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ActiveMQ vs Amazon SQS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 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

ActiveMQ
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon SQS
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 19.8%, down from 26.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon SQS is 6.5%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ActiveMQ19.8%
Amazon SQS6.5%
Other73.7%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

MD
Software Engineer III at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Integration capabilities enhance message handling without human interaction
With ActiveMQ there should be more options. If you work with other technologies, for example, Java, there are many options. We can integrate the way we want ActiveMQ. We can create partitions and clusters, but AP is not providing such options currently. It only provides time, request response timing, the number of requests that need to be handled, and protocol types. The configuration needs to be broadened inside AP to perform in a better way. Sometimes issues arise in production with ActiveMQ due to the number of requests. For example, if you have configured one thousand requests at a time and it receives one thousand and one messages at a time, it breaks. The configuration aspect is tricky. When configurations are proper, ActiveMQ almost has zero errors.
Roberto Costa - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data & AI Engineer at Imprint
Facilitates seamless queue creation and management for efficient application decoupling
If you need a messaging service to help decouple your application, Amazon SQS would be a smart choice because it's easy to use and very easy to manage Amazon SQS is a simple service to use. If we compare with other solutions such as RabbitMQ for messaging, Amazon SQS is easier to use and easier…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"ActiveMQ is a good solution; it is low cost, high performance, and scalable."
"The most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."
"It's a very easy-to-use product, documentation is sufficient, and anyone with a bit of knowledge about technology, like Java, can quickly set it up and it could be up and running in minutes."
"I'm impressed, I think that Active MQ is great."
"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."
"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."
"The initial setup and first deployment of ActiveMQ is fairly simple."
"One of the most important features of ActiveMQ is the ability to set up a network of brokers, and the ability to forward the message to another broker in the network, where there is a demand for messages from a consumer."
"This is a free-to-use solution for somebody who wants to do 1 million requests, and this is sufficient for any application at a small organization."
"All Amazon Web Services resources are easy to configure."
"SQS is very stable, and it has lots of features."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to decouple components."
"The most valuable feature for me is the variety of queues offered, such as the standard and FIFO queues, providing reliable communication."
"I am able to find out what's going on very easily."
"Amazon SQS provides faster search through indexing via OpenSearch."
"It works consistently and is economical under a standard non-FIFO model."
 

Cons

"Configuring ActiveMQ brokers for working in a cluster is difficult and has many constraints."
"There is need for more protocols and maybe they should provide documentation on the internet as well."
"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."
"This solution could improve by providing better documentation."
"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."
"We ran into various stability problems with our implementations over the years."
"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."
"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."
"It would be easier to have a dashboard that allows us to see everything and manage everything since we have so many queues."
"Sometimes, we have to switch to another component similar to SQS because the patching tool for SQS is relatively slow for us."
"The retention period for messages could be improved. Currently, messages are retained for four or seven days."
"The primary issue was the increase in costs due to frequent polling for messages."
"The initial setup of Amazon SQS is in the middle range of difficulty. You need to learn Amazon AWS and know how to navigate, create resources, and structures, and provide rules."
"It would be beneficial to have the ability to peek at messages currently in Amazon SQS without needing to monitor incoming messages."
"Support could be improved."
"I do not think that this solution is easy to use and the documentation of this solution has a lot of problems and can be improved in the next release. Most of the time, the images in the document are from older versions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"We use the open-source version."
"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."
"I think the software is free."
"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"Amazon SQS is moderately priced."
"Compared to the other options and based on what I have heard, Amazon SQS is relatively more expensive, but it is not insanely expensive."
"Amazon SQS offers a generous free tier, beyond which it remains very cost-effective. The cost per million messages is less than a dollar, making it an economical choice."
"It's quite expensive."
"Amazon SQS is quite expensive and is at the highest price point compared to other solutions."
"The pricing model is pay-as-you-use. It depends on your usage and configuration."
"The pricing of Amazon SQS is reasonable. The first million requests are free every month, and after, it's cost 40 cents for every million requests. There are not any additional fees."
"Amazon SQS is more affordable compared to other solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with ActiveMQ?
Pricing is something to consider with ActiveMQ, though cloud pricing is not costly and depends upon the compute selection. Focusing on AI is essential nowadays. AI capabilities require improvement ...
What is your primary use case for ActiveMQ?
In my current organization, I'm only working with ActiveMQ. I previously worked with IBM WebSphere MQ.
What advice do you have for others considering ActiveMQ?
We have not deployed ActiveMQ's flexible clustering as that requirement is not present for us. We only use active-passive configuration. On a scale of one to ten, I rate ActiveMQ a ten out of ten.
What needs improvement with Amazon SQS?
There is nothing I can remember that I would want as new features for Amazon SQS.
What is your primary use case for Amazon SQS?
If you need a messaging service to help decouple your application, Amazon SQS would be a smart choice because it's easy to use and very easy to manage.
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon SQS?
I would recommend Amazon SQS to other people. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution a 10.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AMQ
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc. 
EMS, NASA, BMW, Capital One
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.