DevOps

The Top 10 Message Queue (MQ) Software

Message queue software facilitates communication between distributed systems by enabling the asynchronous exchange of messages, ensuring reliable and scalable data transfer.

Last updated on Sep 13, 2024

Written by Caitlin Harris

Technical review by Laura Iannini

The Top 10 Message Queue Software include:

1. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
2. Anypoint MQ
3. Apache ActiveMQ
4. Azure Service Bus
5. EMQ Technologies EMQX
6. IBM MQ
7. RabbitMQ
8. Red Hat AMQ
9. Solace PubSub+ Event Broker
10. TIBCO Enterprise Message Service

Message Queue (MQ) software enables asynchronous communication between applications within serverless and microservices architectures. This means that they enable applications to seamlessly process requests, manage workloads, and handle complex workflows, without a developer having to couple or integrate them. To achieve this, the MQ software receives messages from the sending application called a producer, and adds those messages to a queue, where they wait to be processed by a receiving application. These receiving applications, also called consumers, process the messages in the queue and perform necessary actions based on the content of the message.

By storing and routing messages in this way, MQ software ensures that messages are delivered accurately and efficiently. It also helps to simplify the application architecture, streamline development, and enable greater flexibility for future expansion.

In this competitive market, several message queue software solutions have emerged, each with unique features, strengths, and use cases. In this article, we’ll explore the top message queue solutions to help you navigate the market and choose the right solution for your business. We’ll highlight the key use cases and features of each solution, including supported communication protocols and languages, fault tolerance, scalability, component isolation, guaranteed message delivery, and ease of integration into existing applications.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service designed for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.

Who it’s for: Teams looking to decouple and connect microservices, improve application reliability, and scale operations.

Benefits: The solution can support high data volumes and has a range of robust security features.

Supports high data volumes and ensures message delivery without loss, maintaining system availability.
Enables scaling of workers based on workload, making it adaptable to varying demands and latency requirements.
Cost-effective usage, eliminating the need for capacity planning.

The bottom line: Amazon SQS reduces overheads by removing upfront costs and cutting time spent on manual software management and infrastructure maintenance. It’s a strong choice for increasing application reliability and scale.

Amazon is a multinational technology company headquartered in Seattle, WA, serving millions of customers globally.

Anypoint MQ

Anypoint MQ is an advanced messaging service that provides both asynchronous and real-time messaging features including queueing and pub/sub. It provides enterprise-grade functionality including business group support and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).

Who it’s for: Enterprises needing a scalable, secure, and reliable messaging service that seamlessly integrates with both Mule and non-Mule applications.

Benefits: Anypoint MQ is a highly scalable solution with the added benefits of robust security and comprehensive integration options with both Mule and non-Mule applications.

Intelligent message routing allows users to automatically direct messages to specific queues based on predetermined rules.
Persistent data storage ensures secure and reliable message delivery across multiple data centers.
Provides usage statistics, role-based access control, client application management, MQ monitoring, and queue management for efficient system management.

The bottom line: Anypoint is an advanced messaging service that performs well in real-time. It is one part of the Anypoint platform, a leading suite for building APIs and integrations. Anypoint allows users to efficiently manage their messaging systems and ensure optimal performance.

Anypoint, headquartered in San Francisco, serves thousands of customers globally with its comprehensive integration solutions and were acquired by Salesforce in 2018.

Apache ActiveMQ

Apache ActiveMQ is an open source, multi-protocol, Java-based message broker designed for seamless client integration and high-performance messaging.

Who it’s for: Enterprises and development teams seeking reliable message brokering across various platforms and languages can all benefit from implementing this solution.

Benefits: Apache ActiveMQ is a robust messaging solution for scalable microservices and diverse integration use-cases.

Support for multiple protocols including JavaScript, C, C++, Python, and .Net. AMQP, STOMP, MQTT, and JMS can also be used to ensure flexibility and wide client compatibility.
ActiveMQ Artemis offers throughput in the millions of messages per second, making it suitable for high demand use-cases with low latency.
Effective load balancing with queues ensures each message is processed by a single consumer, while the mirrored queue feature allows easy monitoring of message flow.
ActiveMQ supports tens of thousands of queues in a single broker with configuration adjustments, optimizing resource usage and maintaining high performance as an organization grows.
It implements a paging cache to manage persistent messages efficiently, allowing management of hundreds of millions of messages without being limited by memory availability.

The bottom line: Apache ActiveMQ provides a powerful and flexible solution for a range of messaging use-cases, combining high performance with extensive protocol support. ActiveMQ is an excellent choice for enterprises looking to enhance scalability and reliability within their messaging systems.

Apache ActiveMQ is part of the Apache Software Foundation, a globally recognized organization providing open source software for over two decades.

Azure Service Bus

Azure Service Bus is a fully managed enterprise message broker with message queues and publish-subscribe topics. It’s used decouple applications and services.

Who it’s for: Teams looking to build scalable and reliable cloud applications, enhance system integration, and manage complex messaging needs.

Benefits: Azure Service Bus ensures high reliability with straightforward server management as well as supporting seamless integration with other Azure services.

Effectively separates application functions, facilitating load balancing and safe data transfers.
Supports complex messaging topologies meaning that businesses can utilize complex routing and fan-out messages at scale.
Azure provides a robust solution for managing temporary traffic spikes, connecting on-premises systems to cloud environments, and ensuring ordered messaging.

The bottom line: Azure Service Bus is a fully managed service that efficiently navigates traffic spikes and complex routing to maintain message delivery consistency. It delivers flexibility in brokering messaging between clients and servers, using asynchronous operations.

Azure Service Bus is part of Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond, WA, serving thousands of customers worldwide. It can be purchased on a pay-as-you-go format, meaning that you only pay for what you use.

EMQ Technologies EMQX

EMQX by EMQ Technologies is a serverless, fully-managed MQTT messaging platform designed for high-performance and low-latency communication.

Who it’s for: Organizations needing a scalable, high-performance messaging platform for IoT or other large-scale applications requiring real-time data processing and secure communication.

Benefits: The platform is scalable, supporting up to 100 million MQTT connections with a single EMQX 5.0 cluster. It also provides flexible deployment options both on-premises and in the cloud.

EMQX supports up to 100 million concurrent MQTT connections, providing flexibility for large-scale deployments.
Its masterless distributed architecture ensures horizontal scalability and high availability.
The SQL-based rule engine enables real-time event processing for efficient data handling.
It supports multiple protocols including MQTT, HTTP, QUIC, and WebSocket, ensuring reliable and efficient connections.

The bottom line: EMQX delivers an efficient and scalable solution, able to manage message queues across varied regions. It supports deployment across 17 regions on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

EMQ Technologies is headquartered in California.

IBM MQ

IBM MQ is a high-performance messaging solution that connects applications and microservices across private data centers, hybrid or multi-cloud environments, and edge locations. It ensures exactly-once message delivery and reduces errors.

Who it’s for: Teams looking to dynamically, securely and reliably connect applications with automated workload balancing.

Benefits: IBM MQ delivers robust security features and flexible deployment options.

You are able to deploy IBM MQ flexibly, on public or private clouds, virtual machines, or containers like Docker, Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenShift.
Automated and intelligent workload balancing enhances scalability without impacting functionality.
Easy to set up and ensures business continuity through quick recovery times.
Features user access management and TLS-secured communications to protect data and assure security.

The bottom line: IBM MQ is a high-performance and security-focused messaging solution. The solution also allows organizations to access data insights to understand effectiveness. IBM offers 24/7 technical support, ensuring assistance whenever it is needed.

IBM, headquartered in Armonk, New York, serves thousands of customers globally.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ is an open-source message broker used for deploying scalable and high-availability messaging systems across both on-premises and cloud environments.

Who it’s for: Organizations of all sizes looking for a reliable and scalable messaging solution with strong support for both on-premises and cloud environments.

Benefits: RabbitMQ is known for its flexibility, broad compatibility with multiple messaging protocols, and excellent developer tool support.

Offers asynchronous messaging with various exchange types, allowing messages to be efficiently routed to different queues.
It can be deployed in clusters and federated configurations for increased throughput and resilience across multiple regions.
The platform supports pluggable authentication, TLS, LDAP integration, and comes with a range of tools and plugins for robust security and functionality.
It provides comprehensive management and monitoring via an HTTP-API, command line tool, and user interface for simplified administration and monitoring.

The bottom line: RabbitMQ is widely used by organizations of all sizes. Its lightweight deployment effectively facilitates asynchronous messaging at high volumes, ensuring that productivity and latency are not adversely affected.

RabbitMQ is developed by Pivotal Software, headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Red Hat AMQ

Red Hat AMQ is a flexible messaging platform designed for real-time integration and data sharing across an enterprise. It leverages open-source technologies like Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka to support diverse messaging patterns and protocols.

Who it’s for: Teams needing a reliable, secure messaging platform to integrate applications and data efficiently, especially those leveraging IoT.

Benefits: Red Hat AMQ offers high throughput and low latency for efficient data sharing. It also simplifies management.

Red Hat AMQ ensures quick and efficient data sharing between microservices and applications, without leading to a latency issues.
The AMQ streams component makes deploying, configuring, and managing Apache Kafka easy on OpenShift.
Red Hat AMQ supports multiple programming languages including Java, C++, Python, and .Net.
AMQP ensures messaging interoperability, enabling diverse distributed messaging solutions.

The bottom line: Red Hat AMQ can handle a large amount of data being shared between microservices in real-time. It is also designed to work across languages and protocols, making it well suited to use in diverse environments. Red Hat’s community of developers help with troubleshooting and getting the most out of the solution.

Red Hat is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has a strong foundation in open-source projects supported by a vibrant community of contributors.

Solace PubSub+ Event Broker

Solace PubSub+ Event Broker is a messaging solution designed for versatile event handling, allowing for flexible topics and wildcard subscriptions to efficiently route information. As part of the broad PubSub+ platform, it supports a broad range of exchange patterns, making it applicable to many settings.

Who it’s for: Teams that require robust and scalable event handling and messaging solutions across diverse deployment environments.

Benefits: Solace allows flexible deployment options and seamless integration with various applications through popular APIs and protocols.

Solace ensures efficient information routing across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments by linking several brokers to form an event mesh.
Support for OpenTelemetry traces that allows users to track event progress and pathways using their preferred observability tools.
It offers APIs for popular languages and connectors for cloud services and integration/streaming technologies like Apache Kafka, resulting in seamless integration.

The bottom line: Solace PubSub+ is a robust, yet versatile, message queue solution that effectively routes information to the relevant area. The solution is able to handle high volumes of data effectively, without leading to outages or drops in performance.

Solace is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, and its solutions are used by a wide range of customers globally.

TIBCO Enterprise Message Service

TIBCO Enterprise Message Service (EMS) is a robust messaging solution designed to integrate diverse platforms and facilitate efficient inter-application communication. It supports Jakarta Messaging 2.0 and 3.0, ensuring compatibility and reduced operational overheads.

Who it’s for: TIBCO is ideal for organizations looking for a secure and versatile messaging solution for varied environments, supporting a wide range of deployment options and strong integration capabilities.

Benefits: TIBCO EMS offers a range of versatile messaging options and strong security features.

TIBCO EMS supports reliable, synchronous, asynchronous, and XA-compliant transactional delivery, optimizing performance for use in various locations.
The platform integrates with TLS and JAAS pluggable security models, providing fine-grained authentication and authorization control.
It is compatible with TIBCO FTL, eFTL software, and other TIBCO Messaging solutions, ensuring comprehensive inter-application communication.

The bottom line: TIBCO EMS is an effective solution that can be used as a versatile means of managing message queues across multiple platforms. It prioritizes secure communication through integration with TLS and JAAS models. TIBCO delivers fully cross-compatible libraries in C and .NET.

TIBCO Software, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, serves thousands of customers worldwide.

Everything You Need To Know About Message Queue (MQ) Software (FAQs)

What Is Message Queue (MQ) Software?

In a modern software architecture, applications are often run across multiple different locations and servers. In this type of distributed environment, these applications need a way to communicate with one another. Message queue software can help them do that.

A message queue is a software component that allows applications within serverless and microservices architectures to communicate asynchronously (i.e., without real-time back-and-forth), without having to directly couple or integrate the applications. As the name suggests, message queue software stores messages (i.e., data packets that applications create to send information to other applications) in a queue, then delivers them to the recipient when that recipient is ready to receive the message. This enables the sender to keep operating and move onto the next task, while the recipient processes the message in its own time. It also means that, in the event there’s something wrong with the network or receiving application, the message isn’t lost; it’s simply stored safely in the queue until it can be received.

The messages added to a message queue are usually small and specific—such as error messages, requests, replies, or information needed for tracing or logging—and they don’t need an instant reply.

How Does Message Queue (MQ) Software Work?

A message queue is made up of three parts: a message broker, a producer client, and a consumer client. The producer is a client application that creates a message. The message broker receives the message from the producer and stores it in the queue. The consumer is another application that connects to the queue and retrieves the message when it’s ready to process it.

Now you know the different components of MQ software, let’s take a look at the modes they can work in.

There are two different message queue modes: Point-to-Point (PTP) and Publish-Subscribe (Pub-Sub).

In the Point-to-Point mode, the message is sent from the producer to a single consumer. The producer needs to know which queue the consumer is on, and possibly also the queue manager name, before being able to send the message. This type of message queue is common within environments that handle lots of repetitive transactions, such as a controller in a factory communicating with a piece of machinery.

In the Publish-Subscribe mode, multiple consumers can receive a message from a single producer. The producer creates messages on a specific topic, and all consumers (more commonly referred to as “subscribers” in this mode) that have subscribed to that topic can retrieve the messages from the queue—usually without having to send a response. In this mode, the producer doesn’t need to know specific details about the application that’s going to be consuming the message. This means the producer and the consumer can be decoupled.

What Are The Benefits Of Message Queue (MQ) Software?

There are a few reasons that you might consider implementing message queue software:

Deliver messages more reliably. By using a message queue, you can ensure that any important messages sent between applications will be delivered, even in the event of a network outage or a problem with the recipient application itself, because the queue will safely store the message until it can be delivered. This means that you don’t need to implement additional de-duplication tools or message loss prevention logic.
Deliver messages more securely. A message queue can authenticate the sender of all messages to ensure they come from a trusted source, and some solutions even offer encryption to secure messages at rest, in transit, or even end-to-end.
Integrate file transfers. Some MQ software can transfer files, thereby allowing the software to be used as an alternative to file transfer protocol (FTP) for more streamlined communications.
Simplify application development. Some MQ software can handle transactionality and encryption, and most MQ solutions can support multiple APIs, protocols, and languages, such as Java, Node, Python, Ruby, COBOL, C#, and C/C++. This enables separate, disparate architectures to work more seamlessly together and can help simplify application development.

Caitlin Harris

Deputy Head Of Content

Caitlin Harris is Deputy Head of Content at Expert Insights. Caitlin is an experienced writer and journalist, with years of experience producing award-winning technical training materials and journalistic content. Caitlin holds a First Class BA in English Literature and German, and provides our content team with strategic editorial guidance as well as carrying out detailed research to create articles that are accurate, engaging and relevant. Caitlin co-hosts the Expert Insights Podcast, where she interviews world-leading B2B tech experts.

Laura Iannini

Cybersecurity Analyst

Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.