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IBM MQ vs Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure comparison

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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

IBM MQ
Ranking in Business Activity Monitoring
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (1st), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (1st)
Software AG Optimize for In...
Ranking in Business Activity Monitoring
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Business Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of IBM MQ is 22.0%, down from 25.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure is 4.1%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Activity Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM MQ22.0%
Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure4.1%
Other73.9%
Business Activity Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Srinivas Krishnamsetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, At Tiaa Senior Technical Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Asynchronous messaging has streamlined workflow triggers and supports reliable session rollbacks
The best features IBM MQ offers are the topic and subscription, as well as the IBM MQ session and message rollbacks, especially for JMS integration. IBM MQ serves as the underlying foundation for our JMS messages. IBM MQ has positively impacted my organization by enabling asynchronous processing, which means we do not need to wait for any responses from our downstream systems.
RK
Vice President - Digital Integration at Kellton Tech Solutions Limited
Mature, stable, and powerful managed platform
Sometimes Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure goes through an upgrade cycle of four years to get to the next version. Some of the utilities need to be definitely advanced as well so that migration to the latest version is even smoother and easier. That could probably be the only improvements that they can look at. I definitely think that their cloud version capabilities are still nascent. They need to evolve into offering similar capabilities to the cloud infrastructure as well. That is not specifically SaaS but any managed infrastructure that customers would subscribe to in AWS, Azure, and other public clouds. How to employ Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure and also to see if it can be subscribed as a service from Software AG would be the ideal next steps for this solution to evolve into.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In conjunction with some other products we use, such as IIB, it does a lot of the transformation and cuts out a lot of programming that has to be done for transforming data from our carrier customers into the format that we need it to be."
"We are able to transport data across any platform in a secure fashion, be it internal or external."
"The solution allows one to easily configure an IBM MQQueueManager."
"We use queue managers/concentrators for message flow going upstream and downstream on applications with enterprise licenses."
"The most valuable feature is the stability. It's perfect in this way."
"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 MQ's flexibility has sped up our active communication."
"The most valuable features I have found to be the message queue itself and its ability to bridge between mainframe type services to distributed services."
"It kind of alleviates all the complexity in the IT support and service teams, and it will make their life easier."
"The infrastructure monitoring features are the most valuable. The primary purpose of Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure is to automate the aspects of monitoring various infrastructure and applications. They will definitely automate an alert automatically, but a lot of such tools differ from each other on aspects of various low-level components that they can monitor."
 

Cons

"I like Kafka more. MQ is number-two compared to Kafka."
"IBM support team is really only concerned with the IBM cloud. They're not supporting any other cloud platforms or suggestions."
"We are looking for another solution that is less expensive."
"MQ needs instruments for connection with new modern queues like Kafka or RabbitMQ."
"The scalability is the one area where IBM has fallen behind. As much as it is used, there is a limit to the number of people who are skilled in MQ. That is definitely an issue. Places have kept their MQ-skilled people and other places have really struggled to get MQ skills. It's not a widely-known skillset."
"SonicMQ CAA (continuous availability architecture) functionality on auto failover and data persistence should be made available without a shared drive, as it exists in multi-instance queue managers."
"Customer support response times could be improved."
"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."
"Sometimes Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure goes through an upgrade cycle of four years to get to the next version."
"Sometimes Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure goes through an upgrade cycle of four years to get to the next version. Some of the utilities need to be definitely advanced as well so that migration to the latest version is even smoother and easier. That could probably be the only improvements that they can look at. I definitely think that their cloud version capabilities are still nascent. They need to evolve into offering similar capabilities to the cloud infrastructure as well. That is not specifically SaaS but any managed infrastructure that customers would subscribe to in AWS, Azure, and other public clouds. How to employ Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure and also to see if it can be subscribed as a service from Software AG would be the ideal next steps for this solution to evolve into."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side."
"Licensing for this software is on a yearly basis. The standard fee includes the maintenance and updates that are released periodically."
"99.999 percent availability for less than a penny per message over the past 25 years. IBM MQ is the cheapest software in the IBM software portfolio, and it is one of the best."
"IBM products, in general, have high licensing costs and support costs are too high."
"Small-scale companies may not want to buy IBM MQ because of its high cost."
"The pricing needs improvement."
"The solution costs are high, it is going to cost a fair bit for annual operating costs and support."
"IBM MQ has a flexible license model based on the Processor Value Unit (PVU) and I recommend it."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

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...
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Also Known As

WebSphere MQ
webMethods Optimize for Infrastructure
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
Swisscom
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, TIBCO, Aurea and others in Business Activity Monitoring. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.