MQTT Broker Selection: HiveMQ vs Mosquitto for Industrial Use

I spent a month running both HiveMQ and Mosquitto in a production IoT setup with 2,500 endpoints. The difference between them wasn't in the marketing material , it was in the logs, the failed connections, and the way they handled message floods. HiveMQ had a clean dashboard and enterprise support. Mosquitto had a simpler config and less overhead. Neither was perfect. Both had gotchas that weren't obvious until you hit them. WHY YOU'D CHOOSE You'd face this choice when designing an industrial IoT