Ably vs HiveMQ
On the evidence we track, Ably leads this comparison with a composite score of 74/100. Scores are only directly comparable because these tools share a category; the full breakdown and every source is below.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for realtime messaging infra. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
Ably
LeaderA distributed messaging platform for building interactive features like chat, notifications, and collaboration. Provides fault-tolerant message delivery with guaranteed ordering, automatic network recovery, and multi-region redundancy.
HiveMQ
HiveMQ is a real-time data streaming platform built on MQTT that provides reliable, high-performance connectivity for industrial systems and AI applications. It supports both fully-managed cloud deployments and self-hosted installations, enabling enterprises to move operational data reliably at enterprise scale.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Ably
LeaderFree tier available. Paid plans start at $29/month with per-million message and channel minute billing.
- FreeFree
- All Ably products included
- Community and email support
- No commitment
- Standard$29/month plus usage charges
- 1 day email support SLA
- Pro$399/month plus usage charges
- 4 hour email support SLA
- Datadog lite monitoring
- EnterpriseContact sales
- 24/7 mission critical support
- 99.999% uptime SLA
- Committed use discounts
- Datadog integration
- SSO and SCIM
- +4 more
HiveMQ
Free tier available. Starter from $0.34/hour + $0.80/million messages. Enterprise custom.
- Serverless FreeFree
- 100 connections
- 10 GB/month throughput
- Shared MQTT broker
- TLS encryption
- RBAC
- +2 more
- Starter$0.34/hour + $0.80/million messages; 15-day free trial
- Production-ready MQTT with clustering and high availability
- 1 MB/sec max throughput
- 10,000 connections
- TLS encryption, authentication, advanced authorization
- Data Streaming Extensions
- +2 more
- EnterpriseContact sales
- Complete HiveMQ Platform
- Custom connection and throughput limits
- Distributed Data Intelligence
- Agentic AI for Operations (coming soon)
- Up to 99.99% uptime SLA
- +2 more
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
- Kafka
Ably
Leader- AWS Lambda
- Microsoft Azure Functions
- Google Cloud Functions
- Cloudflare Workers
- AWS Kinesis
- RabbitMQ
- AMQP
- AWS SQS
- Pulsar
- Zapier
- IFTTT
- Datadog
- BigQuery
- Terraform
- Netlify
- HTTP Webhooks
HiveMQ
- Amazon Kinesis
- AWS CloudWatch
- Prometheus
- Graphite
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.