Was chosen over HiveMQ due to HiveMQ's proprietary nature and the pricing model. The platform was initially built with HiveMQ as the channel to publish sensor events over MQTT. VerneMQ was analyzed but we needed a shared subscription model to client side load balancing for for a host of Kafka MQTT consumers. VerneMQ didn't support this feature when we started building the platform. We later migrated to VerneMQ when they started supporting shared subscriptions from version 5.0