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IBM App Connect vs Quest SharePlex comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM App Connect
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (8th)
Quest SharePlex
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (24th), Data Integration (50th)
 

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers flexible adapters, good scalability but logging can be difficult at times
There is room for improvement in the logging messages. Sometimes, if you put someone new into App Connect, they can abandon it the same day. The logging is really painful. However, IBM has made efforts to integrate with Elasticsearch for logging, so that's an improvement. Overall, the logging can be difficult at times. One more important point is that if IBM improves its CI/CD capabilities, it will make a big difference. Right now, I have to create my own CI/CD setup from scratch for every client, which is inefficient. Back in 2013, I worked with Sonic ESB, and even then, it had CI/CD with Maven. With App Connect, you need to build everything yourself when using tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, or CircleCI. IBM really needs to provide official support for this.
KW
It reduces the downtime and migration time exponentially
I would rate SharePlex's high availability, and disaster recovery features highly. It works as advertised in terms of rapid fill-over and switch-over opportunities. It reduces the migration time for a multi-terabyte database to an hour or less because it performs real-time replication. SharePlex reduces downtime and migration time exponentially. Something that could take 12 to 24 hours is cut down to one to two hours. By the time you start to migrate, the only remaining replication is a slight difference in data from the point when SharePlex has shut down, and the application has to also switch over to the new database. It allowed the company to replicate data more transparently. Some of the business executives probably don't even know it's there. It works 100 percent of the time, with little downtime or problems. It provides what is needed. There's little concern about whether or not it functions. It's allowed the company to achieve its objectives with its clients, reducing and minimizing downtime for substantial migrations and upgrades. It can reduce hardware and storage costs, but my company doesn't utilize it with high-availability architecture.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the security."
"It's stable to use, connect with the cloud, and to deploy."
"App Connect's best feature is that it can be deployed in a container."
"There is a friendly interface for configuration, and integration is made easy."
"It can handle API conversions with mapping and transformation rules, simplifying the development process."
"It has different type of interfaces that can integrate with companies."
"Technical support is good."
"When using IBM stacks, IBM App Connect is suitable and integrates well with other IBM products like WebSphere."
"Because of the volume of the transactions, we heavily use a feature that allows SharePlex to replicate thousands of transactions. It's called PEP, Post Enhancement Performance, and that has helped us scale tremendously."
"The core replication and its performance. Performance is crucial, and SharePlex is by far the fastest. The way it handles replication to multiple targets along with basic filtering, as well as from multiple sources to a single target, is very efficient."
"There are some capabilities within SharePlex where you can see how the data is migrating and if it still maintains good data integrity. For example, if there are some tables that get out of sync, there are ways to find them and fix the problem on the spot. Since these are very common issues, we can easily fix these types of problems using utilities, like compare and repair. So, if you find something is out of sync, then you can just repair that table. It basically syncs that table from source to target to see if there are any differences. It will then replicate those differences to the target."
"The core features of the solution we like are the reliability of the data transfer and the accuracy of data read and write. The stability of the solution is also excellent."
"I like SharePlex's Compare and Repair tool."
 

Cons

"IBM needs to enhance and have a stronger offering for the event streaming part because this is the future needed for the containerization and the new integration requirement."
"The product should improve its support."
"IBM App Connect should improve security features."
"IBM App Connect is scalable. From the administration side, they need to improve the RBAC model, as well as the clustering of this product. It will be good if we can start up the cluster, via IBM Connect Console. Some other products like MuleSoft, are providing this type of administration. MuleSoft is easy to use and user friendly."
"Plugins for the repositories are difficult to find."
"They reply in one or two hours at most, but they could be better."
"The setup time for App Connect could be improved."
"The addition of string functionality would be a benefit, particularly in the ESQL space that IBM already uses internally."
"I would like the solution to have some kind of machine learning and AI capabilities. Often, if we want to improve the performance of posting, we have to bump up a parameter. That means we need to stop the process, come up with a figure that we want to bump the parameter up to, and then start SharePlex. Machine learning and AI capabilities for these kinds of improvement would tremendously help boost productivity for us."
"I don't know how easy it would be to change the architecture in an already implemented replication. For example, if we have a certain way of architecting for a particular database migration and want to change that during a period of time, is that an easy or difficult change? There was a need for us to change the architecture in-between the migration, but we didn't do it. We thought, "This is possibly complicated. Let's not change it in the middle because we were approaching our cutover date." That was one thing that we should have checked with support about for training."
"For its function in relation to replication (i.e. filtering), I'd give it a six or seven out of 10. GoldenGate has much more functionality by comparison."
"The reporting features need improvement. It would be very good for users to have a clear understanding of the status of replication."
"I would like more ability to automate installation and configuration in line with some of the DevOps processes that are more mature in the market. That would be a considerable improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM App Connect's pricing is high compared to other products."
"It is very expensive if we want to scale."
"The solution's pricing isn't cheap, but you can get good discounts based on your competitive deal."
"App Connect is not cheap."
"The cost depends upon the consumer."
"The price could be better."
"The licensing cost for IBM App Connect is very high."
"Initially, App Connect was quite expensive because the cost was based on the number of processors we used. However, it's now based on containers, which means we can be more specific about our consumption and get a better price."
"It is not as expensive as Oracle GoldenGate and has worked really well within our budgets."
"It's really good value for the money. There are some things they could improve on, but in terms of the pricing, features, and support, as a holistic package, we are not thinking of anything else at this point in time."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
57%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Real Estate/Law Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM App Connect?
I like the adapters. The adapters help us achieve scalability. If you want to connect to SAP, there's an adapter. Salesforce? There's an adapter. You want to connect to another system? There's like...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM App Connect?
IBM App Connect's pricing is high compared to other products.
What is your primary use case for IBM App Connect?
Our company has a big project for delivery and e-commerce sites. We use IBM App Connect to deliver information to our end users after they buy our products. We get information from many places, suc...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

IBM Cast Iron
Dell SharePlex, SharePlex
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

United Way of Allegheny County, Saint-Gobain CPS, Ricoh, SunTrust Banks Inc.
Bodybuilding.com, Priceline.com, Ameco Beijing, Viasat, SK Broadband
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM App Connect vs. Quest SharePlex and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.