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IBM B2B Integrator vs Mule ESB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

IBM B2B Integrator
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Business-to-Business Middleware (7th)
Mule ESB
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Application Integration solutions, they serve different purposes. IBM B2B Integrator is designed for Business-to-Business Middleware and holds a mindshare of 6.5%, up 6.0% compared to last year.
Mule ESB, on the other hand, focuses on Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), holds 20.6% mindshare, down 22.3% since last year.
Business-to-Business Middleware
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
 

Featured Reviews

Nagasaikiran Kesana - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast, easy to use, and useful for integration purposes
In the initial stage, I used only business processes to build code. As I used the product more and more, I learned that we could monitor, perform support activities, and install and upgrade servers. We can learn how to manage the clients to get business. We must get into a call with customers and get their requirements. We must pass all the test cases, both positive and negative. We need to manage our team as well. We use various protocols for data security, like SFTP, FTP, and HTTP. We follow the security levels based on the customer’s requirements. We encrypt the file, and the customers decrypt it using the public and private keys we provide. Customers who need high security opt for HTTP certificates and AS2. I have also worked on AWS and Azure to pass files to the buckets. I also work on single sign-on authentication. External users can access our dashboard with a few details. For example, if our customers need to see whether a file is transferred from our end, they can easily log in to the details and monitor it. They can also perform health checks. I will recommend the tool to others. People who want to use the tool must not do anything blindly. They must analyze, learn the concept, and understand the purpose of the tool. There are other products in the market, like MuleSoft, that have the same functionality. We must understand why we are using IBM B2B Integrator. We must gather some information. I take some introductory classes for the new joiners in my organization. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
PurbayanSaha - PeerSpot reviewer
Has API-led architecture and provides a unique, user-friendly, and scalable architecture for hosting APIs
There's room for improvement in multi-file transfer functionality. It's not convenient when using MuleSoft, and it should have better capability for handling large amounts of data. For example, applications like GoAnywhere can handle huge chunks of data, so the tool should also have something to facilitate that aspect of integration.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best feature is that many companies use the solution so there is a lot of peer support."
"It is easy of use and it's easy to maintain. It's also faster to on-board partners."
"The solution is useful for transferring files from one format to another format. Also, the solution is useful in translation."
"Everything from the order to fulfillment to the payment process, except for physical packing and shipping, is fully automated for some customer orders."
"It uses VMs, allowing us to enable horizontal scaling."
"It can scale horizontally as well as vertically as a cluster."
"B2B provides a secure communication channel."
"This solution allows for easy integration with heterogeneous applications."
"The most valuable features of Mule ESB are its ease of use, documentation, ease to adapt to newer security and vulnerabilities, and a lot of help available. Additionally, there is a lot of flexibility, many patches available, and they provide APIs. They are a market standard."
"The API management capabilities are exemplary. You can apply security policies to most applications, monitor logs, and get analytical data on request reception, response generation time, associated APIs, endpoints, and inbound and outbound messages."
"I'm not using ESB directly. It is the integration layer, so it's running under the hood. However, the conversion and transformation performance is excellent. Anypoint Enterprise Security is also solid."
"Once it is started, we don't see any problems on a day to day basis."
"The solution improved my company by modernizing the way we offer services and improving the user experience."
"I am impressed with the product's connectors and scalability."
"Scalability and load balancing."
"The solution has a good graphical interface."
 

Cons

"There is no related transaction stored in the database because it's an OLTP application."
"Map translator needs more enhancements."
"API integration could be improved. The legacy system could be on the cloud."
"The reporting features could be better. right now, they are lacking a bit."
"Patching or upgrading the product is a bit of a nightmare. It would be nice if they removed the installation manager port. We find it complicates upgrading and patching a great deal."
"There should be a single place to do things, rather than making it complicated, not moving away and truncating the old features but instead coming up with the new and still keeping the old stuff confuses people sometimes."
"End-to-end visibility and monitoring application required. The control center is available and covers this area, but it still fails in many monitoring scenarios."
"The one thing that is lacking is easy visibility. It's hard to provide business users with a view into the statuses of their transactions."
"It would be beneficial if users could navigate the UI easily without extensive training or learning curves."
"Limitation on external subscribers to listen to the messages on the bus."
"It would be great to see implementing security modules as a feature."
"The price of Mule ESB could improve."
"From an improvement perspective, there should be fewer coding challenges for users in Mule ESB."
"Mule ESB is more into the latest REST APIs, not much into the SOAP web services. Developing is all about web services and not easy with Mule."
"The solution isn't as stable as we'd like it to be. There are some ongoing issues and therefore Mule has to provide frequent patches. Mule's core IP should be more stable overall."
"Documentation is cryptic, product releases are far too frequent, and upgrades become troublesome."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay an annual fee based on the number of VPUs. It's fairly reasonable. We're in the middle of analyzing other products, and they're all pretty much in the same range."
"The pricing is based on how many cores are used and the type of cores."
"Licensing depends upon the package you opt for within the solution. The solution is a bit costly compared to the other integration tools in the market."
"The solution is priced at $20,000 to $30,000 per year with no extra costs."
"The price of IBM B2B Integrator is too high. However, IBM may be willing to give a discount if there are negotiations. If they see that there is a good opportunity for them they can provide a discount."
"The product costs more than 40K."
"The licensing is yearly, and there are additional fees for services."
"This product is cheaper than some offered by other vendors, although there is a problem because you have to pay for some third-party adapters."
"The various features and components for this solution are no longer free."
"This product is expensive, but it does offer value for money."
"The solution is expensive."
"This is expensive. In my next project, we had to go to other vendor."
"I think the price is very high. If you use TIBCO BW, the license is for the CPU usage, then the IPS, and support. I also think the license for the product is a one-time expense."
"Regarding licensing and pricing, I find it somewhat flexible. They are more flexible with larger customers compared to small and medium ones, as their licensing model depends on ports and other factors. Large customers benefit from more flexibility in implementation and renewal compared to smaller ones."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM B2B Integrator?
IBM B2B Integrator is a great tool, robust, reliable, low-maintenance, and ideal solution.
What needs improvement with IBM B2B Integrator?
It supports many of our use cases but falls short in some areas as technology evolves, especially with data transfer between edge locations and the cloud or on-premise systems. The solution doesn’t...
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 ...
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...
What do you like most about Mule ESB?
The solution's drag-and-drop interface and data viewer helped us quite a lot.
 

Also Known As

IBM Sterling B2B Integrator, Sterling Gentran Integration Suite
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Bonnie Plants, Toshiba Europe, Florida Hospital
Ube, PacificComp, University of Witwatersrand, Justice Systems, Camelot
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