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IBM DataPower Gateway vs Mule ESB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 2025

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)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (6th), SOA Application Gateways (1st), API Management (7th)
Mule ESB
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 5.9%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Mule ESB is 21.0%, down from 22.6% 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.
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 solution is very easy to work with."
"The scalability of the solution is good."
"It is very easy to set up and configure, even for users with no prior experience."
"If you have an API application in your organization that you want to make safe and secure, in addition to your existing WAF or load balancer, this product comes with all those capabilities:"
"It can look for the various security threats, productions, payload scanning, and perform routing based on the content type."
"It's high-speed and it can be remotely administered via an API."
"Support for PCA and non-PCA services is valuable."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The solution doesn't require much code writing and we can develop APIs very easily."
"The product offers a community edition that is free of cost."
"The most valuable feature of Mule ESB is data transformation, i.e. our interacting with different systems and orchestrating for our business needs."
"Mule ESB is a very easy-to-use and user-friendly solution."
"The most valuable feature for Mule is the number of connectors that are available."
"I like that it's user-friendly. Compared to other ESBs, I find it easier to use. I like it better than other ESBs. I like the connectors, which make calling the APIs through the routers easier."
"We can use Java expressions anywhere in the flow."
"Most of our use cases are for Salesforce. So, the connectors for Salesforce have been really helpful. They've made development two times faster."
 

Cons

"The two biggest issues of this solution are the complexity and the maintenance procedures."
"DataPower isn't the most user-friendly tool. It is not an easy tool to use. Some things could use better wizards to guide you through processes."
"Some pre-packaged connectors for integration with various applications, such as SaaS offerings, would be a useful addition."
"It is a costly product."
"In terms of OEM support, it is poor. If I raise a CBRT one, as per the SLA, they should respond in one hour, however, sometimes it takes four or five hours to respond."
"IBM DataPower Gateway is quite big for smaller organizations, looking at different types of clients who are virtually assisted in this, I would say it's not really a good product for smaller firms."
"One area that could be improved is the integration with Postgres and SQL databases. Currently, IBM DataPower Gateway only integrates with Oracle databases."
"They should improve the solution's clustering features."
"Mule ESB could be more user-friendly. I think users must learn about the architecture before they start coding. The price could be better. In the next release, I would like to see an EDIFACT integration."
"We would like the ability to use our own code. This would allow us to develop customizations with ease. Additionally, it would be nice to have more analytics or insights on the exchanged information between databases."
"It's not easy to troubleshoot and we still can't make it work."
"In order to meet the new trend of active metadata management, we need intelligent APIs that can retrieve new data designs and trigger actions over new findings without human intervention."
"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."
"I would like to see support for BPM in the next release of this solution."
"Mule ESB isn't as secure as IBM. Financial companies go with IBM for that reason."
"Lacking some connectors that could be included."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The appliance is a bit on the expensive side for the workloads that are not too high."
"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 licensing cost is very expensive."
"This product is a bit expensive as IBM products are costly assets. However, for enterprise customers it is a worthwhile investment."
"The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."
"The cost is very high and requires all five components in the API management solution."
"The product is expensive."
"It's expensive when you compare it with others."
"Most of the challenges that I had with this solution were for smaller customers. There is not a good licensing model or pricing model. It is more expensive than other solutions, and that's the downside of MuleSoft. I had to be creative to be able to sell it to the business, but we did. This is something they have to work on because for large companies, it's affordable, but for small and medium businesses, it's very hard to sell."
"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."
"The price of the Mule ESB commercial version is expensive. However, they have a free community version."
"This is expensive. In my next project, we had to go to other vendor."
"The various features and components for this solution are no longer free."
"The licensing is yearly, and there are additional fees for services."
"Plan your licensing model (cloud or on-premises or hybrid) that will allow seamless integration with new partners."
"Mule ESB is an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

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

Also Known As

WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity
Ube, PacificComp, University of Witwatersrand, Justice Systems, Camelot
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Mule ESB and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,388 professionals have used our research since 2012.