Self-host HiveMQ Community Edition
2026.5Open-source Java MQTT 3.x/5 broker for IoT messaging
- Stars
- 1 213
- CPU
- 4 or more CPUs
- RAM
- At least 4GB of RAM
- Storage
- 10GB or more free disk space
- Port
- 1883 (Default MQTT TCP listener, bound to all interfaces)
hivemq/hivemq-ceWhat is HiveMQ Community Edition?
HiveMQ Community Edition (CE) is a Java-based MQTT broker released under the Apache 2.0 license that covers the full MQTT 3.x and 5.0 specification and serves as the open-source core of the commercial HiveMQ platform. Clients connect over plain TCP, TLS, WebSocket or Secure WebSocket, and behaviour such as retained messages, sessions, queues, subscriptions and persistence mode is tuned in a single XML file (conf/config.xml) that the broker reads at startup, with ${ENVVAR} placeholders filled from the environment. Custom authentication, authorization, client initializers and packet interceptors can be written against the Java Extension SDK, and the broker can also be started inside a Java application through its embedded API. Run it by unzipping the official binary package and calling bin/run.sh, with the hivemq/hivemq-ce Docker image, or by building your own package and image from source. Production deployments are supported on Linux only and need OpenJDK 11 or newer, roughly 4 GB RAM, 4 CPUs and 10 GB of free disk.
Should you self-host HiveMQ Community Edition?
HiveMQ Community Edition scores 55/100 on selfhost.directory (how scoring works) and ranks #10 of 12 in Message Broker. It has 1 213 GitHub stars.
It shipped 2 stable releases in the past year. The latest, 2026.5, came out on 27 May 2026. New versions land roughly every 6 months.
Setup is easy: most people get it running in one sitting. An official Docker image is available. It is Apache-2.0-licensed and written mostly in Java.
Its closest alternative on selfhost.directory is Apache Kafka (83/100, 34 152 stars). It scores higher overall, so compare the two before you pick. See HiveMQ Community Edition vs Apache Kafka side by side.
Features
- Certificate autoreload
- Embedded mode
- JMX monitoring
- MQTT 3.1 / 3.1.1 / 5.0 support
- Multiple listeners
- Plugin/extension SDK
- Retained message and session persistence
- Shared Subscriptions
- TLS Encryption
- WebSocket transport
- XML file configuration
HiveMQ Community Edition README
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