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ActiveMQ vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

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
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (12th), Streaming Analytics (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of ActiveMQ is 26.2%, up from 23.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 4.6%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ActiveMQ26.2%
PubSub+ Platform4.6%
Other69.2%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

Eyob Alemu - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
BhanuChidigam - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs well, high availability, and helpful support
We use approximately four people for the maintenance of the solution. My advice to others is this solution has high throughput and is used for many stock exchanges. For business critical use cases, such as processing financial transactions at a quick speed, I would recommend this solution. I rate PubSub+ Event Broker an eight out of ten.

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 important feature is that it's best for JVM-related languages and JMS integration."
"The initial setup and first deployment of ActiveMQ is fairly simple."
"I'm impressed, I think that Active MQ is great."
"We value ActiveMQ for its performance, throughput, and low latency, especially in handling large volumes of data and sequential management of topics."
"ActiveMQ is very lightweight and quick."
"For reliable messaging, the most valuable feature of ActiveMQ for us is ensuring prompt message delivery."
"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."
"The most useful features has been the WAN optimization and probably the HybridEdge, which requires some third-party adapters or plugins. The idea that we can position Solace as a protocol-agnostic message transport fabric is key to our company having all manners of asynchronous messaging protocols from MQ, Kafka, JMS, etc. I really like the WAN optimization: Send once over a WAN, then distribute locally as many times as there are subscribers."
"Guaranteed Messaging allows for us to transport messages between on-prem and the cloud without any loss of data."
"Some valuable features include reconnecting topics, placing queues, and direct connections to MongoDB. The platform provides a dashboard to monitor the status of messages, such as how many have been processed or delivered, which is helpful for tracking performance."
"The valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the speed of processing, publishing, and consumption."
"When it comes to granularity, you can literally do anything regarding how the filtering works."
"I rate the PubSub+ Platform a 9 out of 10."
"One of the main reasons for using PubSub+ is that it is a proper event manager that can handle events in a reactive way."
"We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code."
 

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."
"AI capabilities require improvement in future updates."
"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."
"There are some stability issues."
"Message Management: Better management of the messages. Perhaps persist them, or put in another queue with another life cycle."
"We need to enhance stability and improve the deployment optimization to fully leverage the platform's capabilities."
"It does not scale out well. It ends up being very complex if you have a lot of mirror queues."
"The solution can improve the other protocols to equal the AMQ protocol they offer."
"The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively."
"We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building. A current workaround is using the message's header, where the business data can be put into this header and be used for a dynamic topic lookup. I want to see this in action when there are a couple of hundred cases live. E.g., how does it perform? From an administration perspective, is the ease of use there?"
"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."
"We've pointed out some things with the DMR piece, the event mesh, in edge cases where we could see a problem. Something like 99 percent of users wouldn't ever see this problem, but it has to do with if you get multiple bad clients sending data over a WAN, for example. That could then impact other clients."
"The deployment process is complex."
"Some of the feature's gaps with some of the open-source vendors have been closed in a lot of ways. Being more agile and addressing those earlier could be an area for improvement."
"If you create one event in the past, you cannot resend it."
"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no fees because it is open-source."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions."
"ActiveMQ is open source, so it is free to use."
"I think the software is free."
"I use open source with standard Apache licensing."
"We use the open-source version."
"It’s open source, ergo free."
"The solution is less expensive than its competitors."
"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."
"We have been really happy with the product licensing rates. It has been free for us, up to a 100,000 transactions per second, and all we have to do is pay for support. Making their product available and accessible to us has not been a problem at all."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."
"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."
"We are looking for something that will add value and fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The price of PubSub+ Event Broker is reasonable for the capability it offers. However, when compared to others solutions on the market it is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
32%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
8%
Computer Software 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 Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise12
 

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.
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 needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
Regarding improving the PubSub+ Platform, I'm not sure about the pricing aspect, but I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka. That's the only concern I can mention; otherwise, it was a...
What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?
My typical use case for the PubSub+ Platform is as an event-driven solution for communication between two components.
What advice do you have for others considering PubSub+ Event Broker?
I have experience working with Kafka, PubSub+ Platform, and IBM MQ, all three of them. We are customers, meaning my company uses Solace. We use it and customize it based on our needs. Based on my e...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AMQ
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Washington, Daugherty Systems, CSC, STG Technologies, Inc. 
FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet 
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveMQ vs. PubSub+ Platform and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
866,218 professionals have used our research since 2012.