IBM MQ vs. RabbitMQ

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM MQ
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
IBM MQ (formerly WebSphere MQ and MQSeries) is messaging middleware.
$5
per month
RabbitMQ
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
RabbitMQ, an open source message broker, is part of Pivotal Software, a VMware company acquired in 2019, and supports message queue, multiple messaging protocols, and more. RabbitMQ is available open source, however VMware also offers a range of commercial services for RabbitMQ; these are available as part of the Pivotal App Suite.N/A
Pricing
IBM MQRabbitMQ
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM MQRabbitMQ
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM MQRabbitMQ
Considered Both Products
IBM MQ
Chose IBM MQ
IBM MQ is very stable and a proven product compared to other Messaging platforms available. Performance was better than WSO2 product and also the RabbitMQ. Though Kafka and IBM MQ is not directly comparable, Kafka is more suited for event based systems and also where there is …
RabbitMQ

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
IBM MQRabbitMQ
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 out of 10
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 out of 10
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM MQRabbitMQ
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(42 ratings)
9.4
(11 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
9.4
(30 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(28 ratings)
6.5
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM MQRabbitMQ
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
In the context of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, IBM MQ plays a pivotal role in managing the substantial data streams emanating from interconnected devices. Its primary function is to guarantee the dependable transmission and processing of data, catering to a diverse range of IoT use cases, including but not limited to smart city initiatives, healthcare monitoring systems, and industrial automation solutions. In the telecommunications sector, IBM MQ is employed for message routing, call detail record (CDR) processing, and network management to ensure real-time data exchange and fault tolerance. When managing the supply chain and logistics, IBM MQ is used to ensure timely and accurate communication between different entities, including suppliers, warehouses, and transportation providers. IBM MQ can be cost-prohibitive for smaller organizations due to licensing and maintenance costs. In such cases, open-source or lightweight messaging solutions may be more appropriate. For scenarios requiring extremely low-latency, real-time data exchange, and high throughput, other messaging technologies, like Apache Kafka, may be more suitable due to their specialized design for such use cases.
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Open Source
It is highly recommended that if you have microservices architecture and if you want to solve 2 phase commit issue, you should use RabbitMQ for communication between microservices. It is a quick and reliable mode of communication between microservices. It is also helpful if you want to implement a job and worker mechanism. You can push the jobs into RabbitMQ and that will be sent to the consumer. It is highly reliable so you won't miss any jobs and you can also implement a retry of jobs with the dead letter queue feature. It will be also helpful in time-consuming API. You can put time-consuming items into a queue so they will be processed later and your API will be quick.
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Pros
IBM
  • The documentation is very clear,It is understandable and the support helps to configure it in the best way.
  • Server guidelines make it possible to get the most out of work management. It's broad, we can work with different operating systems, I really recommend using linux.
  • It is highly compatible with systems, brockers, applications, and data accumulation programs, it is possible to configure everything so that after the installation of programs, they can communicate with each other and then throw data to an external program that accumulates it and represents in clear details of steps to follow and make business decisions.
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Open Source
  • What RabbitMQ does well is what it's advertised to do. It is good at providing lots of high volume, high availability queue. We've seen it handle upwards of 10 million messages in its queues, spread out over 200 queues before its publish/consume rates dipped. So yeah, it can definitely handle a lot of messages and a lot of queues. Depending on the size of the machine RabbitMQ is running on, I'm sure it can handle more.
  • Decent number of plugins! Want a plugin that gives you an interface to view all the queues and see their publish/consume rates? Yes, there's one for that. Want a plugin to "shovel" messages from one queue to another in an emergency? Check. Want a plugin that does extra logging for all the messages received? Got you covered!
  • Lots of configuration possibilities. We've tuned over 100 settings over the past year to get the performance and reliability just right. This could be a downside though--it's pretty confusing and some settings were hard to understand.
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Cons
IBM
  • There is limitation on number of svrconn connections you can have to MQ on the mainframe which has been an major issue for us. This has been an issue for us for over 4 years and still no fix although I am aware IBM have been working on a solution over the last year.
  • When upgrading to MQ V9.3 on our MQ appliances there is no fall-back option. This was the same for MQ V9.2 upgrade from MQ V9.0. For production upgrades this I believe is not acceptable.
  • AMS is not supplied as part of the standard mainframe MQ licence. You need an extra licence. IBM tell customers how important security and protecting data is yet they still want to charge for this software. The cost of MQ on the mainframe is not cheap so I would expect AMS to be part of the base product.
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Open Source
  • It breaks communication if we don't acknowledge early. In some cases our work items are time consuming that will take a time and in that scenario we are getting errors that RabbitMQ broke the channel. It will be good if RabbitMQ provides two acknowledgements, one is for that it has been received at client side and second ack is client is completed the processing part.
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Usability
IBM
No answers on this topic
Open Source
RabbitMQ is very usable if you are a programmer or DevOps engineer. You can setup and configure a messaging system without any programmatic knowledge either through an admin console plugin or through a command-line interface. It's very easy to spin up additional consumers when volume is heavy and it's very easy to manage those consumers either through automated scripting or through their admin console. Because it's language agnostic it integrates with any system supporting AMQP.
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Reliability and Availability
IBM
The messages are delivered instantly with this software and it integrates with our technology stack, in terms of availability we only had one failure when we were doing some testing and integration with third parties, the features of this software make it always available and its deployment is easy for the company, it does not generate expenses due to failures
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
IBM
There are very specific things that must be elevated to more specialized areas of support, but the common support is very agile when receiving questions or when we leave concerns in real time. I recommend the support of the program in this regard.
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Open Source
RabbitMQ is more software than service so there's no real customer service to speak of unless you go with a provider such as CloudAMQP. So I'll just speak on CloudAMQP. Their customer support is only okay: they only do it over email. They frequently gloss over our support tickets and half answer them without delving deeply or investigating our issues. Their response times are pretty reasonable though.
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Alternatives Considered
IBM
We found IBM MQ very easy to get started and quick to learn by the new users with a short learning curve and seamlessly integrates with IBM products, and quick to perform self-service analytics and make informed business decisions. IBM MQ is also very straightforward in creating simple and best reports, which are very profitable and productive.
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Open Source
RabbitMQ has a few advantages over Azure Service Bus 1) RMQ handles substantially larger files - ASB tops out at 100MB, we use RabbitMQfor files over 200MB 2) RabbitMQ can be easily setup on prem - Azure Service Bus is cloud only 3) RabbitMQ exchanges are easier to configure over ASB subscriptions ASB has a few advantages too 1) Cloud based - just a few mouse clicks and you're up and running
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Return on Investment
IBM
  • Positive- Message Reliability and Reduced downtime, increases the ROI many times.
  • Positive- Increased stability and enhanced customer experience
  • Negative- cost is very high - Both licensing and integration cost
  • Negative- Learning and training cost of IBM MQ is high as its complex to use and integrate
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Open Source
  • Earlier we had a problem with missing work items with our own implementation but later using RabbitMQ is solved a problem. Now our job processing mechanism is highly reliable.
  • We also had a problem with scaling, processing 1k work items per second. RabbitMQ helped us to scale well with increasing work items.
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