HiveMQ

Enterprise MQTT broker for industrial IoT with a published self-managed price list

As of 31 August 2026, HiveMQ has a free plan and paid plans start at $299/month. A Java MQTT broker built for large device fleets, notable in this category for publishing self-managed prices at all. Softwr lists it under Networking. HiveMQ is available on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web.

Visit siteVisit HiveMQ

Overview

What HiveMQ does

HiveMQ is an MQTT broker aimed at connected vehicles, industrial equipment and utilities: the workloads where hundreds of thousands of intermittently connected devices need persistent sessions, quality of service guarantees and message ordering. It clusters natively, supports MQTT 3.1.1 and 5, and has an extension framework for authentication, authorisation and bridging into Kafka, databases and enterprise systems. HiveMQ Data Hub adds schema validation and policy enforcement so a malformed payload from one device fleet does not poison downstream consumers. The fact worth checking early is the split between editions. HiveMQ Community Edition is Apache 2.0 and implements the MQTT specification, but clustering, persistence extensions, the control centre, the enterprise security extension, Kafka bridging and Data Hub are all commercial. Teams that prototype on the Community Edition and assume the production path is a support contract on the same software are wrong: it is a different binary with different capabilities. Pricing is unusually transparent for enterprise middleware. Self-managed Launch is 299 US dollars a month for 10,000 connections and 500 messages a second, Run is 499 for 10,000 connections and 1,000 messages a second, and Enterprise is priced by connections plus throughput for multi-broker and multi-site deployments. That means a mid-size IoT project can be budgeted without a sales call, which is not true of the commercial alternatives.

What people use it for

A connected vehicle fleet where devices drop off the network for hours and sessions must survive
An industrial plant bridging MQTT telemetry into Kafka without writing and operating the bridge
A utility that needs message-level schema validation so one faulty firmware release cannot corrupt the data lake
An IoT project that needs a self-managed broker price for a budget submission without entering a sales process

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about HiveMQ.

The Community Edition lacks clustering, persistence extensions, the control centre and all enterprise bridges, so a prototype built on it does not become production by buying support.
The entry commercial tiers cap at ten thousand connections, and device fleets grow, so the step to Enterprise capacity pricing arrives sooner than most projects plan for.
It is a JVM application, so memory tuning and garbage collection behaviour become the operator’s problem at high connection counts, unlike the C-based brokers in this space.
Extensions are written in Java against HiveMQ’s SPI, which means custom authentication logic is locked to the platform and cannot move to another broker.
For simple use cases it is substantially heavier and more expensive than Mosquitto or EMQX, and small deployments frequently pay enterprise prices for clustering they never use.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of HiveMQ

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

HiveMQvs
MQTT
MQTT: MQTT as a protocol if you are choosing a standard rather than a specific broker implementation.
HiveMQvs
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka: Apache Kafka if the workload is server-to-server event streaming rather than intermittently connected devices.
HiveMQvs
RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ: RabbitMQ if you need several messaging protocols including MQTT and already run it for other queues.

Pricing

What HiveMQ costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Community Edition

Free

Apache 2.0 licence
MQTT 3.1.1 and 5 support
Single broker, no clustering
No enterprise extensions, control centre or Data Hub
Community support

Launch

$299 /mo

Ten thousand connections
Five hundred messages per second
Single broker deployment
Clustering, TLS and authentication
Data Hub included
Community support level

Run

$499 /mo

Ten thousand connections
One thousand messages per second
Single broker deployment
All enterprise extensions and Data Hub
Silver support

Enterprise

On request

Priced by connections and throughput
Multi-broker and multi-site deployments
Distributed data intelligence
Silver, Gold or Platinum support
Custom limits

Capabilities

Features

MQTT 5 and 3.1.1
Full specification support including shared subscriptions and session expiry
Native clustering
Elastic broker clusters with masterless replication for persistent sessions
Data Hub
Schema validation and policy enforcement on messages at the broker
Extension framework
Java SPI for custom authentication, authorisation and message interception
Enterprise bridges
Managed extensions to Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, PostgreSQL and Google Pub/Sub
Control centre
Operational console for connection, throughput and client diagnostics

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is HiveMQ free?

The Community Edition is Apache 2.0 and free, but it has no clustering and none of the enterprise extensions.

What does the commercial version cost?

Self-managed Launch is 299 US dollars a month for ten thousand connections; Run is 499 with higher throughput.

Does it support MQTT 5?

Yes, both MQTT 5 and 3.1.1, including shared subscriptions and session expiry intervals.

Can it bridge into Kafka?

Yes, via a commercial enterprise extension, not in the Community Edition.

Keep looking

Where to go from HiveMQ

Best Networking software for

Compare HiveMQ with

Other Networking software

Eclipse Mosquitto
Small, EPL-licensed MQTT broker that runs on hardware other brokers cannot
Open source12 researched notes
Catchpoint
Internet and digital experience monitoring, with a genuinely published entry price through its WebPageTest product line
Free plan11 researched notes
Domotz
Network monitoring for MSPs and IT teams priced per managed device or per collector, with published rates
12 researched notes
NetBird
Open source WireGuard mesh VPN with identity based access policies and a hosted control plane
Free plan12 researched notes
pfSense
Open source firewall software with a free Community Edition and a separate commercial Plus edition sold by Netgate
Open source12 researched notes
Auvik
Cloud-based network monitoring and management priced by managed device count, quote-only
Pricing on request12 researched notes
Zabbix
Open source infrastructure and network monitoring with distributed proxies and templating
Open source10 researched notes
Ivanti
Security, service management, and unified endpoint management
Pricing on request6 researched notes
Cisco Meraki
Cloud-managed networking hardware where the licence is mandatory and the hardware stops passing traffic if it lapses
Pricing on request12 researched notes
Kentik
Network observability platform built on flow and traffic data, sold on annual-only contracts starting around $24,000/year
12 researched notes
LibreNMS
Free, community-driven network monitoring with commercial support sold by a third-party partner, not the project itself
Open source11 researched notes
OpenVPN
Open source VPN protocol with a commercial Access Server product priced per simultaneous connection
Open source12 researched notes
Icinga
Open source infrastructure monitoring, free at its core, with paid support and modules sold separately by Icinga GmbH
Open source11 researched notes
MikroTik RouterOS
Router and network operating system with a one-time perpetual licence rather than a recurring subscription
12 researched notes
Ubiquiti UniFi
Effortlessly manage 100+ APs in the same way you manage an individual AP
6 researched notes
Catchpoint
Internet and digital experience monitoring, with a genuinely published entry price through its WebPageTest product line
Free plan11 researched notes
LibreNMS
Free, community-driven network monitoring with commercial support sold by a third-party partner, not the project itself
Open source11 researched notes
OpenVPN
Open source VPN protocol with a commercial Access Server product priced per simultaneous connection
Open source12 researched notes

Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for HiveMQ, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

Best Networking software alternatives

View all Networking software