Solace
Event streaming and messaging middleware company
Solace is a company that builds event streaming and messaging middleware, best known for its PubSub+ platform, which provides message brokers supporting multiple protocols (AMQP, MQTT, JMS, REST) for connecting applications, devices, and…
Definition
Solace is a company that builds event streaming and messaging middleware, best known for its PubSub+ platform, which provides message brokers supporting multiple protocols (AMQP, MQTT, JMS, REST) for connecting applications, devices, and cloud services in real time. Its products are used to move event data reliably across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments, competing in the same enterprise messaging space as IBM MQ, RabbitMQ, and Apache Kafka-based platforms.
Overview
Solace exists to help organizations move event data reliably between systems that were not built to talk to each other directly — legacy mainframes, modern microservices, IoT devices, and cloud services — without forcing every one of them onto the same protocol or vendor stack. Its flagship offering, PubSub+, is a message broker designed from the outset to be protocol-agnostic, letting a device speaking MQTT and a backend service speaking AMQP exchange messages through the same broker without custom bridging code. This multi-protocol design differentiates Solace from single-protocol systems and has made it a common choice in industries with heterogeneous device and application landscapes, such as financial trading, logistics, and automotive. Mechanically, the PubSub+ broker accepts and delivers messages over several wire protocols simultaneously, translating between them internally so a publisher and subscriber using different protocols can still communicate. Brokers can be deployed as software, hardware appliances, or managed cloud services (PubSub+ Cloud), and can be linked together into an event mesh, a network of interconnected brokers spanning on-premises data centers, multiple cloud providers, and edge locations, so that an event published in one location can be routed automatically to subscribers anywhere in the mesh. Solace also provides an event portal for cataloging and governing event schemas and topic hierarchies across an organization, addressing the discoverability problem that grows as event-driven architectures scale. Within the broader event streaming landscape, Solace differs from Apache Kafka in emphasis: Kafka centers on durable, replayable logs optimized for stream processing and analytics, while Solace's PubSub+ centers on flexible, protocol-agnostic message routing and real-time delivery guarantees suited to operational integration across diverse systems. Many organizations run both, using Kafka for analytical and log-based pipelines and Solace for cross-protocol operational messaging, sometimes bridging the two directly since Solace offers Kafka connectivity. In practice, Solace is deployed for use cases like distributing market data and trade events in financial services, connecting IoT sensor networks in logistics and manufacturing, and building event meshes that span multiple cloud providers for organizations avoiding single-cloud lock-in. Its event portal is used specifically to give architecture teams visibility into what events exist across a growing microservices landscape before it becomes unmanageable. The trade-offs center on cost and specialization. Solace's licensing, particularly for its appliance and enterprise broker tiers, tends to be more expensive than open-source alternatives like RabbitMQ, and organizations whose needs are purely log-based streaming and analytics are usually better served by Kafka or a managed Kafka service rather than PubSub+. Solace's strength — protocol flexibility and event mesh routing — matters most when an organization genuinely has heterogeneous systems to connect, not in a homogeneous, single-protocol environment.
Key Features
- PubSub+ broker supports AMQP, MQTT, JMS, and REST simultaneously
- Deployable as software, hardware appliance, or managed cloud service
- Event mesh links brokers across clouds, data centers, and edge
- Event Portal for cataloging and governing event schemas and topics
- Protocol translation lets mismatched clients communicate through one broker
- Kafka connectivity for bridging operational and analytical event pipelines
- Real-time delivery guarantees suited to operational integration
- Used across financial services, logistics, and IoT deployments