EMQX Enterprise 6.3 Long-Term Support Release Strengthens Security for Production MQTT Deployments

New release adds stronger security defaults and optional hardening, with Feature Gates, finer operational control, and performance and stability improvements

MENLO PARK, Calif., Sept. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- EMQ, the company behind the EMQX Platform for device connectivity, real-time data movement, and system coordination across IoT and AI environments, today announced EMQX Enterprise 6.3.0, a Long-Term Support (LTS) release that strengthens security for production MQTT deployments and adds new flexibility in how the platform is configured and operated across edge, cloud, and containerized environments.

Security is a central focus of EMQX Enterprise 6.3, with stronger safeguards enabled by default and an optional hardened security profile for security-sensitive environments. The release also introduces Feature Gates, allowing organizations to tailor EMQX to different deployment requirements, along with improvements to operational control, observability, performance, and stability.

Strengthen Security for Production Deployments

EMQX Enterprise 6.3 strengthens the platform's default security posture while giving organizations the option to enable a hardened security profile for environments with stricter security requirements. The hardened profile remains optional in 6.3 and is planned to become the default in EMQX 7.0.

The release adds strict MQTT protocol parsing by default, stronger credential protection, authentication for OpenAPI and Prometheus endpoints, and broader detection of problematic connection behavior. Together, these changes provide stronger safeguards out of the box, while the optional hardened profile provides an additional layer of protection where needed.

Platform teams also gain finer control over how clients and tenants access and consume resources. Context-aware authorization and dynamic authentication routing support more flexible security architectures, while enhanced topic metrics, rate limiting, and session visibility provide deeper insight into workloads and resource consumption.

"Enterprise customers need infrastructure they can standardize on and operate with confidence over time," said Benniu Ji, Chief Product Officer at EMQ. "EMQX Enterprise 6.3 combines long-term support with stronger security, more predictable operations, and the flexibility to adapt the platform to different deployment environments as needs evolve."

Tailor EMQX to Each Deployment

Enterprise MQTT infrastructure increasingly spans environments with very different requirements, from lightweight edge nodes and embedded gateways to cloud infrastructure and large-scale, multi-tenant platforms. Feature Gates provide a more flexible way to match EMQX to those requirements.

Organizations can run the complete EMQX capability stack using the default FULL configuration, choose an ESSENTIAL configuration focused on core MQTT messaging, authentication, and authorization, or create a custom configuration containing only the capabilities a particular deployment needs. EMQX resolves feature dependencies automatically and validates the configuration at startup.

For resource-constrained deployments, ESSENTIAL mode reduces overhead while preserving the core capabilities needed to operate an enterprise MQTT broker. Its idle boot memory footprint is less than 100 MB, making it particularly useful for edge, embedded, and containerized environments where resources are more limited.

Improve Performance and Stability Under Real-World Loads

EMQX Enterprise 6.3 improves how the platform uses available infrastructure resources. Resource-aware defaults adapt network port and scheduler settings to assigned CPU resources, helping EMQX operate more efficiently in smaller deployments and resource-constrained container and Kubernetes environments. The default TCP listener now uses Erlang/OTP's modern socket API, while JSON encoding and decoding performance has also been improved.

New QoS 0 flow control addresses another practical production challenge: slow consumers. By keeping QoS 0 backlogs bounded while allowing QoS 1 and QoS 2 traffic to continue making progress, EMQX can maintain more predictable resource usage and system behavior during traffic bursts and uneven downstream consumption.

Extend EMQX Across Cloud and AI Workloads

Beyond its core security, deployment, and operational improvements, EMQX Enterprise 6.3 expands an ecosystem of more than 50 built-in data integrations. New capabilities include Google Cloud Bigtable support, attached service accounts for Google Cloud Pub/Sub and BigQuery, AWS IAM Roles Anywhere authentication for Kafka, and OpenTelemetry-based integration with Dynatrace.

The new cloud authentication options support more cloud-native credential management and reduce reliance on manually managed, long-lived credentials when connecting EMQX to external services.

For agent-driven applications, 6.3 also introduces MQTT Agent, a new plugin that provides MQTT-native building blocks for creating stateful, event-driven AI agent workflows within the EMQX platform. The addition brings agent workflows closer to the devices, events, and real-time data they act on, continuing EMQ's work at the intersection of MQTT, connected devices, and AI-driven systems.

Availability

EMQX Enterprise 6.3 is available immediately.

For a complete overview of the new features and enhancements, read the EMQX Enterprise 6.3 release notes.

Organizations interested in enterprise-grade features and commercial support can learn more or request a personalized demo on the EMQ website.

Developers can download the latest version of EMQX from the official GitHub repository.

About EMQ

EMQ is the company behind EMQX, a unified MQTT-based platform for device connectivity, real-time data movement, and system coordination across IoT and AI environments. EMQX connects, processes, stores, and streams data from edge to cloud, enabling organizations to build scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure that integrates systems and coordinates operations across industrial environments, connected devices, and emerging autonomous applications. Deployed by more than 1,500 customers worldwide and connecting over 500 million devices, EMQX powers real-time operations across manufacturing, automotive, energy, and beyond.

For more information, visit www.emqx.com, follow EMQ on LinkedIn, and @EMQTech on X.

Media Contact

Brandon Ruiz
Product Marketing Manager
EMQ Technologies
[email protected]
(800) 557-8132

SOURCE EMQ Technologies