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 8.0, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.7. Apache holds a 26.5% mindshare in MQ, compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s 8.5% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 26 ActiveMQ reviews

6,942 Views
4,318 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Amazon SQS

Read 29 Amazon SQS reviews

2,390 Views
1,965 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 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

March 2025

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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

7.8

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

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 26.5%, up from 21.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon SQS is 8.5%, down from 11.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Featured Reviews

Prashant-Sharma

Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Allows for asynchronous communication, enabling services to operate independently but issues with stability

The feature of ActiveMQ which I feel is good is its ability to have DLP, the later queues. If something goes wrong with the platform, it retries. Even if it fails, it goes to DLP, and later we can rescan the same event for processing. The ability to store the failed events for some time is valuable.

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Ariel Tarayants

Powerful queue system facilitates seamless asynchronous operations

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. Enhanced filtering on the messages would be beneficial, as currently one has to pull all messages out, filter the right one by code, and then re-insert the remaining messages. This solution is not effective with the FIFO queue.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

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

"Most people or many people recommended using ActiveMQ on small and medium-scale applications."

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

"The initial setup is straightforward and only takes a few minutes."

"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."

"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."

"I'm impressed, I think that Active MQ is great."

More ActiveMQ pros

"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."

"I like how we can subscribe to multiple topics in Amazon SQS. It's also much simpler and quicker to set up than other solutions. It also supports patterns like Kafka and RapidMQ's fan-out pattern but with easier implementation."

"The dead-letter queue is very helpful in maintaining the messages that come into the queue."

"One of the most valuable features of Amazon SQS is its event-driven invocation."

"We used SQS for the Kapolei system to ensure that certain tasks were executed precisely once. The first-in, first-out (FIFO) capability was a great feature for us. Additionally, its redundancy out of the box meant we didn't have to worry about missing messages. It provided peace of mind and automatically instilled trust, relieving us of any concerns."

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

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

"We use Amazon SQS for notifying, queuing servers, queuing messages, and notifying the people for alerting systems."

More Amazon SQS pros

Cons

"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."

"One potential area would be the complexity of the initial setup."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."

"For additional functionality, I suggest making it easier to install and monitor the queues, topics, broker status, publisher status, and consumer status. Improved monitoring tools would help avoid needing to manually access the server for monitoring purposes."

More ActiveMQ cons

"Sometimes, we have to switch to another component similar to SQS because the patching tool for SQS is relatively slow for us."

"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."

"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 solution is not available on-premises so that rules out any customers looking for the messaging solution on-premises."

"It would be easier to have a dashboard that allows us to see everything and manage everything since we have so many queues."

"There could be improvements in the UI for security and scalability."

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

"I cannot send a message to multiple people simultaneously. It can only be sent to one recipient."

More Amazon SQS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

"It’s open source, ergo free."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

"We use the open-source version."

"I think the software is free."

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

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

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

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

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

"I rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten."

"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 moderately priced."

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

More Amazon SQS pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

34%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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?

We need to address the non-deterministic load issues. Sometimes, ActiveMQ either restarts automatically or goes into ActiveMQ mode, causing interruptions. We need to enhance stability and improve t...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for ActiveMQ?

We have a digital ID platform that uses various services running on Kafka. There are two main endpoints where services interact with external services. These include an automatic biometric service ...

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?

AWS provides another messaging service, which is fine for certain purposes. SQS meets the cloud messaging workload requirements. However, combining the features of both products could be an easier ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon SQS?

I primarily use SQL Server for messaging services, and I need to offer loose couplings. SQS is handy for offloading non-urgent tasks that can be reverted later. I use it as a queue management servi...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 53% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 12% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

Apache Kafka vs ActiveMQ

Compared 3% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Apache Kafka vs Amazon SQS

Compared 27% of the time

Redis vs Amazon SQS

Compared 20% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Amazon SQS

Compared 14% of the time

Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service vs Amazon SQS

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon MQ vs Amazon SQS

Compared 7% of the time

More Amazon SQS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

March 2025

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon SQS

March 2025

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 2025

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. Amazon SQS

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