Eclipse Mosquitto vs IronMQ

Eclipse Mosquitto is a free, open-source message broker for MQTT 5.0, 3.1.1 and 3.1. It uses publish/subscribe messaging, a pattern suited to connected devices such as sensors, phones, embedded computers and microcontrollers. The project describes it as lightweight, with applications from low-power single-board computers to full servers. Mosquitto runs on Linux, macOS, Windows and self-hosted environments. The project also provides a C library for MQTT clients and the mosquitto_pub and mosquitto_sub command-line tools. MQTT and MQTT over WebSockets are supported, and delivery guarantees are configurable. A public test server offers plain MQTT, TLS, client-certificate TLS and WebSocket options. The project lists manufacturing, healthcare, automotive and smart-home systems among broker application areas. Community support is best effort through GitHub, a mailing list, Matrix and Cedalo forums. Cedalo offers hosted or on-premises instances, consulting and custom development.

IronMQ is a persistent message queue for communication between services and components in distributed applications. It supports push and pull queues, long polling, error queues, alerts, and triggers, as well as dead-letter queues and ordering within each queue. Delivery is described as best-effort and one-time, a behavior application teams should account for in message handling. Its HTTPS and REST-based APIs support HTTP/REST, Amazon SQS, and OpenStack Marconi protocols. During an outage, queues can automatically point to alternative availability zones without code changes. Deployment options include shared, dedicated, and on-premise environments. Documentation lists client libraries for Go, Ruby,.NET, Java, PHP, Python, Node, and Rust, plus community-supported Apache Camel and Clojure libraries. Iron.io says OAuth and SSL protect data in transit, and recommends client-side encryption for especially sensitive payloads at rest. The free Basic plan includes 100K API requests per month, limited queues, and a 64k message size limit. Entry costs $399 a month; a full-feature 14-day trial is offered for non-dedicated clusters.