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ActiveMQ vs EMQX comparison

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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
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
EMQX
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
IoT Connectivity (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 20.1%, down from 24.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of EMQX is 3.4%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ActiveMQ20.1%
EMQX3.4%
Other76.5%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

MD
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.
AP
Senior Software Engineer
Connected millions of iot devices and manage real time pub sub control and flexible access rules
When going with the open-source EMQX version, there are limitations provided. For example, the webhooks use case cannot be scaled to as large a scale compared to the enterprise edition of EMQX. The open-source version helps a great deal with work in the company. The way this resource helps nurture the IoT device paradigm is greatly helpful for developers working newly on this system because the onboarding part of EMQX is very easy and developer-friendly. Someone who wants to dive into it can easily implement and make the system robust based on the technologies it provides. EMQX provides API connections for applications. HTTP calls can be made to EMQX to get updates from the client. Those connections should be made asynchronously. The webhook part handles this well, but when it comes to the API part, when the load and payload of the MQTT topics and messages are very heavy, sometimes unknown errors occur, and logs and errors must be found. When a specific log session is created for that client, the readability of those logs is not good. The platform itself does not need improvement, but when it comes to developer-friendly implementations of EMQX, there are some pain points that need attention. The visibility of logs, error logs, and information logs inside the built-in monitoring needs work because developers, when they implement code or any kind of specific tools, need proper control over the system. Without that control, there is no point in implementing anything at all. The monitoring part needs work. When it comes to the flow chart of how different clients are connected with different devices, there is a feature inside EMQX called Flow. When that Flow is in place, clients (devices) should be controllable from that Flow itself. These are the most important improvements that need to be addressed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The installation was pretty straightforward, and it was also easy setting up HA using an NFS share for hosting the KahaDB."
"There is a vibrant community, and it is one of the strongest points of this product. We always get answers to our problems. So, my experience with the community support has been good."
"We value ActiveMQ for its performance, throughput, and low latency, especially in handling large volumes of data and sequential management of topics."
"ActiveMQ demonstrates excellent stability and sturdiness."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the holding and forwarding."
"Reliable message delivery and mirroring."
"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."
"For us, initial setup was VERY easy since we were using the Apache-provided Docker image for ActiveMQ, which alleviates a lot of the traditional pains involved with installing new software."
"EMQX has positively impacted my organization in many ways, particularly by making our main agenda of getting stock details and connecting users to our real-time protocol much easier."
"The outcomes from using EMQX are very cost-saving for us because we previously used the MQTT Mosquitto broker, and when I compare Mosquitto with EMQX, EMQX is far better than Mosquitto and other protocols."
"The best features EMQX offers are that it is highly scalable and cheaper than other brokers, plus we can use our own back-end services integrated to it for authentication and authorization."
"EMQX helped me complete my project perfectly because when I compared it to other platforms, EMQX truly fits my needs and my project, allowing me to explain my output more clearly to my lecturer, and ultimately I received a good grade, so it has been very helpful."
"EMQX remains live and matured, allowing us to scale it, and we continue using EMQX without requiring to switch to any other offerings as it still works best and is resilient."
"The best features EMQX offers in my experience are that it can send messages for a large number of customers with a very high message-per-second rate while consuming low resources."
"EMQX is a solid open-source project for making IoT devices connect anywhere in the world."
"EMQX has positively impacted my organization because we didn't get any issues about MQTT; it just works."
 

Cons

"There is need for more protocols and maybe they should provide documentation on the internet as well."
"Another area of improvement is the monitoring console, which is kind of rudimentary."
"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."
"Because this is an open-source project, there is no support. We don't have any help or anything like that."
"The included admin web app is not sufficient and we ended up disabling it."
"We ran into various stability problems with our implementations over the years."
"We have had problems with the message selector as when the queue size reaches a certain level, the message selector does not have enough time to run and finish before the JMS reply timeout."
"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."
"If you want to improve further, the SSL certificate and TLS certificate have overhead in serverless EMQX."
"On EMQX improvement side, I saw certain frameworks such as NanoMQTT and others claiming to be much more performant than EMQX, so maybe the newer version of EMQX can look into those aspects for potential improvements, but I do not have insight on the latest version of EMQX to know whether it has already addressed this or not."
"The visibility of logs, error logs, and information logs inside the built-in monitoring needs work because developers, when they implement code or any kind of specific tools, need proper control over the system."
"I think EMQX can be improved by providing a uniform UI and login feature that we can use in the dashboard."
"EMQX is a good MQTT broker but the historian is simple."
"To improve EMQX, I think it should reduce costs, save time when sending messages, and improve reliability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the open-source version."
"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."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Outsourcing Company
17%
Media Company
16%
Legal Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
No data available
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for EMQX?
My experience with EMQX regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing shows that it is affordable.
What needs improvement with EMQX?
I think EMQX can be improved, but to be honest, I don't have anything I'd like to see added or changed. In terms of needed improvements, I don't have anything else to add, even small ones or nice-t...
What is your primary use case for EMQX?
My main use case for EMQX is a stable and scalable IoT message queue. I use EMQX in one of my projects specifically with ESP32 and Argon and Boron embedded chips, and I program them to send and rec...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AMQ
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc. 
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveMQ vs. EMQX and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.