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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 August 2026, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of IBM Event Streams is 3.0%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 21.0%, down from 26.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ21.0%
IBM Event Streams3.0%
Other76.0%
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

"The system efficiently processes and calculates the data flow within the cluster using DLP functionality."
"I am happy with the product, other than pricing I don't have any other improvements that I can suggest."
"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."
"Combined with IBM MQ, this product is our primary data store."
"Clustering is one of its most valuable features."
"The solution is scalable; it is flexible because, for us, we used the solution's adapter to provide the connection parameters to send a message, which has been quite easy."
"We haven’t had any stability problems at all; stability and availability have been outstanding with the MQ appliance, and when an appliance went down everything failed over so seamlessly that none of our clients even knew about it."
"IBM is doing really good and they're still growing."
"Overall, MQ is good, capability-wise."
"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."
"As I mentioned elsewhere, it provides one of the most seamless integrations that we can do both from open systems to z Systems or vice versa."
 

Cons

"The pricing needs to be improved."
"In the next release, I would like to see the GUI allow you to configure the security section."
"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."
"If they could come up with monitoring dashboards that would be good. We are using external monitoring tools, apart from our IBM MQ, to monitor IBM MQ. If we could get monitoring tools or dashboards to keep everything simple for the user to understand, that would be good."
"The installation of product upgrades and patches is very difficult. It requires the use of the IBM Installation Manager (IM)."
"I haven’t given it a perfect rating because there's always room for improvement."
"I wanted to upgrade Windows Server. It's not that easy to move."
"It could always be more stable and secure."
"Everything in the solution could be simplified a little. We have trouble with the configuration and cost which is mostly an internal issue, but nevertheless, the errors do come up when there are configuration changes across a specific version. We have slightly different versions, which may have slightly different configurations which cause issues."
"Scaling out MQ is possible, but it's not as easy as some other products."
"IBM MQ has limitations regarding scaling options. The licensing costs associated with scaling up and down were significant, which is why we are moving to Apache-based services such as Kafka."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform is averagely priced."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"There is real money involved here. As compared to RabbitMQ, IBM MQ is on the higher side in terms of cost."
"In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side."
"The licensing fees are paid quarterly and they are expensive."
"The problem with this product is that it's a little bit expensive."
"The pricing seems good according to the functionality that the solution provides."
"IBM MQ appliance has pricing options, but they are costly."
"Small-scale companies may not want to buy IBM MQ because of its high cost."
"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
No data available
Financial Services Firm
20%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

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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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

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: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.