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 8.0, and holds a 26.4% mindshare in the category. Apache Kafka is ranked #8 in SA , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 2.8% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of ActiveMQ users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Apache Kafka users who would recommend it.

ActiveMQ

Read 26 ActiveMQ reviews

6,648 Views
4,133 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 87 Apache Kafka reviews

899 Views
721 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

ActiveMQ

Apache Kafka

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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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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

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (2nd)

Apache Kafka

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (8th)

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 26.4%, up 21.8% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 2.8% mindshare, up 1.9% since last year.

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Streaming Analytics

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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Amit Laddha

Vice President (Information and Product Management) at Tradebulls Securities (P) Limited

With valuable features like clustering and sharding, the product also offers good stability

If you are using the latest version of Apache Kafka in which the use of Zookeeper is not required, then it uses the KRaft protocol, which is built into Kafka broker. Since the use of Zookeeper is no longer required, I think the setup phase of dissolution is better than its previous versions. I rate the initial setup of the product somewhere between seven to eight out of ten. Apache Kafka's initial setup is very straightforward. The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. Apache Kafka was deployed in our company within a couple of days. Three people were involved in the deployment process of Apache Kafka.

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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

"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."

"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."

"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."

"I appreciate many features including queue, topic, durable topic, and selectors. I also value a different support for different protocols such as MQTT and AMQP. It has full support for EIP, REST, Message Groups, UDP, and TCP."

"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."

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

"Message broadcasting: There could be a use case sending the same message to all consumers. So as a producer, I broadcast the message to a topic. Then, whichever consumers are subscribed to the topic can consume the same message."

More ActiveMQ pros

"Kafka, as compared with other messaging system options, is great for large scale message processing applications. It offers high throughput with built-in fault-tolerance and replication."

"It eases our current data flow and framework."

"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."

"The ability to partition data on Kafka is valuable."

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

"The main advantage is increased reliability, particularly with regard to data and the speed with which messages are published to the other side."

"The publisher-subscriber pattern and low latency are also essential features that greatly piqued my interest."

"Overall, I rate Apache Kafka as nine out of ten for its scalability and stability."

More Apache Kafka 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."

"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."

"I would rate the stability a five out of ten because sometimes it gets stuck, and we have to restart it. We"

"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."

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

"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."

More ActiveMQ cons

"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."

"Data pulling and restart ability need improving."

"Apache Kafka can improve by adding a feature out of the box which allows it to deliver only one message."

"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."

"We struggled a bit with the built-in data transformations because it was a challenge to get them up and running the way we wanted."

"Lacks elasticity and the ability to scale down."

"Kafka requires non-trivial expertise with DevOps to deploy in production at scale. The organization needs to understand ZooKeeper and Kafka and should consider using additional tools, such as MirrorMaker, so that the organization can survive an availability zone or a region going down."

"The UI is based on command line. It would be helpful if they could come up with a simpler user interface."

More Apache Kafka cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

"It’s open source, ergo free."

"I think the software is free."

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

"We use the open-source version."

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

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"This is an open-source version."

"The cost can vary depending on the provider and the specific flavor or version you use. I'm not very knowledgeable about the pricing details."

"Apache Kafka is an open-sourced solution. There are fees if you want the support, and I would recommend it for enterprises. There are annual subscriptions available."

"This is an open-source solution and is free to use."

"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution."

"I was using the product's free version."

"Apache Kafka is free."

"The price of the solution is low."

More Apache Kafka 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

Financial Services Firm

30%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

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...

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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 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 53% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 17% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 3% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 15% of the time

Amazon SQS vs Apache Kafka

Compared 15% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 14% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 13% of the time

Databricks vs Apache Kafka

Compared 3% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

May 2025

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

May 2025

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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