HiveMQ Introduction

HiveMQ is an enterprise-ready MQTT broker that is specifically tailored to business needs in the age of machine-to-machine communication (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The HiveMQ enterprise MQTT broker 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). From the ground up, our broker is built with maximum scalability and enterprise-ready security concepts in mind.

Through 100% compliance with the MQTT specification, HiveMQ leads the way in professional adoption of all the possibilities the Internet of Things has to offer for companies worldwide. As members of the OASIS committee, the HiveMQ team was 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. Meet the New MQTT Protocol

  2. Foundational Changes in the MQTT 5 Protocol

  3. Upgrade Now. Here’s Why

  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

Supported MQTT features

Here are just a few of the popular MQTT features HiveMQ supports:

  • Retained messages

  • QoS 0

  • QoS 1

  • 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 features

HiveMQ is built to be ultra-flexible so it can be integrated with virtually every existing enterprise system. The HiveMQ extension framework provides an open API that allows developers to create custom extensions for their specific infrastructure.
Some of the many additional features HiveMQ adds on top of its MQTT core include:

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