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IBM DataPower Gateway vs IBM Integration Bus 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 DataPower Gateway
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (6th), SOA Application Gateways (1st), API Management (8th)
IBM Integration Bus
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 5.9%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Integration Bus is 22.6%, up from 20.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
 

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi - PeerSpot reviewer
Security features meets compliance needs and offers MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) that simplifies integration efforts
While I like IBM products, I'm not an evangelist. I work with Java, Microsoft ASP.NET, and various technologies. I'm not tied to any specific vendor. However, I do find IBM to be a bit greedy. It's a large, profit-driven company. The support team is mostly based in India, and they follow a very structured process and protocol. Sometimes, it feels like playing ping pong with them – lots of back and forth before the problem gets escalated. You might even have to get your sales rep involved to push things along. For me, the support it could be better. Indian support teams aren't inherently bad, but with IBM, it feels impersonal. They respond, sure. But if it's a complex technical issue, they might ask you a lot of questions that just seem designed to waste your time. Sometimes it feels like they hope you'll get frustrated and solve the problem yourself.
Ashraf Siddiqui - PeerSpot reviewer
Helpful for complex integrations because it has tools and functionality to integrate with other systems
Everything needs to be improved. As far as integration and the cloud are concerned, things are moving to the cloud side. When you use Kubernetes and similar technologies, IBM Integration Bus doesn't greatly facilitate these environments. Maybe I don't know enough about that, but I feel that when it comes to the DevOps environment, the tool needs to be deployed on production in a way that's just like pods. Cloud integration needs to be more facilitated with the DevOps environment. This IBM technology needs to adapt because in the recent world, in the real world, we see that everything is just a cloud pod. Whenever you need to scale anything, you just put some cloud and pod and improve it, make any server and deploy it. But in IBM Integration Bus, there is a problem because we can't do this as easily. In short, IBM needs to more emphasize or more integrate with the cloud environments as well, similar to DevOps. There are limitations in IBM Integration Bus when it comes to DevOps.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product is stable...The product is scalable."
"The most valuable feature is the security appliance, it's very secure."
"Support for PCA and non-PCA services is valuable."
"The product's most valuable features are AAA policies and security features."
"Since it is a gateway, it provides a lot of security features."
"Its initial setup was straightforward."
"It is easy to use, easy to install, and it's resilient for high availability."
"The solution is straightforward and for large organizations, it functions well."
"The features I have found most valuable in this solution are transformation and routing."
"It is user-friendly and a value-added tool for banks and other verticals."
"The most valuable feature is the API integration."
"The most valuable thing is the loose coupling and making the change in only one stack of the ESB layer or the middleware layer."
"Facilitates communication between parties and legacy systems."
"The product is usually very easy to deploy."
"The message queue feature is very valuable."
"We've been using IBM Integration Bus for seven years to create a service-oriented architecture in our bank and implement SOAR infrastructure using this tool. It helps us with internal services for core banking and different digital channels. We also use it to expose our services to other banks and companies and consume services from outside our bank using proxy servers."
 

Cons

"They should add features to manage API integrations."
"An area for improvement in IBM DataPower Gateway is its price point because it's a relatively expensive product. Sometimes, when the customer use case is just a very small subset of what's being offered in IBM DataPower Gateway, then the product can be expensive, making my company lose some of the opportunities because of the expensive pricing. A lower price point for IBM DataPower Gateway, even if that results in a less feature-rich version, would be appreciated. In terms of additional features that I'd like to see in the next release of IBM DataPower Gateway, nothing specific comes to mind because IBM constantly improves its standards and provides quarterly updates to the product, so it's quite fine."
"They should improve the solution's clustering features."
"We are always looking for more features wherein it could be easily integrated with cloud applications. We are looking for either a cloud solution or a cloud integration option."
"The two biggest issues of this solution are the complexity and the maintenance procedures."
"The initial setup isn't so easy, you need who has experience working with the solution to help."
"Small and medium-sized companies might look for cloud-hosted applications due to the cost."
"The IBM community does not have much engagement from the IT community in Saudi Arabia and developers for this solution are difficult to find."
"Current aggregation implementation should be deprecated. MQ independent, as well as an intuitive solution, should be proposed."
"IBM Integration Bus can improve JSON Schema validations. We don't have any kind of nodes that can support that kind of validation. If we want to containerize it by means of the docker's containers in the clouds, we are not able to manage it very well."
"I think security should be more simplified."
"The price could be better. It would also be better if they simplified the code."
"There is room for improvement in providing more specific error messages and error criteria."
"Today, the IBM business rule engine, the DataPower is outside the Enterprise Service Bus. It's sold as a different feature or application. If it could be integrated, then it's able to handle a lot more of what we are doing now rather than just have a stateless ESB that you can't do much on, and a set of normal business rules."
"The version of the technology and current knowledge is a bit outdated."
"We decided to move away from IBM Integration Bus for IT technical refreshments."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."
"As far as I know, they have a perpetual license for this product. They are paying perpetual fees rather than an annual subscription or annual pricing."
"The appliance is a bit on the expensive side for the workloads that are not too high."
"The solution is expensive in comparison to other products."
"The licensing cost is very expensive."
"It is an expensive solution."
"IBM DataPower Gateway is quite expensive to get resources to work on this product. If the price could be cheaper, I think that will make it a little bit better and easily accessible to smaller clients. Then it could compete with other solutions that are available in the market. There's a whole lot of other solutions available that work well and are cheaper than IBM's products."
"The cost is very high and requires all five components in the API management solution."
"The solution requires a license and is very expensive here in India."
"It is not cheap. It has its cost. It is one of the high-cost solutions."
"IBM Integration Bus is expensive. There are cheaper products in the marketplace."
"The price of this product could be lower."
"For small companies, First of all, there are a lot of free products that could be used for integration. It can use the cloud or new implementation in the past. But if the tool is IBM, the official box in your company, you can make your submission and also publish the cloud to the work file. But let’s say, if you are working with premises, then you have to buy a reasonable main full support and gain experience with your product."
"The pricing could be improved to make it more competitive."
"IBM Integration Bus solution is expensive and this is one of the reasons we are looking for an alternative, such as MuleSoft."
"IBM provides a quite complicated licensing model."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Insurance Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM DataPower Gateway?
The MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) is great because it allows you to easily expose services using various protocols – web services, REST (JSON), and others. This flexibility simplifies things.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM DataPower Gateway?
I would rate the pricing a two out of ten, with one being high price, and ten being low price. It's high-priced for smaller companies. But it is okay for enterprises. So, the price could be more fl...
What needs improvement with IBM DataPower Gateway?
The DCDR process should be less complex. AI should improve developer efficiency and effort. Whenever I am writing code, it should give recommendations automatically by incorporating AI so I can wri...
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 IBM Integration Bus?
The message queue, like, message queue connectors. Then they have a built in connectors for most of the systems, like SAP, oracle database, and this Civil connector is there. Of course, we have thi...
 

Also Known As

WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower
IBM WebSphere ESB
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity
Salesbox, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Road Buddy, Swiss Federal Railways, Electricity Supply Board, The Hartree Centre, ESB Networks
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DataPower Gateway vs. IBM Integration Bus and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.