The ActiveMQ project was originally created by its founders from LogicBlaze[4] in 2004, as an open source message broker, hosted by CodeHaus.

[6][7] Artemis is a multi-protocol, embeddable, high performance, clustered, asynchronous messaging system.

ActiveMQ supports a horizontal scaling mechanism called a Network of Brokers[11] out of the box.

ActiveMQ supports a number of transport protocols, including OpenWire, STOMP, MQTT, AMQP, REST, and WebSockets.

[17] Coinciding with the release of Apache ActiveMQ 5.3, the world's first results for the SPECjms2007 industry standard benchmark were announced.