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 25.1% mindshare in the category. Apache Kafka is ranked #8 in SA , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 3.7% 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

5,398 Views
4,966 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 89 Apache Kafka reviews

4,523 Views
859 Comparison Views

96% 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

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

6.9

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 25.1%, up 24.1% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 3.7% mindshare, up 2.0% since last year.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ActiveMQ	25.1%
IBM MQ	25.5%
Red Hat AMQ	9.5%
Other	39.9%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Apache Kafka	3.7%
Apache Flink	14.8%
Databricks	12.5%
Other	69.0%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

Eyob Alemu

Technical Director at NIDP

Efficient data flow management with high performance and occasional stability improvements

For high traffic volumes where management time on ActiveMQ is minimal and where the rate of flow from the provider is slower than from the consumer, ActiveMQ offers the highest performance based on our experience. It has been efficient for data flow control between two endpoints, despite occasional unexpected glitches. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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Snehasish Das

Technology Leader at eTCaaS

Data streaming transforms real-time data movement with impressive scalability

I worked with Apache Kafka for customers in the financial industry and OTT platforms. They use Kafka particularly for data streaming. Companies offering movie and entertainment as a service, similar to Netflix, use Kafka Apache Kafka offers unique data streaming. It allows the use of data in…

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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

"It’s a JMS broker, so the fact that it can allow for asynchronous communication is valuable."

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

"The most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More ActiveMQ pros

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

"Deployment is speedy."

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

"The use of Kafka's logging mechanism has been extremely beneficial for us, as it allows us to sequence messages, track pointers, and manage memory without having to create multiple copies."

"Its availability is brilliant."

"Kafka can process messages in real-time, making it useful for applications that require near-instantaneous processing."

"Apache Kafka is particularly valuable for stream data processing, handling transactions, managing high levels of transactions, and orchestrating stream mode data."

"The most valuable feature of Apache Kafka is the clustering which is very easy to scale and we have multiple servers all over our platforms. It has been useful for stability and performance."

More Apache Kafka pros

Cons

"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."

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

"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 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."

"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."

"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."

"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."

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

More ActiveMQ cons

"I would like to see an improvement in authentication management."

"Maintaining and configuring Apache Kafka can be challenging, especially when you want to fine-tune its behavior."

"An area for improvement would be growth."

"Too much dependency on the zookeeper and leader selection is still the bottleneck for Kafka implementation."

"Kafka has a lot of monitors, but sometimes it's most important to just have a simple monitor."

"Config management can be better."

"The solution should be easier to manage. It needs to improve its visualization feature in the next release."

"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."

More Apache Kafka cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s open source, ergo free."

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

"I think the software is free."

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

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

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

"We use the open-source version."

"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"This is an open-source version."

"It's quite affordable considering the value it provides."

"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-source solution."

"We use the free version."

"Kafka is more reasonably priced than IBM MQ."

"Kafka is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."

"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution."

More Apache Kafka pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

31%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

12%

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	47

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 ...

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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...

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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 49% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 20% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon SQS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 6% of the time

Redis vs ActiveMQ

Compared 2% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 17% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 11% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 11% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon SQS vs Apache Kafka

Compared 9% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

September 2025

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

September 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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