HiveMQ and EMQX are both clustered, enterprise-grade MQTT brokers, and both show up a lot as the backbone of a Unified Namespace. The real differences are in licensing, how pricing is published, and what sits around the MQTT core.
Open-source option
- HiveMQ has a Community Edition: Java-based, Apache-2.0, with full MQTT 3.x and 5 support.
- EMQX moved to a single edition under the Business Source License 1.1 in v5.9.0. Production use on a single node is free, and each version converts to Apache-2.0 after four years.
Pricing (as of Oct 2026)
- HiveMQ self-managed publishes fixed monthly prices: a free Lab license (1 broker, 25 connections, 30 days, renewable at no charge), Launch at US$299/month (10,000 connections, 500 msg/s) and Run at US$499/month (10,000 connections, 1,000 msg/s). Enterprise is priced by connections and throughput.
- EMQX self-managed Enterprise is an annual, custom-priced subscription, with free PoC trials on request.
- Managed cloud: HiveMQ Starter runs from US$0.34/hour plus US$0.80 per million messages (10,000 connections, 1 MB/s, 99.95% SLA). EMQX Serverless starts at US$0/month for up to 1,000 connections (99.9% SLA), and Dedicated Flex starts at US$234/month (99.99% SLA).
Clustering and protocols
- HiveMQ uses dynamic, masterless clustering with no single point of failure, and cites vendor benchmarks of 200M concurrent connections and 1M messages/s. It speaks MQTT 3.1, 3.1.1 and 5 over TCP, TLS and WebSockets.
- EMQX has masterless clustering plus Cluster Linking, and the project cites 100M+ concurrent clients in one cluster. Beyond MQTT 5.0, 3.1.1 and 3.1 it adds MQTT over QUIC and gateways for MQTT-SN, CoAP and LwM2M.
Integrations and data governance
- HiveMQ includes Kafka and Amazon Kinesis on Starter; Google Pub/Sub, MongoDB, MySQL, Snowflake, data lake and bridge integrations are on Enterprise, along with Unified Namespace creation and governance and in-stream transformation.
- EMQX lists 50+ integrations (for example Kafka, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and InfluxDB), a SQL rule engine and Flow Designer, plus Smart Data Hub for schema registry, validation and message transformation.
Quick fit check
Consider HiveMQ if you want published fixed monthly prices for a self-managed broker or an Apache-2.0 community edition, or you're building a governed UNS and want that tooling from the broker vendor.
Consider EMQX if you want a free managed tier to start, need CoAP, LwM2M, MQTT-SN or MQTT over QUIC next to MQTT, or a single production node under BSL plus a built-in rule engine covers you.
These are our editorial reading of the sourced facts, not a recommendation. The full table with every source link is on PlantWired: HiveMQ vs EMQX. Related: EMQX vs Mosquitto, HiveMQ vs Mosquitto, MQTT Sparkplug B explained, and The Unified Namespace (UNS) stack, explained with real tools.
Our data comes from public vendor and project pages and surely has gaps. If you run either in production and something's off, tell us in the comments and we'll fix it.
PlantWired is a free, vendor-neutral map of factory software. A short weekly brief on new integrations is at plantwired.vercel.app.
Top comments (0)