HiveMQ and Eclipse Mosquitto both speak MQTT 5, 3.1.1 and 3.1, and both have a free open-source broker. They sit at opposite ends of the scale, though: Mosquitto is a small broker that runs almost anywhere, while HiveMQ is a clustered enterprise broker with published prices.
Open-source option
- HiveMQ has a Community Edition: Java-based, Apache-2.0, with full MQTT 3.x and 5 support.
- Mosquitto is open source as a whole, under EPL-2.0 or EDL-1.0 (SPDX: EPL-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause).
Pricing (as of Oct 2026)
- HiveMQ self-managed publishes 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.
- HiveMQ Cloud Starter runs from US$0.34/hour plus US$0.80 per million messages (10,000 connections, 1 MB/s, 99.95% SLA).
- Mosquitto is free. Cedalo sells a Pro Edition, hosted or on-prem instances and consulting, and mosquitto.org lists no prices. The open-source project has no managed tier of its own.
Clustering and footprint
- HiveMQ uses dynamic, masterless clustering with no single point of failure, and cites vendor benchmarks of 200M concurrent connections and 1M messages/s. It's built for clustered server deployments, self-managed or in HiveMQ Cloud.
- Mosquitto is lightweight and runs on anything from a low-power single-board computer to a full server. Bridges connect brokers together; high availability is a feature of Cedalo's Pro Edition.
Protocols and integrations
- HiveMQ speaks MQTT over TCP, TLS and WebSockets. Kafka and Amazon Kinesis come with Starter; Google Pub/Sub, MongoDB, MySQL, Snowflake, data lake and bridge integrations are on Enterprise.
- Mosquitto offers listeners for MQTT, MQTT over WebSockets or an HTTP API. Core MQTT features are open source; integrations, REST APIs and persistent queuing are in the Pro Edition.
Getting started
- HiveMQ: the free Lab license for one self-managed broker, or the Community Edition.
- Mosquitto: installers for Windows, Homebrew on macOS, and snap on Linux and Raspberry Pi, plus a public test broker at test.mosquitto.org.
Quick fit check
Pick HiveMQ if you need a clustered broker with no single point of failure and published prices you can budget for, or you want Kafka, Kinesis or database integrations and UNS governance from the broker vendor.
Pick Mosquitto if you want a small, permissively licensed broker for a pilot, an edge gateway or a single-board computer, and one broker or a few bridged brokers is enough (or you'll buy Cedalo's Pro Edition when you need HA).
The full side-by-side table with every source link is on PlantWired: HiveMQ vs Mosquitto. Related: HiveMQ vs EMQX, EMQX vs Mosquitto, MQTT Sparkplug B explained, and The Unified Namespace (UNS) stack, explained with real tools.
Our data comes from public project and vendor pages and surely has gaps. If you run either in production and something's wrong, 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.
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