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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

"The triggering scenarios and routing scenarios are all good, making it a very useful solution for financial institutions."
"The stability has been good."
"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."
"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."
"I've used other solutions, but the most valuable features of this solution are the search capabilities, consolidating the data and searching through the data."
"This solution offers good performance as well as scalability and stability."
"It delivers the stability and security within our applications that we desire as an organization."
"The most valuable feature is that it's a very strong integration platform but it is quite a monolithic solution. It's got everything."
"There is no dependency on the end party service's run status."
"IBM MQ is very stable, which is important for our core banking application."
"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."
 

Cons

"The product's interface needs improvement."
"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 pricing needs to be improved."
"Scalability is lacking compared to the cloud native products coming into the market."
"IBM MQ could streamline its complexity to be more like Kafka without the channel complexities of clusters, making it more straightforward."
"So we're on MQ version 8, and I was at a recent event for MQ 9 and it looks like they've already added some of the features I was looking."
"Maybe the administration interface could be improved."
"We would like to see more capabilities with MQ over the internet."
"With IBM products, there's less marketing. If they do more demos and more seminars on their products, it will be very useful. On a given day. I get seminar invites for many vendors and products, but for IBM, I may get an invite once or twice a year."
"If we have IBM MQ or one of the applications go down, our entire plant is down. Then sometimes, it's 2-3 hours or something before someone calls us back."
"We have used the technical support, but we are more concerned about the response time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform is averagely priced."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"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."
"I think the pricing is reasonable, especially with IIB as a part of it."
"IBM is expensive."
"IBM's licensing model seems more reasonable than some competitors. They charge based on usage, which is good."
"The fee for this solution is on the higher end of the scale."
"I rate the product price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"It's a very expensive product."
"The pricing needs improvement."
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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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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: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.