Mosquitto vs EMQX — An Honest Comparison for IoT Teams

Mosquitto vs EMQX: Which MQTT Broker Fits Your Needs?

Mosquitto is the global open-source standard for MQTT — lightweight, proven, and trusted everywhere. With the Cedalo MQTT Platform, you get Mosquitto plus enterprise-ready clustering, security, and support.

Both Mosquitto and EMQX are leading MQTT brokers for IoT and Industry 4.0.

Mosquitto — developed and maintained by Cedalo, the original creators — is the world’s most trusted open-source MQTT broker, powering millions of connected devices and systems.

With the Cedalo MQTT Platform, you get that same proven Mosquitto technology — enhanced with enterprise-grade clustering, security, management, and professional support.

EMQX, in contrast, provides an MQTT platform optimized for centralized, large-scale deployments.

This page helps you understand the differences — so you can choose the MQTT solution that best fits your architecture, scale, and strategy.

Why This Comparison Matters

Choosing an MQTT broker will shape your IoT architecture for years to come. The decision affects:

• 💰 Cost → Infrastructure footprint, licensing fees, and long-term TCO.
• ⚡ Performance → How reliably and efficiently data flows between devices.
• 📈 Scalability → Ability to grow from hundreds to millions of connections.
• 🔒 Control → Avoiding vendor lock-in and keeping your roadmap open.
• 🏭 Deployment Flexibility → Edge, cloud, hybrid — does the broker fit all environments?
• 👥 Community & Support → Open-source adoption vs. vendor dependency.
• 🛡️ Security & Compliance → Meeting enterprise requirements without complexity.

Most evaluations narrow down to Mosquitto vs EMQX. Both are widely known in the MQTT space. But their design focus — and what they mean for your business — are very different.

Deployment Architecture and Scalability

For extremely large-scale, centralized use cases that require hundreds of millions of clients to connect to a single broker cluster, EMQX’s architecture is designed and tested for such deployments and environments.

By Contrast, Cedalo’s Mosquitto and enterprise platform excel at deployments up to 10 million clients per cluster and are ideally suited for distributed, multi-cluster, and/or edge-centric architectures. This flexibility provides organizations with resource efficiency and operational agility across enterprise and embedded IoT rollouts.

Where EMQX Focuses

EMQX positions itself as an enterprise MQTT broker. Its advertised strengths include:

• ⚙️ Clustering and high availability for very large deployments.
• 📊 Enterprise integrations with Kafka, databases, and analytics.
• 📞 Vendor-backed SLAs and contracts.
• 🔍 Monitoring dashboards out of the box.

These are compelling features — all of which the Cedalo MQTT Platform offers as well: clustering, high availability, integrations, observability, and enterprise support.

The difference?

• With EMQX, you get the full stack to scale to 200 million connections from day one — along with the associated cost and complexity.
• With Mosquitto Pro, you get a lean broker that stays efficient at the edge, and allows you to scale to high performance and enterprise features only when you actually need them.

For most organizations, that balance is far more practical. You avoid lock-in, reduce overhead, and still cover every enterprise scenario.

The Trade-Offs with EMQX

When considering EMQX, it’s important to weigh the trade-offs:

• 💰 Higher Costs → Expensive licenses and heavier infrastructure requirements raise TCO.
• ⚡ Complexity from Day One → Enterprise features bundled in – even for smaller projects.
• 🔒 Vendor Lock-In → Reliance on one vendor limits flexibility and increases users´ dependence.
• 🏢 Datacenter-Centric Design → Optimized for centralized infrastructure ready to take on use cases with 100 millions of clients, but not for distributed or edge deployments.

For certain use cases and companies, these trade-offs make sense and are the right path for their IoT strategy.

But for many, EMQX means paying for features you don’t need and carrying complexity you didn’t ask for.

Cedalo MQTT Platform: Mosquitto for Enterprise

With Cedalo, you don’t need to choose between lightweight and enterprise. You get both.

• ✅ High Availability & Clustering
• ✅ Enterprise Security (RBAC, OAuth2, Audit Trails)
• ✅ Management Center for managing and monitoring Mosquitto setups via UI and APIs
• ✅ Data Integrations (Kafka, databases, and more)
• ✅ Commercial Support & SLAs

The Cedalo MQTT Platform doesn’t just extend Pro Mosquitto. It also lets you monitor and manage your open-source Mosquitto brokers — giving teams a single pane of glass for both OS and enterprise deployments.

👉 Mosquitto gives you efficiency, ubiquity, and openness.

👉 Cedalo adds enterprise-grade features for scale, compliance, and long-term growth.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Where Mosquitto Excels

Mosquitto has been the backbone of MQTT for over a decade. As an Eclipse Foundation project, it is transparent, open source, and trusted by millions worldwide. The Cedalo MQTT Platform and Pro Mosquitto build on this strong base and make it enterprise-ready.

✅ Lightweight & Resource Efficient

Built on the proven Mosquitto core, Pro Mosquitto runs on gateways, routers, Raspberry Pis, and other constrained devices — while also scaling to clustered enterprise deployments. EMQX’s main broker is tied to server-class machines, adding overhead.

✅ Simple to Use

Installation and configuration are quick and intuitive. With the Cedalo MQTT Platform, Pro Mosquitto adds an easy-to-use UI for monitoring and control. EMQX assumes complex enterprise setups from the start, which often slows adoption.

✅ Open & Trusted

The core Mosquitto is fully open source under EPL/EDL and an Eclipse project — transparent, trusted, and free from vendor lock-in. The Eclipse Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organization that acts as a steward of open source software development community — transparent, trusted, and free from vendor lock-in.

✅ Ubiquity & Community

Every developer knows Mosquitto. It’s available in Linux repos, Docker images, and IoT SDKs — often preinstalled in IoT stacks. Pro Mosquitto keeps that ubiquity and adds the professional features needed for serious usage.

✅ Debugging & Testing

Mosquitto is the de facto standard for prototyping, CI/CD, and testing MQTT setups. With Pro Mosquitto, you can take the same trusted broker into production, with high availability and enterprise support.

✅ Edge & Distributed

Pro Mosquitto retains the lightweight footprint of the open-source core, running reliably on small devices and in offline or remote environments. At the same time, it scales to high-performance clusters for enterprise workloads. EMQX remains more datacenter-focused.

✅ Enterprise Value

Cedalo is not only developing and curating the open source Mosquitto but also enhancing it for enterprise success with Pro Mosquitto. The professional edition adds clustering, enterprise-grade security, management tools, diverse integrations, commercial SLAs, and more.

What It Means for You

• 👔 Business leaders → Keep infrastructure and licensing costs under control while accessing all enterprise features your team requires. Build on the world’s most trusted open-source foundation, without the risk of vendor lock-in. The Cedalo MQTT Platform gives you both predictability and freedom.
• 💻 Engineers → Use the broker you already know and trust. Mosquitto is familiar, simple to deploy, and with Pro Mosquitto you get everything else you need – clustering, monitoring, and integrations without changing tools.
• 🤝 Customer success teams → Deliver stable deployments with fewer escalations. A lightweight core – used and continuously tested by millions – plus enterprise reliability means happier customers and less firefighting.
• 🏢 Enterprises → Get clustering, high availability, security, and SLAs — but without the unnecessary overhead of heavyweight stacks. Scale only when and where you need to.

Final Guidance

• 👉 If you need a broker that is lightweight, open, and proven, start with Mosquitto.
• 👉 If you need those strengths plus clustering, security, and support, choose Cedalo MQTT Platform.
• 👉 If your scenario truly demands a centralized broker cluster for hundreds of millions of clients, EMQX may fit well.

In practice, for most scenarios, Mosquitto and Cedalo’s platform provide the optimal mix of flexibility, cost, and freedom.

Mosquitto is the global standard. Cedalo makes it enterprise-ready.

Together, they deliver the most pragmatic, cost-effective, and future-proof MQTT platform on the market.