ActiveMQ vs Redis: What are the differences?

What is ActiveMQ? A message broker written in Java together with a full JMS client. Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

What is Redis? An in-memory database that persists on disk. Redis is an open source, BSD licensed, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.

ActiveMQ and Redis are primarily classified as "Message Queue" and "In-Memory Databases" tools respectively.

"Open source" is the primary reason why developers consider ActiveMQ over the competitors, whereas "Performance" was stated as the key factor in picking Redis.

ActiveMQ and Redis are both open source tools. Redis with 37.1K GitHub stars and 14.3K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than ActiveMQ with 1.49K GitHub stars and 1.04K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Redis has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3239 company stacks & 1732 developers stacks; compared to ActiveMQ, which is listed in 33 company stacks and 17 developer stacks.