A new chapter for the HiveMQ broker: What the HiveMQ 4.55 LTS means for your business

Why this release matters to your team

Since HiveMQ 4.28 LTS, our engineering teams have shipped a steady stream of feature releases. Each one adding capability to the platform you rely on. HiveMQ 4.55 LTS brings that work together into a single long-term supported version. 

This is the release your organization can standardize on, certify against, and plan a multi-year roadmap around with confidence.

Customers tell us the same moments matter: planning an upgrade, preparing for a security review, tuning a cluster, or scaling a new integration. Those conversations shape HiveMQ 4.55 LTS, and it delivers a clear result:

A platform built to last

The new 4.55 LTS is certified to run on Java 25, itself a long-term supported release of the JVM. Core libraries across the platform are refreshed, including Netty and Jetty. Java 21remains the minimum requirement for the JVM.

Pairing a HiveMQ LTS with a JVM LTS is a deliberate choice. The foundation of your deployment stays current and supported for the full life of the release. Your team avoids a separate runtime migration partway through.

This release also removes components that were deprecated or superseded in earlier releases:

• The legacy Control Center (v1)

• Older persistence and compatibility layers

• Extension SDK methods deprecated in earlier releases

The result is a platform that is simpler to operate, faster to validate in your environment, and easier to support.

Enhanced day-to-day experience

One modern Control Center

Control Center v2 is now the single interface for managing HiveMQ. It replaces the legacy Control Center entirely and adds the following capabilities:

• A full-featured MQTT client search dashboard

• Up to 72 hours of metrics in the monitoring dashboards

• Flexible Self-Serve license management

• Full Data Hub management, covering policies, schemas, scripts, and modules

• Audit logging for administrative actions

• Dozens of refinements shaped directly by customer feedback

Visibility your team can act on

HiveMQ 4.55 LTS gives your team significantly more insight into how their deployment performs:

• Memory usage, CPU usage, and disk usage, visible on a dashboard

• Traffic throttling and backpressure queuing, shown directly rather than inferred

• 72 hours of metrics available in the overview

• Expanded diagnostic information available for support

Conditions that once required a support ticket to investigate can now be surveyed on a dashboard. The diagnostic archive is also more complete. The enhanced archive bundles configuration, system data, and metrics together, so that on the rare occasion your team does need support, we reach an answer in a single round trip.

Confidence for your security and compliance teams

Security is rarely the reason a customer is excited about a release, but it is often the reason a release gets approved. This one gives your security stakeholders a great deal to work with:

Recurring themes from support conversations, such as bridge connections without hostname verification, are now handled by default. Your team no longer has to catch them.

If your organization runs a formal review before approving broker upgrades, this release is built to support that conversation.

Room to grow your integrations

Many of our customers connect HiveMQ into a broader data architecture, whether that includes Kafka, a data lake, or databases. HiveMQ 4.55 strengthens those connections:

• Kafka configuration validated at startup. Structural mistakes are caught immediately, instead of surfacing days later as a mystery in production, one of the most common patterns we see in support cases.

• Up-to-date Kafka client libraries, with tuning defaults refreshed to match.

• Stronger delivery guarantees for data written to data lakes.

• Enhanced Kubernetes operations, through recent Platform Operator and Helm chart releases.

• A new MSSQL database extension (added in 4.33)

• A new Enterprise Security Extension customization SDK to provide more flexibility for your authentication and authorization use cases

The practical effect: fewer surprises as you scale, and a more solid foundation for your next use case.

Making the move

Upgrading is supported directly from any 4.28.x LTS version or from any newer version starting with 4.29:

1. Read the HiveMQ 4.28 (LTS) to 4.55 (LTS) migration guide and HiveMQ 4.55 release notes for changes to consider before you upgrade.

2. Review custom extensions against the current HiveMQ Enterprise Extension SDK.

3. Test your deployment in a staging environment that mirrors production, with a realistic workload, not just a clean startup.

4. Roll forward using the rolling upgrade procedure

Naturally, if your team has questions along the way, our Customer Support team is always ready to help.

We are proud of this release, and look forward to making the move with you.