HiveMQ
The enterprise MQTT broker built for always-on industrial data streaming at millions of connections.
About
HiveMQ is an enterprise-grade MQTT broker positioned as the messaging backbone for large-scale IoT and industrial data streaming. Its headline spec is a masterless cluster architecture that the vendor benchmarks at 200 million concurrent connections and 1 million messages per second, with 99.999% uptime claims, TLS 1.2/1.3, mutual TLS, pluggable auth (OAuth 2.0, LDAP), and persistent disk storage so messages survive infrastructure failures. Those scale numbers are provider benchmarks, not independently audited.
What sets it apart from a bare broker is the extension ecosystem: Data Hub for validating and transforming data in motion, and native enterprise extensions for Kafka, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Amazon Kinesis, MongoDB, and broker-to-broker bridging. There is also HiveMQ Swarm, a load and reliability testing tool for simulating MQTT workloads at scale. The broker itself is proprietary; the extension SDK and the MQTT CLI are open source. No independent performance benchmark was found, so treat the 200M/1M figures as vendor-reported.
What it can do
- Masterless MQTT cluster architecture with elastic scaling
- TLS 1.2/1.3, mutual TLS, pluggable auth, and audit logging
- Persistent storage with zero-message-loss guarantees across failures
- Data Hub policy and transformation engine for data in motion
- Native extensions: Kafka, Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub, MongoDB, broker bridging
- HiveMQ Swarm load and reliability testing tool
- MQTT 5.0 and 3.1.1 support with shared subscriptions and retained messages
Setup
Deploy the broker as a Docker container or Kubernetes cluster for evaluation; production runs need a licensed HiveMQ deployment with a cluster configuration and certificates.
Prerequisites
An MQTT-capable device fleet; a HiveMQ license for production; Kubernetes or VM infrastructure for clustered deployments.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: hivemq.com documents the clustering, security model, Data Hub, and enterprise extensions; the docs confirm MQTT 5.0 support, the open extension SDK, and the Kafka/PubSub/Kinesis/MongoDB extensions. Strengths: purpose-built for mission-critical industrial IoT, mature extension ecosystem, honest enterprise docs. Docked for: (1) the 200M-connection and 99.999% figures are provider benchmarks with no independent audit found; (2) the broker core is proprietary with enterprise pricing, so small teams pay a real gate; (3) no published independent head-to-head benchmark against EMQX or Mosquitto. License: proprietary (extensions and MQTT CLI open source).
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 9.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 9.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 4.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 9.0/10
- · 200M connections / 1M msgs/sec / 99.999% are provider benchmarks, no independent audit found
- · data hub, kafka/pubsub/kinesis/mongodb extensions confirmed in docs
- · no published independent head-to-head benchmark vs EMQX/Mosquitto
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.