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 8.7, and holds a 4.0% 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

4,388 Views
4,169 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Apache Kafka

Read 90 Apache Kafka reviews

4,342 Views
1,172 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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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 25.7% compared to last year.
Apache Kafka, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 4.0% mindshare, up 2.3% since last year.

Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ActiveMQ	22.4%
IBM MQ	22.9%
Red Hat AMQ	8.9%
Other	45.800000000000004%

Message Queue (MQ) Software

Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Apache Kafka	4.0%
Apache Flink	11.3%
Databricks	9.5%
Other	75.2%

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

"ActiveMQ demonstrates excellent stability and sturdiness."

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

"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More ActiveMQ pros

"It is a useful way to maintain messages and to manage offset from our consumers."

"A great streaming platform."

"Deployment is speedy."

"When comparing it with other messaging and integration platforms, this is one of the best rated."

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

"The solution is very easy to set up."

"With Kafka, events and streaming are persistent, and multiple subscribers can consume the data. This is an advantage of Kafka compared to simple queue-based solutions."

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

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."

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

"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

More ActiveMQ cons

"would like to see real-time event-based consumption of messages rather than the traditional way through a loop. The traditional messaging system works by listing and looping with a small wait to check to see what the messages are. A push system is where you have something that is ready to receive a message and when the message comes in and hits the partition, it goes straight to the consumer versus the consumer having to pull. I believe this consumer approach is something they are working on and may come in an upcoming release. However, that is message consumption versus message listening."

"The third party is not very stable and sometimes you have problems with this component. There are some developments in newer versions and we're about to try them out, but I'm not sure if it closes the gap."

"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."

"One complexity that I faced with the tool stems from the fact that since it is not kind of a stand-alone application, it won't integrate with native cloud, like AWS or Azure."

"They need to have a proper portal to do everything because, at this moment, Kafka is lagging in this regard."

"It’s a trial-and-error process with no one-size-fits-all solution. Issues may arise until it’s appropriately tuned."

"The interface has room for improvement, and there is a steep learning curve for Hadoop integration. It was a struggle learning to send from Hadoop to Kafka. In future releases, I'd like to see improvements in ETL functionality and Hadoop integration."

More Apache Kafka cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."

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

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

"I think the software is free."

"We use the open-source version."

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

"It’s open source, ergo free."

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

More ActiveMQ pricing and cost advice

"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."

"We are using the free version of Apache Kafka."

"Licensing issues are not applicable. Apache licensing makes it simple with almost zero cost for the software itself."

"It is approximately $600,000 USD."

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

"It's a bit cheaper compared to other Q applications."

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

"It is open source software."

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

20%

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 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

What needs improvement with Apache Kafka?

The long-term data storage feature in Apache Kafka depends on the setting, but I believe the maximum duration is seven days.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 53% of the time

Red Hat AMQ vs ActiveMQ

Compared 14% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveMQ

Compared 8% of the time

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions vs ActiveMQ

Compared 5% of the time

Red Hat JBoss A-MQ for xPaaS vs ActiveMQ

Compared 1% of the time

More ActiveMQ Competitors

Red Hat AMQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 16% of the time

Databricks vs Apache Kafka

Compared 12% of the time

PubSub+ Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 11% of the time

IBM MQ vs Apache Kafka

Compared 9% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Apache Kafka

Compared 7% of the time

More Apache Kafka Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveMQ

February 2026

Download ActiveMQ product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Kafka

February 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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