The reliability of quantum channels for transmitting information is of profound importance from the perspective of quantum information. This naturally leads to the question as how well a quantum state is preserved when subjected to a quantum channel. We propose a measure of quantumness of channels based on non-commutativity of quantum states that is intuitive and easy to compute. We apply the proposed measure to some well-known noise channels, both Markovian and non-Markovian, and find that the results are in good agreement with those from a recently introduced l1-norm coherence based measure. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.