Mule ESB vs NGINX Plus comparison

The compared Salesforce and F5 solutions aren't in the same category. Salesforce is ranked #2 in E , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 16.5% mindshare in the category. F5 is ranked #8 in ADC , with an average rating of 7.8, and holds a 6.6% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Salesforce users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of F5 users who would recommend it.

Mule ESB

Read 54 Mule ESB reviews

3,829 Views
2,910 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

NGINX Plus

Read 32 NGINX Plus reviews

3,930 Views
2,358 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Mule ESB

NGINX Plus

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Mule ESB and NGINX Plus based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Salesforce, Oracle and others in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

To learn more, read our detailed Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

January 2026

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Helped 882,594 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

ROI

Sentiment score

5.4

Calculating Mule ESB ROI is challenging, but users report positive returns from licensing, reusability, and microservices efforts.

Sentiment score

7.5

NGINX Plus boosts website speed and reduces costs, offering superior flexibility and scalability, ensuring significant returns for organizations.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Mule ESB report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the NGINX Plus report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

6.3

Mule ESB's support is generally positive but varies by subscription level; users note inconsistencies and prefer external help sometimes.

Sentiment score

6.9

NGINX Plus offers robust support with responsive engineers, though some lower-tier licenses experience delayed responses; documentation often suffices.

We have a good relationship with our vendor, and they are ready to help us with any technical issues.

Richmond Cosay

Solutions Architect at Metrobank

The technical support of Mule ESB can be rated from nine to ten.

reviewer2704872

Senior Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

The technical support from Salesforce is moderate.

Srinivas-Kanduri

Enterprise integrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Mule ESB report

Response time is good because they have assigned and dedicated support engineers to us, and we have weekly cadence calls.

Nadeem-Inamdar

Senior Information Security Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the NGINX Plus report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

7.5

Mule ESB offers adaptable scalability and performance, ideal for diverse businesses with cloud deployments and large data volumes.

Sentiment score

7.7

NGINX Plus is highly scalable and flexible, easily adapting to various enterprise needs and supporting multiple users and websites.

Mule ESB is a scalable solution.

reviewer2704872

Senior Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

When it comes to scalability and the ability to expand, I would rate Mule ESB as an eight or nine.

Srinivas-Kanduri

Enterprise integrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The adaptability of Mule ESB in supporting multiple messaging patterns is pretty decent and pretty good.

AshwaniKumar

Principal Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Mule ESB report

While some people use NGINX for web servers, my current use case focuses on networking and tunneling, which does not necessitate much scaling.

Michael Olayemi

Senior Software Engineer at Checkit

For more quotes and insights, download the NGINX Plus report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

7.1

Mule ESB is stable with minor glitches; improvements and proper management enhance reliability, scoring 8-9 out of 10.

Sentiment score

7.8

NGINX Plus is highly stable and reliable, praised for connectivity and performance, despite some scalability challenges in clustering.

Mule ESB is a stable product, and I have no doubts about its reliability.

Srinivas-Kanduri

Enterprise integrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Mule ESB report

I require ninety-nine point nine percent uptime, and NGINX has been pivotal in helping me achieve this along with our other DNS services.

Michael Olayemi

Senior Software Engineer at Checkit

For more quotes and insights, download the NGINX Plus report

Room For Improvement

Mule ESB requires user-friendly documentation, enhanced stability, better performance, scalability, exception handling, and improved analytics for broader adaptability.

NGINX Plus users seek improved scalability, user-friendly interface, better integration, cost-effectiveness, advanced features, and enhanced support services.

Points for improvement in Mule ESB definitely include enhancing the analytics capabilities because currently, they rely on external logging tools such as Splunk or ELK, which is lagging behind compared to other tools such as Workato that offer more analytical features.

Srinivas-Kanduri

Enterprise integrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

More information is needed from MuleSoft.

reviewer2704872

Senior Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Pricing is one factor that could be improved about Mule ESB; other than that, I'm pretty fine with it.

AshwaniKumar

Principal Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Mule ESB report

NGINX could provide a means to generate self-signed SSL certificates.

Michael Olayemi

Senior Software Engineer at Checkit

As with any application, there were initial issues, however, after receiving support, everything was rectified.

AnilKumar44

Executive Director at Geojit

There were some vulnerabilities in F5.

Nadeem-Inamdar

Senior Information Security Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the NGINX Plus report

Setup Cost

Mule ESB's cost and flexible licensing appeal to enterprises, yet high fees lead smaller businesses to explore alternatives.

NGINX Plus has a modular licensing model with varying costs, offering value but can be expensive compared to alternatives.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Mule ESB report

My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred any costs.

Michael Olayemi

Senior Software Engineer at Checkit

The solution offers a cost advantage.

AnilKumar44

Executive Director at Geojit

For more quotes and insights, download the NGINX Plus report

Valuable Features

Mule ESB provides flexible, robust integrations with extensive connectors, data transformation, and API management, supported by cloud options and community.

NGINX Plus excels in load balancing, security, and integration, praised for simplicity, efficiency, and superior traffic management features.

They have their own language called DataWeave, which helps transform data and is efficient enough to handle any kind of transformation.

reviewer2704872

Senior Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

It is also reusable, meaning the same service can be used in multiple places simply by adding it, and this comes with the API-led architecture that makes integrations more secure and reliable.

Srinivas-Kanduri

Enterprise integrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The best features of Mule ESB are that it's very robust and solid; I find that even our legacy systems go well with ESB.

Richmond Cosay

Solutions Architect at Metrobank

For more quotes and insights, download the Mule ESB report

For API management, the WebSocket, and the WebServer, NGINX provides a cost advantage, value addition, and effective support.

AnilKumar44

Executive Director at Geojit

The web application firewall feature has helped enhance security for our applications because most of the attacks which are performed on our website are being blocked by it.

Nadeem-Inamdar

Senior Information Security Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the NGINX Plus report

Categories and Ranking

Mule ESB

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

5.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (2nd)

NGINX Plus

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Infrastructure (4th), Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (8th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Application Integration solutions, they serve different purposes. Mule ESB is designed for Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and holds a mindshare of 16.5%, down 21.4% compared to last year.
NGINX Plus, on the other hand, focuses on Application Delivery Controllers (ADC), holds 6.6% mindshare, down 8.3% since last year.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Mule ESB	16.5%
IBM Integration Bus	16.7%
webMethods.io	8.8%
Other	58.0%

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
NGINX Plus	6.6%
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)	14.9%
NetScaler	13.0%
Other	65.5%

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

Srinivas-Kanduri

Enterprise integrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Integration architecture has enabled reliable multi-channel messaging and secure API management but now needs better analytics and simpler development

In my opinion, the real-time analytics part of Mule ESB is not up to the mark for the decision-making process. While there are some analytics features, they lack the standards needed for enterprise use. Compared to other analytics tools such as Power BI, MuleSoft falls short.Points for improvement in Mule ESB definitely include enhancing the analytics capabilities because currently, they rely on external logging tools such as Splunk or ELK, which is lagging behind compared to other tools such as Workato that offer more analytical features. Additionally, issues arise with AI-based use cases due to dependencies on Salesforce tools such as agent force, making development more complicated when it should be more independent. Developing AI-based agents without being tied to Salesforce applications could also enhance functionality.

Read full review

Nadeem-Inamdar

Senior Information Security Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Advanced policies and web firewall have strengthened application protection and reduced attack traffic

There were some vulnerabilities in F5. They tried to fix it, but the fixes were not available at the time because they were zero days, so they attempted to fix it, but their support was not proper. Their support should be improved because sometimes features which we need for customization take time, and they are sometimes feasible and sometimes not feasible by the team, so their support and the engineering team should improve their product. I would like to see more features regarding customization which should be built into the application, and the tool optimization should be good, and the dashboard should be more crisp and clear.

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882,594 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	23
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	38

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

Migration from IBM Integration Bus to Mulesoft ESB for a large enterprise tech services company

I was previously part of the Oracle SOA/OSB development team. In my current capacity I architected solutions using MuleSoft Anypoint Platform on cloud / on-premises and hybrid modes and on PCE/RTF ...

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IBM Integration Bus vs Mule ESB - which to choose?

Our team ran a comparison of IBM’s Integration Bus vs. Mule ESB in order to determine what sort of ESB software was the best fit for our organization. Ultimately we decided to choose IBM Integratio...

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What do you like most about Mule ESB?

The solution's drag-and-drop interface and data viewer helped us quite a lot.

See all answers

Which is better - IIS or NGINX Plus?

IIS is a flexible, secure, and manageable web server to host anything on the web. IIS’s scalable and open architecture can handle the most demanding tasks. From media streaming to web applications,...

See all answers

What do you like most about NGINX Plus?

It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX Plus?

Pricing is reasonable and that is fine.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM Integration Bus vs Mule ESB

Compared 32% of the time

Oracle Service Bus vs Mule ESB

Compared 8% of the time

webMethods.io vs Mule ESB

Compared 8% of the time

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator vs Mule ESB

Compared 6% of the time

IBM B2B Integrator vs Mule ESB

Compared 5% of the time

More Mule ESB Competitors

IIS vs NGINX Plus

Compared 15% of the time

Apache Web Server vs NGINX Plus

Compared 12% of the time

HAProxy vs NGINX Plus

Compared 9% of the time

NetScaler vs NGINX Plus

Compared 9% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs NGINX Plus

Compared 8% of the time

More NGINX Plus Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Mule ESB

February 2026

Download Mule ESB product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX Plus

February 2026

Download NGINX Plus product report

Also Known As

No data available

NGINX

Overview

For companies looking to modernize and unlock the value of existing on-premises systems and applications, an enterprise service bus (ESB) architecture serves as a critical foundation layer for SOA. When deployed as an ESB, the Mule runtime engine of Anypoint Platform combines the power of data and application integration across legacy systems and SaaS applications, with a seamless path to the other capabilities of Anypoint Platform and the full power of API-led connectivity.

Salesforce

NGINX Plus is a versatile solution that offers load balancing, caching, proxying, and API deployment capabilities. It can be deployed on private or public clouds and is ideal for building CDN solutions. The solution can also be used to secure web applications and replace web services like Apache.

NGINX has helped organizations improve functioning, reduce downtimes, and offer a DevOps-friendly solution. Its community support and documentation are highly regarded, and its configuration is more straightforward, making it a recommended choice over HAProxy.

Sample Customers

Ube, PacificComp, University of Witwatersrand, Justice Systems, Camelot

Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA

Buyer's Guide

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

January 2026

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