ActiveMQ vs Amazon SQS comparison

Apache and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are both solutions in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category. Apache is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.0. Apache holds a 22.0% mindshare in MQ, compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s 7.3% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 28 ActiveMQ reviews

4,376 Views
4,157 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Amazon SQS

Read 31 Amazon SQS reviews

2,405 Views
1,443 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

Amazon SQS

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

ActiveMQ and Amazon SQS are message broker solutions. Amazon SQS may have the upper hand in scalability and reliability, making it a potentially better choice based on data comparisons.

Features: ActiveMQ supports multiple protocols, advanced message queuing, and can be deployed on-premises. Amazon SQS integrates seamlessly with AWS, supports high scalability, and provides reliable message delivery.

Room for Improvement: ActiveMQ could benefit from smoother deployment and enhanced customer support. Amazon SQS might improve its flexibility and customization options for users unfamiliar with AWS.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: ActiveMQ's deployment is customizable but requires manual setup, while Amazon SQS offers smoother deployment through AWS, requiring less hands-on management and providing robust customer support.

Pricing and ROI: ActiveMQ's open-source nature lowers setup costs, offering good ROI for technical users. Amazon SQS uses a pay-as-you-go model, providing predictable costs that scale with usage for efficient ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

March 2026

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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

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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 22.0%, down from 26.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon SQS is 7.3%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ActiveMQ	22.0%
Amazon SQS	7.3%
Other	70.7%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Featured Reviews

MoumitaDas

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.

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reviewer2281650

IT Specialist at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

Efficient data retention and high scalability drive significant productivity improvements

The features of Amazon SQS that I find most valuable include its data retention capabilities and message durability. The retention of data is crucial, as other systems like RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ require management. Furthermore, if there's a failure in the system after consuming a message, SQS's settings ensure the message is not deleted until confirmation. Additionally, generating FIFO and standard queues based on use cases is a helpful feature.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We value ActiveMQ for its performance, throughput, and low latency, especially in handling large volumes of data and sequential management of topics."

"The initial setup and first deployment of ActiveMQ is fairly simple."

"The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable."

"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."

"ActiveMQ demonstrates excellent stability and sturdiness."

"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."

"The main function I find valuable in ActiveMQ is facilitating message transfer within the client's internal network. ActiveMQ handles the message transfer from the internal network to the cloud. Regarding multi-protocols, we use different approaches based on client capabilities. Some clients connect for real-time data transfer, using database queries for periodic updates every ten minutes. We collect data from multiple clients, ensuring we get real-time sensor values where possible and periodic updates for others."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."

More ActiveMQ pros

"It is stable and scalable."

"One of the useful features is the ability to schedule a call after a certain number of messages accumulate in the container. For example, if there are ten messages in the container, you can perform a specific action."

"The solution is easy to scale and cost-effective."

"I think the tool is very reliable."

"I am able to find out what's going on very easily."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon SQS is the interface."

"With SQS, we can trigger events in various cloud environments. It offers numerous benefits for us."

"Amazon SQS provides faster search through indexing via OpenSearch."

More Amazon SQS pros

Cons

"There are some stability issues."

"Needs to focus on a certain facet and be good at it, instead of handling support for most of the available message brokers."

"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 solution's stability needs improvement."

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

"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."

"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."

"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."

More ActiveMQ cons

"A feature I would like to see in Amazon SQS is the ability to view the content of messages without removing them from the queue."

"The tool needs improvement in user-friendliness and discoverability."

"There are some issues with SQS's transaction queue regarding knowing if something has been received."

"For Amazon SQS, in particular, I think AWS Management Console has shortcomings. AWS Management Console should be a better pluggable option to help users with some integrations."

"A primary area of improvement for Amazon SQS is the message size limitation, which is currently restricted to 256 kilobytes per message."

"Be cautious around pay-as-you-use licensing as costs can become expensive."

"The current visibility timeout of five minutes is okay. However, I'd like to explore the possibility of extending it for specific use cases."

"There is room for improvement in handling large-scale data."

More Amazon SQS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."

"It’s open source, ergo free."

"We use the open-source version."

"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"There are no fees because it is open-source."

"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"Amazon SQS is more affordable compared to other solutions."

"SQS's pricing is very good - I would rate it nine out of ten."

"It's quite expensive."

"The pricing model is pay-as-you-use. It depends on your usage and configuration."

"Amazon SQS is moderately priced."

"Compared to EC2 and other services, Amazon SQS' pricing is cheaper."

"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."

"Amazon SQS is quite expensive and is at the highest price point compared to other solutions."

More Amazon SQS pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	17

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	14

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ActiveMQ?

For reliable messaging, the most valuable feature of ActiveMQ for us is ensuring prompt message delivery.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about Amazon SQS?

It is stable and scalable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon SQS?

There is nothing I can remember that I would want as new features for Amazon SQS.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 52% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 11% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 8% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 4% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Amazon SQS

Compared 16% of the time

Amazon MQ vs Amazon SQS

Compared 12% of the time

IBM MQ vs Amazon SQS

Compared 11% of the time

Redis vs Amazon SQS

Compared 11% of the time

Apache Kafka vs Amazon SQS

Compared 10% of the time

More Amazon SQS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

March 2026

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon SQS

March 2026

Download Amazon SQS product report

Also Known As

AMQ

No data available

Overview

Apache ActiveMQ is the most popular and powerful open source messaging and Integration Patterns server.

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License

Apache

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message oriented middleware, and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. Get started with SQS in minutes using the AWS console, Command Line Interface or SDK of your choice, and three simple commands.

SQS offers two types of message queues. Standard queues offer maximum throughput, best-effort ordering, and at-least-once delivery. SQS FIFO queues are designed to guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the exact order that they are sent.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc.

EMS, NASA, BMW, Capital One

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

March 2026

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

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