ActiveMQ vs Apache Kafka comparison

The compared ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka solutions aren't in the same category. ActiveMQ is ranked #2 in MQ , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 22.4% mindshare in the category. Apache Kafka is ranked #7 in SA , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 3.8% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of ActiveMQ users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Apache Kafka users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 28 ActiveMQ reviews

4,451 Views
4,184 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 90 Apache Kafka reviews

4,150 Views
996 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

Apache Kafka

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Message Queue (MQ) Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveMQ vs. Apache Kafka Report (Updated: May 2024).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Apache Kafka

May 2024

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Helped 881,082 peers since 2012

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

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (2nd)

Apache Kafka

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (7th)

Mindshare comparison

ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. ActiveMQ is designed for Message Queue (MQ) Software and holds a mindshare of 22.4%, down 25.2% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 3.8% mindshare, up 2.2% since last year.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ActiveMQ	22.4%
IBM MQ	22.5%
Red Hat AMQ	9.5%
Other	45.6%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Apache Kafka	3.8%
Apache Flink	12.3%
Databricks	10.0%
Other	73.9%

Streaming Analytics

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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Bruno da Silva

Senior Manager at Timestamp, SA

Have worked closely with the team to deploy streaming and transaction pipelines in a flexible cloud environment

The interface of Apache Kafka could be significantly better. I started working with Apache Kafka from its early days, and I have seen many improvements. The back office functionality could be enhanced. Scaling up continues to be a challenge, though it is much easier now than it was in the beginning.

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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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

More ActiveMQ pros

"The most important feature for me is the guaranteed delivery of messages from producers to consumers."

"The most valuable features of the solution revolve around areas like the latency part, where the tool offers very little latency and the sequencing part."

"Apache Kafka is a mature product and can handle a massive amount of data in real time for data consumption."

"It eases our current data flow and framework."

"Kafka is an open-source tool that's easy to use in our country, and the command line interface is powerful."

"Kafka allows you to handle huge amounts of data and classify it into different categories. If you have huge amounts of data, Kafka is a very good solution for data classification."

"It seemed pretty stable and didn't have any issues at all."

"Apache Kafka's most valuable features include clustering and sharding...It is a pretty stable solution."

More Apache Kafka pros

Cons

"The solution can improve the other protocols to equal the AMQ protocol they offer."

"The solution's stability needs improvement."

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

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

More ActiveMQ cons

"Kafka does not provide control over the message queue, so we do not know whether we are experiencing lost or duplicate messages."

"Scalability may cause issues in the product if my nodes are full with multiple sources and delivery is slowing down."

"In the data sharing space, the performance of Apache Kafka could be improved. The performance angle is critical, and while it works in milliseconds, the goal is to move towards microseconds."

"Kafka has some limitations in terms of queue management."

"Pulsar gives more scalability to an even grouping, but Apache Kafka is used more if you want to send something in a time series-based. If this does not matter to you then Pulsar could be more customizable. Apache Kafka is nothing but a streaming system with local storage."

"The management overhead is more compared to the messaging system. There are challenges here and there. Like for long usage, it requires restarts and nodes from time to time."

"The product is good, but it needs implementation and on-going support. The whole cloud engagement model has made the adoption of Kafka better due to PaaS (Amazon Kinesis, a fully managed service by AWS)."

"Apache Kafka can improve by providing a UI for monitoring. There are third-party tools that can do it, but it would be nice if it was already embedded within Apache Kafka."

More Apache Kafka cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

"We use the open-source version."

"I think the software is free."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

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

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"It is open source software."

"I would not subscribe to the Confluent platform, but rather stay on the free open source version. The extra cost wasn't justified."

"Apache Kafka is free."

"The solution is open source; it's free to use."

"The solution is open source."

"It's a premium product, so it is not price-effective for us."

"It is approximately $600,000 USD."

"I rate Apache Kafka's pricing a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. There are no additional costs apart from the licensing fees for Apache Kafka."

More Apache Kafka pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

30%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

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	32
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	49

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 are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?

Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...

See all answers

What do you like most about Apache Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open-source solution that can be used for messaging or event processing.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Kafka?

Its pricing is reasonable. It's not always about cost, but about meeting specific needs.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 51% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

Redis vs ActiveMQ

Compared 2% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 16% of the time

Databricks vs Apache Kafka

Compared 11% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 10% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 9% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 8% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

January 2026

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

January 2026

Download Apache Kafka 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

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming platform that serves as a central hub for handling real-time data streams. It allows efficient publishing, subscribing, and processing of data from various sources like applications, servers, and sensors.

Kafka's core benefits include high scalability for big data pipelines, fault tolerance ensuring continuous operation despite node failures, low latency for real-time applications, and decoupling of data producers from consumers.

Key features include topics for organizing data streams, producers for publishing data, consumers for subscribing to data, brokers for managing clusters, and connectors for easy integration with various data sources.

Large organizations use Kafka for real-time analytics, log aggregation, fraud detection, IoT data processing, and facilitating communication between microservices.

Apache

Sample Customers

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

Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ vs. Apache Kafka

May 2024

Free Report: ActiveMQ vs. Apache Kafka

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