possible, or if we can experiment with partition tolerance and other such things, that will be great."
"One potential area would be the complexity of the initial setup."
"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."
"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."
"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."
"The UI. It's both a good thing and a bad thing. The UI is too simple. Sometimes you wanna see the messages coming to the queue, and you have to refresh the dashboard, the console of the product."
"If they could come up with monitoring dashboards that would be good. We are using external monitoring tools, apart from our IBM MQ, to monitor IBM MQ. If we could get monitoring tools or dashboards to keep everything simple for the user to understand, that would be good."
"It would be an advantage if they can include streaming in IBM MQ, similar to Kafka. Kafka is used mainly for streaming purposes. This feature is clearly lacking in IBM MQ. If they add this feature to IBM MQ, it will have an edge over other products."
"Scalability is lacking compared to the cloud native products coming into the market."
"We are looking at the latest version, and we hope that resilience, high availability, and monitoring will be improved. It can have some more improvements in the heterogeneous messaging feature. The current solution is on-premises, so good integration with public cloud messaging solutions would be useful."
"The monitoring could be improved. It's a pain to monitor the throughput through the MQ. The maximum throughput for a queue or single channel isn't clear. We could also use some professional services by IBM to assess and tune the performance."
"More documentation would be good because some features are not deeply implemented."
"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."
"I would like the ability to connect with some of the more recent offerings, such as API Connect; being able to publish our MQ endpoints, the queues, the messaging infrastructure as IT assets."
ActiveMQ is ranked 3rd in Message Queue (MQ) Software with 24 reviews while IBM MQ is ranked 2nd in Message Queue (MQ) Software with 158 reviews. ActiveMQ is rated 7.8, while IBM MQ is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of ActiveMQ writes "Allows for asynchronous communication, enabling services to operate independently but issues with stability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM MQ writes "Offers the ability to batch metadata transfers between systems that support MQ as the communication method". ActiveMQ is most compared with Anypoint MQ, Red Hat AMQ, VMware RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka and Amazon SQS, whereas IBM MQ is most compared with Apache Kafka, VMware RabbitMQ, Red Hat AMQ, Amazon SQS and PubSub+ Event Broker. See our ActiveMQ vs. IBM MQ report.
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From my Experience so far i will go for RabbitMQ its rock solid and robust with a simple learning curve. Its free and has great documentation available