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Avada Software Infrared360 vs IBM MQ 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

Avada Software Infrared360
Ranking in Business Activity Monitoring
9th
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
12th
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (80th), Server Monitoring (37th)
IBM MQ
Ranking in Business Activity Monitoring
1st
Ranking in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Business Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of Avada Software Infrared360 is 5.4%, down from 7.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 19.0%, down from 42.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Activity Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ19.0%
Avada Software Infrared3605.4%
Other75.6%
Business Activity Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

WK
ICT Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems
* We now have the possibility of getting a central perspective on all tenants. * We have defined access roles for developers. Therefore, they can 'read in' their queues on the development and testing stages. With special roles, they may also write. This improves our development and testing cycle. * For operative systems, we have restricted the access. Still, selected people can react if something is happening in the various BOQs.
MK
SWIFT manager at Raiffeisen Bank Aval
Reliable payment processing is achieved with minimal disruption
Currently, we have some disadvantages; it's a bit difficult to use IBM ID to access support from the IBM site. To get nice support from IBM, we need to use IBM ID, and it's a bit complicated to integrate it with IBM support. Support can be better because sometimes we need explanations for some behaviors of the product, and it's not easy to reach the proper person in IBM support. They could add some new features into IBM MQ to make it better. A graphical user interface in addition to MQ Explorer could be useful, but we are satisfied with MQ Explorer as well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's what we use for monitoring our MQ system, so the features that they provide are just really, really good."
"IR360 does not require a large team to manage our entire middleware estate and allows the leveraging of a logical model of reuse."
"Monitoring that ties into our incident management system"
"I highly recommend Infrared360 for an all-in-one IBM MQ tool."
"The ability for development teams to have access to their MQ queues has freed us up as administrators to do things other than chase down an application’s message for research purposes."
"The product has a small footprint on our system, they're very knowledgeable of MQ, which we use, and the features that they provide for monitoring our MQ system are just really, really good."
"The administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities."
"It allows non-technical users to inspect their individual components within the total infrastructure without disturbing other components and without bothering the technical teams."
"Currently, we are not using many advanced features. We are only using point-to-point MQ. I have previously used features like context-based authentication, SSL authentication, and high availability. These are good and pretty cool features. They make your business reliable. For critical business needs, everyone uses only IBM MQ. It is the first choice because of its reliability. There is a one-send-and-one-delivery feature. It also has a no-message-loss feature, and because of that, only IBM MQ is used in banking or financial sectors."
"IBM HQ's stability is great - we send six million messages a day, and we're very satisfied with HQ's ability to handle that volume."
"I have found that the solution scales well."
"It is stable, reliable, and scalable."
"We've been using MQ for so many years; it's been really, really working great for us."
"The number one thing is it's pretty reliable with data integration."
"I have seen in many organizations it has helped in designing great architectural solutions by helping transfer messages between different systems."
"The message queue and the integration with any development platform/language, i.e., NET and Java, are the most valuable features."
 

Cons

"The UI can be cumbersome - but we are still using the Viper interface and we have not had the time to check out the Alloy interface which is supposed to be much improved."
"The user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic. The competing products have similar problems."
"We are still working with the FTE/MFT subscription monitoring and reporting functionality. That is an area in which we would like to see further development taking place."
"Some of the graphics in the interface could be improved. It's pretty basic. Some interfaces are not up to what you're used to seeing on other, more Windows-like tools."
"The user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic."
"One area where they could improve is with their documentation. Some sections are not up to date with new release information and providing additional samples in some areas would be very helpful."
"We desire a dashboard that could accumulate BOQ lengths per tenant on one screen for all tenants."
"Some of the graphics in the interface could be improved. It's pretty basic."
"IBM HQ's scalability isn't the best."
"Should have more integration in the monitoring tools."
"While there is support for API, it's not like the modern API capabilities."
"There are many complications with IBM MQ servers."
"One of the bottlenecks for us is owing to the industry that we're in, we sometimes get the large payloads and the MQ queues that we can increase."
"The response time for IBM MQ support could be better because when we are using IBM MQ and something goes wrong, support is required as the resource availability of the IBM product is very limited."
"It could get a face lift with a modern marketing campaign."
"One possible area with room for improvement is some integration with the alert system to alert us in case of any failure of any message to be transmitted from one source to another; maybe that could help."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Because the licensing is at the QMGR level, you need to have at least a small cushion of licenses for occasional enterprise needs."
"Our internal budget calculation model incorporates the pricing per endpoint for any new projects. However, as our footprint for distributed queue managers shrinks as part of our shared middleware hub deployment, the initial licensing and support costs have been reduced over the last five years."
"Start small, then increase licensing later as per your demand."
"Avada Software's licensing metric is very good because the license fees are based on the number of connections (which have not increased for us very much over the years) rather than the CPU processing power (which increases significantly whenever our hardware is upgraded) or the number of users (which has increased for us a lot since our original purchase)."
"IBM MQ is expensive and they charge based on the CPU."
"The solution costs are high, it is going to cost a fair bit for annual operating costs and support."
"Most of our customers are quite happy with the solution but they have an issue with the cost. They want to move to cheaper solutions."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, and we are on an annual subscription."
"It would be a 10 out of 10 if it wasn't so expensive."
"I think IBM needs to look at its pricing. The prices of IBM products should be simple. The old way of pricing should now be moving on to the cloud to be pay as you go, a plan-based kind of pricing."
"IBM products, in general, have high licensing costs and support costs are too high."
"The problem with this product is that it's a little bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Printing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is MQ software?
Hi As someone with 45+ years of experience in the Transaction and Message Processing world, I have seen many "MQ" solutions that have come into the market place. From my perspective, while each pro...
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...
How does IBM MQ compare with VMware RabbitMQ?
IBM MQ has a great reputation behind it, and this solution is very robust with great stability. It is easy to use, simple to configure and integrates well with our enterprise ecosystem and protocol...
 

Also Known As

Infrared360
WebSphere MQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

USBank, Southwest Airlines, Visiting Nurse Services of New York, Aon Hewitt, Parker Hannifin,  Cantonal Bank of Zurich (ZKB), Hagemeyer NA, and many others
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about Avada Software Infrared360 vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.