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EMQX 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

EMQX
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
IoT Connectivity (1st)
IBM MQ
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
Business Activity Monitoring (1st), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of EMQX is 2.8%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 21.0%, down from 26.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ21.0%
EMQX2.8%
Other76.2%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

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.
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

"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."
"EMQX is a solid open-source project for making IoT devices connect anywhere in the world."
"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 will boost your product sampling rate and transmission so that you can achieve a large amount of data without any loss while transmitting through the internet."
"I would recommend IBM MQ to others that are using major transaction processing."
"The feature I find most effective for ensuring message delivery without loss is the backup threshold. This feature allows for automatic retries of transactional messages within a specified threshold."
"If you have mission-critical applications that rely on an exchange of data, and the data is very valuable, then I would suggest using MQ."
"So far, it's helped us with our Maximo integration between the users and the database administrators."
"The solution is easy to understand and even medium developers can easily start using it."
"Overall, I am very happy with this product and my only complaint is that the price is high."
"We use MQ as part of the core of our enterprise information bus, allowing messaging to integrate with third-party solutions, like for web banking, so we are able to create an information highway that takes in legacy events, captures ATM and credit card transactions, and integrates that into a digital web dashboard."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its reliability, efficiency, and the capacity to bring value."
 

Cons

"To improve EMQX, I think it should reduce costs, save time when sending messages, and improve reliability."
"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."
"If you want to improve further, the SSL certificate and TLS certificate have overhead in serverless EMQX."
"EMQX is a good MQTT broker but the historian is simple."
"They need to provide more and more platform integrations because I'm not sure what are the latest upgrades, in terms of MQ as of today."
"IBM MQ is not very user-friendly."
"The GUI part could be better."
"IBM MQ can scale, but there are some challenges with it."
"There could be a better front-end GUI interface for us, where we can see things more easily."
"IBM MQ could improve capacity, monitoring, and automatization."
"It's not always easy for applications to connect to IBM MQ, but I think it's fine in general."
"IBM MQ could streamline its complexity to be more like Kafka without the channel complexities of clusters, making it more straightforward."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The problem with this product is that it's a little bit expensive."
"Use the new and lightweight version (Liberty) to lower licensing costs. It is also easier to upgrade/maintain."
"It's a very expensive product."
"The pricing needs improvement."
"The licensing fees are paid quarterly and they are expensive."
"The license for IBM MQ is commercial and not cheap. You get a multi-platform solution, which is important because it lets you connect systems on mainframes, personal solutions, Unix, Linux, etc."
"To implement such an IBM solution, a company has to pay a lot in term of licensing and consultancy. A pricing model might be a better option."
"IBM's licensing model seems more reasonable than some competitors. They charge based on usage, which is good."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Legal Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Media Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

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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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
WebSphere MQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about EMQX vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: May 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.