HiveMQ Introduction

HiveMQ is a world-class, enterprise-ready MQTT platform that provides fast, efficient, and reliable movement of data to and from connected IoT devices.

HiveMQ fully implements the MQTT protocol (the standard messaging and data exchange protocol for IoT). Additionally, HiveMQ is 100% Sparkplug compatible. Sparkplug allows smart manufacturing companies to get the most out of their IIoT deployments by adding additional context to MQTT data.

The HiveMQ platform is built from the ground up with maximum scalability and enterprise-grade security concepts in mind. Through 100% compliance with the MQTT specification, HiveMQ is a worldwide leader in the professional adoption of all the possibilities the Internet of Things has to offer.
As a member of the OASIS committee, the HiveMQ team has been directly involved in the creation and release of MQTT 5.0, the newest version of the MQTT protocol.

New to MQTT?

If you are new to MQTT, take a look at these frequently asked question about MQTT. To learn more about the features and concepts of the lightweight MQTT protocol, we highly recommend our informative MQTT Essentials series:

  1. An introduction to MQTT

  2. Publish & Subscribe Basics

  3. Client, Broker, and Connection Establishment

  4. Publish, Subscribe & Unsubscribe

  5. Topics & Best Practices

  6. Quality of Service Levels

  7. Persistent Session and Queuing Messages

  8. Retained Messages

  9. Last Will and Testament

  10. Keep Alive & Client Take-Over

  11. MQTT over WebSockets

Complete MQTT Compliance

HiveMQ is 100% MQTT compliant and implements all MQTT features for single node and clustered deployments.

Supported MQTT versions

HiveMQ fully supports all MQTT versions:

Curious about MQTT 5?

If you want to learn about MQTT 5 (the newest and most feature-rich version of the MQTT protocol ever), dive into all the technical details with our insightful MQTT 5 Essentials series:

  1. Introduction to MQTT 5 Protocol

  2. Foundational Changes in the MQTT 5 Protocol

  3. MQTT 5: Seven Reasons to Upgrade to it from MQTT 3.1.1

  4. Session and Message Expiry Intervals

  5. Client Feedback & Negative ACKs

  6. User Properties

  7. Shared Subscriptions

  8. Payload Format Descriptions

  9. Request-Response Pattern

Standard MQTT features

HiveMQ supports all required and optional features of the MQTT protocol, including these popular features:

  • Retained messages

  • All quality of service levels (QoS 0, QoS 1, and QoS 2)

  • Clean & persistent sessions

  • Queued messages

  • Last will and testament (LWT)

  • Dynamic topics

  • Wildcard subscriptions

  • Username / password fields

  • MQTT client takeovers

  • MQTT ordered topic guarantees for QoS 1 and 2

  • MQTT client load balancing with shared subscriptions

  • User properties & reason codes

  • Payload format descriptions

  • Session & message expiry intervals

  • and more

Additional MQTT Tools and Features

The HiveMQ platform is designed to be ultra-flexible so it can be integrated with virtually every existing enterprise system. Along with our purpose-built enterprise extensions, HiveMQ offers an open API that allows developers to create custom extensions for their specific infrastructure.
Here are a few of the tools and features the HiveMQ platform includes:

Third party MQTT libraries
The additional features that HiveMQ provides are compatible with most MQTT client libraries (including the HiveMQ MQTT client).