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ActiveMQ vs Apache Kafka comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
28
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (2nd)
Apache Kafka
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (3rd)
 

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 19.8%, down 26.2% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 3.9% mindshare, up 3.0% since last year.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ActiveMQ19.8%
IBM MQ20.7%
VMware Tanzu Data Solutions9.6%
Other49.9%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache Kafka3.9%
Apache Flink8.2%
Databricks7.9%
Other80.0%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

NS
Sr. Manager - Digital at IndiGo
Offers diverse messaging protocols and excellent cloud support
In my current organization, I'm only working with ActiveMQ. I previously worked with IBM WebSphere MQ The features of ActiveMQ and WebSphere MQ fundamentally do the same thing. From my experience, I prefer WebSphere MQ. Both are very sturdy solutions; there is no doubt. Both are sturdy and…
Varuns Ug - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Event-driven workflows have improved payment processing and reduced latency across services
One area for improvement in Apache Kafka is operational complexity. Running and maintaining an Apache Kafka cluster at scale involves handling partitions, replications, retention policies, rebalancing, and monitoring, which requires strong expertise. Debugging and observability can be complex in large systems, as troubleshooting issues such as consumer lag, offset management problems, or uneven partition distribution can become challenging. The learning curve is relatively steep, requiring a good understanding of concepts such as partition, consumer group, offset commit, and delivery guarantees to avoid subtle production issues. One area where Apache Kafka could improve is the developer experience around debugging and tracing events end to end. In distributed systems, when an event passes through multiple topics and consumer services, troubleshooting can become time-consuming. Better built-in observability for tracing event flows across services would be very useful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The initial setup and first deployment of ActiveMQ is fairly simple."
"I fully recommend this product, but you need to have some expertise working with JMS and asynchronous tasks."
"ActiveMQ brings the most value to small applications because it will not cost you very much to complete."
"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 most important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."
"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."
"ActiveMQ is a good solution; it is low cost, high performance, and scalable."
"Kafka is scalable. It can manage a high volume of data from many sources."
"The most valuable feature is the support for a high volume of data."
"Apache Kafka offers unique data streaming."
"This solution is robust and delivers messages quickly."
"It's a high-performance distributed system."
"The most valuable feature of Apache Kafka is Kafka Connect."
"Apache Kafka has good integration capabilities and has plenty of adapters in its ecosystem if you want to build something. There are adapters for many platforms, such as Java, Azure, and Microsoft's ecosystem. Other solutions, such as Pulsar have fewer adapters available."
"Kafka is a highly scalable product."
 

Cons

"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."
"Distributed message processing would be a nice addition."
"The included admin web app is not sufficient and we ended up disabling it."
"Another area of improvement is the monitoring console, which is kind of rudimentary."
"I would rate the stability a five out of ten because sometimes it gets stuck, and we have to restart it. We"
"We ran into various stability problems with our implementations over the years."
"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."
"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."
"One improvement is in regards to the OS memory management."
"I would like to see real-time event-based consumption of messages rather than the traditional way through a loop."
"The support on Apache Kafka could be improved."
"Apache Kafka can improve by making the documentation more user-friendly. It would be beneficial if we could explain to customers in more detail how the solution operates but the documentation get highly technical quickly. For example, if they had a simple page where we can show the customers how it works without the need for the customer to have a computer science background."
"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."
"Kafka is complex and there is a little bit of a learning curve."
"Kafka's interface could also use some work. Some of our products are in C, and we don't have any libraries to use with C. From an interface perspective, we had a library from the readies. And we are streaming some of the products we built to readies. That is one of the requirements. It would be good to have those libraries available in a future release for our C++ clients or public libraries, so we can include them in our product and build on that."
"Kafka has some limitations in terms of queue management."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"We use the open-source version."
"I think the software is free."
"We are using the open-source version, so we have not looked at any pricing."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."
"It is approximately $600,000 USD."
"I would not subscribe to the Confluent platform, but rather stay on the free open source version. The extra cost wasn't justified."
"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."
"This is an open-source version."
"The solution is open source; it's free to use."
"When starting to look at a distributed message system, look for a cloud solution first. It is an easier entry point than an on-premises hardware solution."
"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."
"Kafka is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise51
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
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.
What advice do you have for others considering ActiveMQ?
We have not deployed ActiveMQ's flexible clustering as that requirement is not present for us. We only use active-passive configuration. On a scale of one to ten, I rate ActiveMQ a ten out of ten.
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Kafka?
From the AWS perspective, the price is on the higher side. However, if you go for Apache Kafka, it is low. From a price perspective, if you are asking about Apache Kafka, I would rate it a nine.
What needs improvement with Apache Kafka?
Apache Kafka is abundant with features which only an expert-level person will be able to manage due to the high volume and high concurrent expectations. Apache Kafka groups could introduce themes o...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AMQ
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc. 
Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Apache, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Message Queue (MQ) Software. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.