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IBM Event Streams vs IBM MQ 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

IBM Event Streams
Ranking in Message Queue (MQ) Software
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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 June 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of IBM Event Streams is 2.9%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 20.7%, down from 26.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ20.7%
IBM Event Streams2.9%
Other76.4%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

TM
IBM MQ Specialist / Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Easy to use, stable, has a good interface, and the security is good
I don't know if it's because of experience, but for me, it was easy to install. It's just a matter of having an RPM, then click next, next, and next again. The difficult part comes in when you have to configure the security. That is the most difficult part, but it's not that difficult. It takes less than two hours to install. Two hours max, because I did one yesterday. I installed it on AWS and it was easy to install the software. It was less than an hour for the bare minimum installation. Setting up the security, took close to two hours.
David Pizinger - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Technical Leader at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has faced unexpected VM restarts but continues to deliver messages reliably
I'm not sure if we've utilized IBM MQ's high availability. Our MQ VMs are set up in clusters, and I think our queue managers are set up in pairs. However, I don't know if we actually use any specific high availability features of IBM MQ that are out of the box. We have it architected with high availability because we use F5 load balancers, and everything about our architecture is highly available. I haven't personally used the management tools with IBM MQ, but we do have them, and our middleware folks leverage them. I can't really comment on them because I don't use them myself. I don't think the management tools help optimize message flows, and I'm not really aware of how they help in this. I'm not familiar with dynamic routing for IBM MQ.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I'm an administrator, and what I like most is the interface, the security, and the storage."
"The stability has been good."
"The triggering scenarios and routing scenarios are all good, making it a very useful solution for financial institutions."
"I am happy with the product, other than pricing I don't have any other improvements that I can suggest."
"The system efficiently processes and calculates the data flow within the cluster using DLP functionality."
"I appreciate the level of control we have over queue managers, queues, and the messaging itself. That provides good security. So, the control and scalability of messaging are important to me."
"This product is from IBM which is a very well-known company, and MQ is a reliable, easy to understand and install solution."
"The biggest advantage of IBM MQ is its reliability."
"Seamless integration with IBM WebSphere Application Server, which is the most stable application server I ever worked with."
"Setting up MQ is easy; we had a "grow as you go" implementation strategy, starting with a single channel and progressing to multiple queues and channels depending on the systems and integrations with other systems, resulting in a gradual deployment and expansion as we grew the services interacting with the core system using MQ."
"IBM MQ is used heavily in all of the companies I have worked for, mostly in the financial industry, as it is easy to set up and has good instrumentation."
"Secure, safe, and very fast."
"From our experience with the functionality and the stability of the product, it's going to be difficult to find something that rivals it in the industry right now."
 

Cons

"It would be helpful if they could help us explain why they, as in, the customers, should use the product and the overall benefits."
"The product's interface needs improvement."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"In the next release, I would like to see the GUI allow you to configure the security section."
"Price is one thing that could be improved."
"The barrier to success is basically the engine behind the collection of the data."
"It could provide more monitoring tools and some improvement to the UI. I would also like to see more throughput in future versions."
"I couldn't find a lot of information on the system API side."
"Sometimes the applications people don't really understand MQ."
"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."
"Scalability-wise, in terms of the implementations that we have currently, it's not quite scalable."
"I believe the stability of the product has decreased since we began using it initially."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing needs to be improved."
"The platform is averagely priced."
"It is a licensed product. As compared to an open-source solution, such as RabbitMQ, it is obviously costly. If you're using IBM Message Broker, which is a licensed product, IBM MQ is included in the same license. You don't have to pay separately for IBM MQ. The license cost of IBM MQ is lesser than IBM Message Broker."
"It's a very expensive product."
"The price of IBM MQ could improve by being less expensive."
"The problem with this product is that it's a little bit expensive."
"IBM MQ appliance has pricing options, but they are costly."
"IBM products, in general, have high licensing costs and support costs are too high."
"The licensing fees are paid quarterly and they are expensive."
"It's super expensive, so ask them if they can consolidate some other licensing costs. But, IBM is IBM, so I guess we'll pay for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

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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

No data available
WebSphere MQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

American Airlines, UBank, Bitly, Eurobits, Active International, Bison, Contextor, Constance Hotels, Resorts & Golf, Creval, Deloitte, ExxonMobil, FaceMe, FacePhi, Fitzsoft, Fuga Technologies, Guardio, Honeywell, Japanese airline, Jenzabar, KONE
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Event Streams vs. IBM MQ and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.