HiveMQ is available in 3 different editions: HiveMQ Enterprise, HiveMQ Professional and HiveMQ Community. The Enterprise and Professional editions are commercially licensed and available for evaluation. HiveMQ CE is available for download under the Apache-2.0 open source license.
HiveMQ Editions Comparison
| Community | Starter | Professional | Enterprise | |
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| MQTT Engine | ||||
| HiveMQ supports all MQTT versions and standards in all editions Out-of-the-Box. Full MQTT 3.1 support |  |
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| Full MQTT 3.1.1 support | |
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| Full MQTT 5 support | |
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| It allows clients that use different MQTT versions to communicate via one broker. This enables subscribers using MQTT 5 to receive a message from publishers that use MQTT 3.1.1 for example. MQTT version compatibility layer | |
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| Enables web clients to use MQTT publish/subscribe in the browser, web apps can take full advantage of highly scalable messaging with a very low bandwidth footprint. Websockets | |
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| Support for both internet protocols. IPv4 & IPv6 | |
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| Support for server side and mutual TLS with versions TLSv1, TLSv1.1, TLSv1.2 and TLSv1.3 TLS / SSL | |
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| Linear and transparent scaling of client subscriptions in order to load balance message processing across multiple workers. The load balancing is facilitated by a smart algorithm that takes the load of subscribing clients into account. Linear Scaling Shared Subscription Sharding |  |
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| epoll is a Linux kernel system that provides better performance in more demanding applications, where the number of watched file descriptors is large. Linux Epoll Support | |
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| The $expired, $dropped and $dead topics enable you to capture "lost" messages to avoid loss of data and improve error analytics and handling capabilities. MQTT Add-ons | |
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| Helps the broker identify connecting clients with their unique IP addresses. Without the Proxy Protocol, the broker cluster will only see the IP address of the intervening load balancer. It’s helpful if clients with unidentifiable ClientIDs connect to a cluster behind a load balancer as the proxy protocol carries over connection information to the broker in this case. Without the proxy protocol the broker would only see the IP of the load balancer. So it helps to identify clients via their source IP address. Proxy Protocol | |
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| Extensions | ||||
| The HiveMQ Marketplace is a catalog of pre-built extensions built by the HiveMQ team and the HiveMQ community. HiveMQ Extension Marketplace | |
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| They provide a rich set of extension interface that can be used to customize various aspects of a MQTT lifecycle including Client settings, Subscription Management, Publish and Retained Message behavior. Additionally, external systems can be integrated and Admin and Cluster services can be managed in a customized fashion. Community Extension SDK | |
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| The Enterprise Extension SDK extends the already large capability set of the Community Extension SDK. It includes advanced features related to Session management, advanced system integration capabilities, inter-extension communication in a cluster. It further allows to extend the REST API and Control Center security. Enterprise Extension SDK | |
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| Extensions running in our commercial editions can be hot reloaded at runtime and therefore allow zero downtime upgrades. Extension Hot Reload | |
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| HiveMQ offers 6 pre-installed Enterprise Extensions that enhance the functionality of the HiveMQ broker. We ensure Enterprise level security via our Enterprise Security Extension, bi-directional MQTT message forwarding via our Enterprise Bridge Extension, and bi-directional integration to the Confluent/Kafka ecosystem via our Enterprise Kafka Extension. Our MQTT broker can now fully integrate with the Google Cloud Platform through our Google PubSub extension. Moreover, our Distributed Tracing extension provides a high-level overview of a data request’s journey without taking a deep dive into individual systems. We also have the Amazon Kinesis extension that can send MQTT data directly to AWS via the Kinesis Data Streams service. HiveMQ Enterprise Extensions | |
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| Clustering | ||||
| The commercial HiveMQ Editions allow you to build a cluster of multiple brokers that support that High Availability with no message loss and Scalability up to thousands and 100s of millions of clients and messages can be achieved. Cluster Support | |
Limited | |
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| A broker cluster can be upgraded in a zero downtime fashion by upgrading cluster nodes one by one. Zero Downtime Upgrades | |
Limited | |
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| Through dynamic auto-discovery mechanisms a cluster can be scaled up and down during runtime without further configuration. Elastic and linear scalability at runtime | |
Limited | |
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| The auto-discovery leverages several discovery providers such as DNS, S3, etc. This gives you the possibility to choose your most favored approach for dynamic cluster discovery. Pluggable Auto-Discovery | |
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| Autoscaling can be leveraged in container environments such as kubernetes. There is a potential tradeoff between scaling triggered by events like resource utilization and the strain it can put on your overall systems (like authentication). Autoscaling support | |
Limited | |
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| It reduces the rate of incoming messages and connection requests from publishing clients that significantly contribute to the overload of a cluster. This mechanism improves the resiliency of a HiveMQ cluster dramatically and allows a cluster to recover itself from stress situations without notable service degradation for most MQTT clients. Cluster Overload Protection | |
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| HiveMQ Control Center | ||||
| The dashboard of the control center provides a clear overview of the current state of the HiveMQ cluster and its system metrics including CPU, Memory and Disk usage and other details. It provides insights on key MQTT relevant metrics such as number of connections and subscriptions, inbound and outbound message throughput, retained messages and queued messages. Notifications inform about latest warnings and errors and lead directly into drill down views to access relevant information quickly. Furthermore the status of your current license can be verified. Real-time monitoring Dashboard | |
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| It gives you a consolidated view of all MQTT sessions from all nodes in your cluster and provides an efficient way to sort, filter, and navigate through all sessions. On click connection, session, security, subscription and historic information and more details of a particular client session can be viewed. Furthermore clients can be disconnected and removed from the broker cluster. MQTT Client Drill-Down Analysis | |
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| It gives you access to all previous events associated with a selected client and makes it easier to monitor and analyze the behavior of a specific client over time and diagnose problems. Client Event History | |
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| The shared-subscription overview provides information for each shared subscription on your HiveMQ cluster. On click details about a shared subscription can be viewed and cross-links lead to clients details of participating clients. Shared Subscription Drill-Down Analysis | |
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| The retained message overview gives you a consolidated view of all retained messages from your cluster. The overview provides an efficient way to sort, filter, and navigate through all retained messages. On click details such as message and user properties, expiry information and payload metadata of a retained message can be examined. Retained Messages Drill-Down Analysis | |
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| Separately available feature. The Enterprise Security Extension provides additional access control capabilities for the HiveMQ Control Center. Through flexible user and role based permissions fine-grained access to every control center capability and information can be granted. User Authentication with Third Party Systems | |
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| Allows you to create backups, import, and migrate data from HiveMQ simply and efficiently. Backups contain all relevant client session data stored in the cluster. You can manage your backups from every available node in your cluster either through UI or Rest API. Backup & Restore | |
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| The analytics functionality.helps to understand situations where messages have been dropped. It thereby provides reason and further details about it and which client or shared subscription has been affected by the dropped message. Advanced Analysis | |
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| Trace Recordings provide the ability to write and download human readable log files. The files are written based on a combination of filters which allows you to select messages of specific clients or topics. This helps finding out what is really happening with a client or on a topic by analysing only specific information from the broker cluster. Trace Recordings | |
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RBAC allows you to restrict user permissions and precisely control which users can view, access, and modify data. RBAC in the HiveMQ Control Center requires the Enterprise Security Extension and is only available in the Enterprise edition of the broker. Role Based Access Control |
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This support function automates data collection so that when your HiveMQ cluster experiences a performance issue, you have all the information that the support team needs to identify the cause and resolve the issue. Diagnostic Archive |
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| Security | ||||
| Support for server side and mutual TLS with versions TLSv1, TLSv1.1, TLSv1.2 and TLSv1.3 TLS / SSL for MQTT | |
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| HiveMQ is built on the concept of extensions that can provide different types of authenticators to authenticate MQTT clients. You can build your own custom authentication extension or make use of our built-in Enterprise Security Extension that provides Basic Auth, SSL Cert or JWT based authentication methods. Pluggable Authentication | |
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| Similarly to the Authentication you can also build custom authorization or make use of our ESE to leverage its flexible and fine grained permission system. Authorization and Permissions | |
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| HiveMQ comes prepackaged with an OpenSSL implementation called BoringSSL which is maintained by Google and can be activated on Linux or MacOS X. The main advantage of using native SSL lies in its increased performance compared to standard JVM SSL and the availability of additional state-of-the-art cipher suites like a stronger AES with GCM, the CHACHA20 stream cipher, and additional cipher suites with elliptic curve algorithms. Native TLS / SSL | |
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| Online Certificate Status Protocol stapling allows the determination of the SSL certificate status by the HiveMQ broker. The broker regularly obtains an OCSP response about its own certificate from the OCSP responder, caches the response and sends it directly to the client in the initial TLS handshake. The client does not have to connect to the OCSP responder directly. This significantly reduces the load on the OCSP responder, since a single request per validity period is sufficient. A request per individual client is no longer necessary. OCSP Stapling | |
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| It provides an encrypted connection between the HiveMQ broker nodes to ensure privacy and data integrity. Anyhow as encryption requires additional computing load, best performances can be achieved by providing a security layer on top of TCP for the cluster, like a secure network zone for the HiveMQ cluster nodes. Secure cluster communication comes into play if such mechanisms are not possible or other individual security/regulation or law related requirements exist. Secure cluster communication with TLS / SSL | |
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| The audit log provides a single, unified log for tracking auditing-relevant data. It allows to access an overview of all actions that are performed and which information was accessed by whom and when. This can satisfy legal and compliance requirements. Furthermore can it be used to secure a HiveMQ cluster via intrusion-prevention software. Audit Logs | |
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| Connection Overload Protection determines the rate of MQTT CONNECT packets that HiveMQ allows per second. This is useful if your deployment makes use of external authentication and/or authorization systems that can only handle a certain average rate of authentications per second. Connection Overload Protection | |
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| The Handshake Overload Protection defines number of concurrent SSL handshake operations which can be used as an overload protection for the broker during bulk (re)-connection scenarios. Handshake Overload Protection | |
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| Monitoring | ||||
| HiveMQ exposes a large set of MQTT related metrics including throughput in amounts and bytes and rates, counts and bytes per different MQTT message type. This enables you to monitor the health of your central MQTT messaging platform and to proactively identify anomalies, bottlenecks and other technical issues. MQTT Message Metrics | |
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| One option to expose the HiveMQ metrics is the usage of the Java Management Extensions (JMX) which enables the integration into a large set of JMX based Java monitoring tools. JMX Monitoring | |
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| In our Extension Marketplace we offer several open source monitoring extensions to seamlessly integrate into the most popular monitoring systems such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, or Datadog and leverage the large set of metrics that are exposed. We also offer a commercial extension into Splunk. Open Source Monitoring Extensions | |
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| HiveMQ offers more than 800 additional Monitoring metrics that allow you monitor the additional capabilities of our commercial editions, examples are metrics of the cluster communication or our cluster overload protection. These metrics extend the set of MQTT related metrics. 800+ Monitoring Metrics | |
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| We provide prebuilt Grafana Dashboards that visualise the populated metrics in either Prometheus or InfluxDB. These dashboards can be extended to your needs. Grafana Dashboards | |
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| Tools | ||||
| The HiveMQ REST API provides an interface for applications to interact programmatically with the HiveMQ Enterprise MQTT broker. REST API | |
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| The Operator is a controller that allows DevOps to easily orchestrate, automate and manage the lifecycle of multiple HiveMQ cluster deployments within Kubernetes (platform agnostic). It allows you to monitor, maintain, recover, and upgrade your HiveMQ application with ease. K8s Operator | |
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| The HiveMQ command line interface allows to export all clients known to a HiveMQ broker cluster from an API endpoint. MQTT CLI - Client Export | |
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| Enterprise Extensions | ||||
| Separately available feature. The Enterprise Extension for Kafka provides scalable, secure and reliable bidirectional message transfer between HiveMQ and Apache Kafka. It supports both Apache Kafka and the Confluent platform and is based on the native Kafka protocol implementation including Avro Schema Validation. Using the Kafka Extension SDK message validation, transformation etc. can be added to fit your use case. Enterprise Extension for Kafka | |
Limited | |
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| Separately available feature. The Enterprise Bridge Extension provides scalable, secure and reliable bidirectional message transfer between multiple MQTT broker clusters. Thereby only specific topics can be bridged via flexible topic in- and exclusion filters (including wildcards). Enterprise Bridge Extension | |
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| Separately available feature. The Enterprise Security Extension provides HiveMQ integration with third party enterprise security systems, fine-grained authorization rules that can specify permissions for specific (groups of) clients, and a structured access log for tracking security related device information. Enterprise Security Extension | |
Limited | |
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| Separately available feature. Our MQTT broker can now fully integrate with the Google Cloud Platform through our Google PubSub extension to ingest data directly into existing Google Cloud pipelines, circumventing Google IoT Core. It also features bi-directional data transformation, and multiple project authentication. Enterprise Extension for Google Cloud Pub / Sub | |
Limited | |
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| Separately available feature. The Distributed Tracing extension provides a high-level overview of a data request’s journey without taking a deep dive into complex individual systems. It helps troubleshooters know where they should start looking when an issue occurs. Enterprise Extension for Distributed Tracing | |
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| Separately available feature.The Amazon Kinesis Extension allows you to quickly move your MQTT data from the broker into your AWS infrastructure using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Enterprise Extension for Amazon Kinesis | |
Limited | |
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| Separately available feature. This extension integrates MQTT data with MongoDB, unlocking the full potential of IoT data analytics. It supports SCRAM authentication, Connection URIs, TLS encryption, and a fully customizable templating system. Enterprise Extension for MongoDB | |
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| Separately available feature. This extension integrates MQTT data with PostgreSQL for secure storage and analysis. Features customizable message templates and secures data with TLS encryption. Enterprise Extension for PostgreSQL | |
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| Separately available feature. This extension integrates MQTT data with MySQL for secure storage and analysis. Features customizable message templates and secures data with TLS encryption. Enterprise Extension for MySQL | |
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| Software License | ||||
| License | Apache-2.0 | Commercial | Commercial | |
| Technical Support | ||||
| The HiveMQ Community Edition is supported by our Community Forum. The Professional Edition is supported by our support team via mail, support portal, video, telephone through either 8/5 CET or 24/7 support. The Enterprise Edition comes automatically with 24/7 supportSupport | Community Forum | Business Hours | Up to 24/7 Support | 24/7 Support |
| OSS Project Page |