What is the difference between Red Hat AMQ and Apache ActiveMQ?

Question

I am providing a design for a new project and I am trying to understand which JMS provider to use. Is there any difference between Red Hat AMQ and Apache ActiveMQ ?

Answer 1

The latest version of Red Hat AMQ (i.e. the 7.x releases) is more than just a message broker. It is a platform consisting of a message broker (based on Apache ActiveMQ Artemis), a message router (based on Apache Qpid Dispatch Router), and a suite of clients with different language bindings and protocol support.

Red Hat AMQ broker is based on the upstream ActiveMQ project, but depending on which version of Red Hat AMQ you're using you'll get a different ActiveMQ broker. Red Hat AMQ 6.x broker is based on ActiveMQ 5.x whereas Red Hat AMQ 7.x broker is based on ActiveMQ Artemis 2.x. Aside from that, the Red Hat AMQ brokers are usually (but not always) based on an a public release of the corresponding ActiveMQ project broker with potentially a number of additional code changes to address customer-specific issues, branding changes for the web console, etc. Red Hat also does additional testing, has independent documentation, and commercial support as well.