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IBM DataPower Gateway vs NGINX Plus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM DataPower Gateway
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (6th), SOA Application Gateways (3rd), API Management (8th)
NGINX Plus
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Application Infrastructure category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 4.1%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 11.5%, down from 12.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Infrastructure
 

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.
Ritesh-Bakhru - PeerSpot reviewer
Quick installation and very easy to manage while doing orchestration or automation
NGINX cannot be a replacement for your traditional load balancer with what we use in the network today. However, with applications going toward microservices, NGINX is definitely a way forward. F5 has many traditional load balancing features, so they still need to bring some of those features to NGINX. NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5. I think F5 is trying to implement those features in NGINX so they can improve the balancing on NGINX, but I think that will take some time. With the traditional F5 set up, the same OS can do load balancing, firewalls, and even policy enforcement. If we are able to bring some of those capabilities to NGINX, I think it would become a versatile solution and usage would definitely increase.

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 straightforward and for large organizations, it functions well."
"I like all of the features in this product and it does what it's supposed to do."
"The most valuable feature is the security appliance, it's very secure."
"It is easy to use, easy to install, and it's resilient for high availability."
"I like the tool's security. Also, all functionalities are integrated within on platform."
"The solution is scalable, our customers are mostly South African banks and they handle mostly transactions with this solution."
"The solution is stable."
"You don't have to have a separate DMC proxy because DataPower Gateway is an appliance and will take care of a lot of security features. These include data validations, encryption, as well as XML or any type of scripting or security threats that are present."
"I find the solution’s community support and documentation most valuable. Compared to HAProxy, have found a lot of documentation and community support on Quora. If you would be asking me as a developer whether to choose this product, I would recommend this since it has good community support, documentation, and signature updates. The configuration of HAProxy is also very tedious. However, NGINX’s configuration is very simple."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is simple to configure."
"Its versatility and capabilities make it invaluable for implementing patches and fixes when necessary."
"NGINX Plus' most valuable feature is the ingress controller."
"When I worked in a security research center, we tested NGINX to support DoS and DDoS attacks, and its results were great."
"The product is resilient."
"The product is lightweight and fast."
"NGINX Plus also has NGINX App Protect. It's a separate module, which is inspired by the F5 apps."
 

Cons

"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."
"The product should be more adapted to the DevOps process."
"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."
"Making it more user-friendly would be an improvement."
"Small and medium-sized companies might look for cloud-hosted applications due to the cost."
"One area that could be improved is the integration with Postgres and SQL databases. Currently, IBM DataPower Gateway only integrates with Oracle databases."
"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."
"The solution requires a lot of training manuals in order to get to know it better and to be able to use it effectively."
"The user interface could be improved."
"It would be good if NGINX provided a graphical user interface."
"The KPI should be more focused on load balancing and the latency in application calling from the end system."
"The drawback is that you must obtain a license for everything."
"NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5."
"Improvement needed in NGINX Plus could focus on optimizing memory usage for users."
"The solution must improve its performance."
"I would suggest adding GUI-based configuration panels to NGINX Plus to simplify setup and management tasks."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This product is a bit expensive as IBM products are costly assets. However, for enterprise customers it is a worthwhile investment."
"The cost is very high and requires all five components in the API management solution."
"The solution is expensive in comparison to other products."
"The tool's initial costing is expensive for small banks and financial institutions."
"It is an expensive solution."
"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 cost of this product varies from customer to customer and the relationship with IBM, including how many offerings from IBM are already being used."
"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."
"​NGINX is a free tool in Brazil. There are some companies which do support it.​"
"The price is the cost to contract support with a specialized company, usually during consulting hours.​"
"The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500."
"NGINX Plus is an open-source solution with limited additional features. When you try to get additional features in the solution, then you need to pay an extra amount to NGINX Plus."
"HAProxy is cheaper than NGINX."
"I use the solution's community edition which is free of cost."
"​NGINX Plus is worth it, if you need it. If you do not need the features or support, the free and open source package is more than capable. ​"
"The solution is free, but you can spend a lot of money with a complex solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
31%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
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 price could be more flexible for different clients.
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,...
What do you like most about NGINX Plus?
It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX Plus?
There's an open-source version of NGINX that is free. There's also NGINX Plus, which is a paid version with additional features.
 

Also Known As

WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower
NGINX
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity
Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DataPower Gateway vs. NGINX Plus and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.