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.
"The most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."
"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes."
"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."
"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."
"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."
"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."
"There is a vibrant community, and it is one of the strongest points of this product. We always get answers to our problems. So, my experience with the community support has been good."
"I haven't seen any issues with respect to the message loss."
"Encryption and the fact that we have not had any data loss issues so far have been very valuable features. IBM MQ is well encrypted so that we are well within our compliance and regulatory requirements, so that is a plus point as well."
"It also has a backup queue concept and topics, features that I have not seen anywhere else. I like these features very much."
"The most valuable features are RDQM and queue sharing."
"The most valuable features are the point to point messaging and the MQ API."
"The most valuable feature of IBM MQ is transaction processing."
"Secure, safe, and very fast."
"IBM MQ is robust compared to other products in the market. It also gives you support from the IBM team."
"One potential area would be the complexity of the initial setup."
"I would like the tool to improve compliance and stability. We will encounter issues while using the central applications. In the solution's future releases, I want to control and set limitations for databases."
"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."
"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."
"The tool needs to improve its installation part which is lengthy. The product is already working on that aspect so that the complete installation gets completed within a month."
"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."
"I would rate the stability a five out of ten because sometimes it gets stuck, and we have to restart it. We"
"The issue is that they're using a very old clustering model."
"They have provided a Liberty Profile in the Web Console for administration, and that could be further enhanced. It is not fit for use by an enterprise. They have to get rid of their WebSphere process and develop a front-end on Node.js or the like."
"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."
"There are things within the actual product itself that can be improved, such as limitations on message length, size, etc. There is no standardized message length outside of IBM. Each of the implementations of the MQ series or support of that functionality varies between various suppliers, and because of that, it is very difficult to move from one to the other. We have IBM MQ, but we couldn't use it because the platform that was speaking to MQ didn't support the message length that was standard within IBM MQ. So, we had to use a different product to do exactly the same thing. So, perhaps, there could be more flexibility in the standards around the message queue. If we had been able to increase the message queue size within the IBM MQ implementation, we wouldn't have had to go over to another competing product because the system that was using MQ messaging required the ability to hold messages that were far larger than the IBM MQ standard. So, there could be a bit more flexibility in the structuring. It has as such nothing to do with the IBM implementation of MQ. It is just that the standard that is being put out onto the market doesn't actually stipulate those types of things."
"I'm not sure that current version has event-driven mechanism requests that people go for. I would like the latest version to come with both type of event mechanisms: an email server and a POP server. If that is not there, then that would be a great addition."
"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."
"The solution isn't free. There are other solutions, like RabbitMQ, which are open source and absolutely free to use. It's one reason we are moving away from IBM."
"I would like to see faster monitoring tools for this solution."
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, Amazon SQS, VMware Tanzu Data Services and Apache Kafka, whereas IBM MQ is most compared with Apache Kafka, VMware Tanzu Data Services, Red Hat AMQ, PubSub+ Event Broker and Amazon SQS. See our ActiveMQ vs. IBM MQ report.
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We monitor all Message Queue (MQ) Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
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