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IBM DataPower Gateway vs NGINX Plus 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 Application Infrastructure
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (6th), SOA Application Gateways (1st), API Management (11th)
NGINX Plus
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Application Infrastructure category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 4.4%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 11.8%, up from 11.6% 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 scalable, our customers are mostly South African banks and they handle mostly transactions with this solution."
"The solution is very easy to work with."
"The performance is good. It's been very stable."
"It is a scalable solution."
"It is very easy to set up and configure, even for users with no prior experience."
"What I like most is the stability."
"The solution is robust."
"The most valuable feature is the security appliance, it's very secure."
"Nginx is extremely efficient in terms of the connection rate to the CPU cycles ratio, and in terms of the bandwidth to CPU cycles."
"The best solution, by far, for web traffic control for things in production and just around the house."
"Nginx is simple to configure, very stable in a highly utilized environment and very modular, allowing DevOps to create it's own modules for interactive use with Nginx."
"The most valuable features are the gateway and the ability to publish to sites."
"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."
"Application Gateway with application-level firewall tool and load distributor and balancer (also serves for A/B testing)."
"NGINX provides a cost advantage, value addition, and effective support."
"I need to highlight that the number one thing about NGINX is that it is free."
 

Cons

"They should add features to manage API integrations."
"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."
"In the next release, I would like to see the product price reduced. It should be cheaper."
"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."
"Scripting needs improvement. It's hard for our customers."
"The components that they include in the product that are, in fact, a WTX, really need to be removed from the product because they tend to fail."
"The programming language is only supported in XSLT and Gateway script."
"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."
"The solution's GUI is an area with certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"The KPI should be more focused on load balancing and the latency in application calling from the end system."
"Make modules easier to enable or disable. The beauty and ugly side of the NGINX modules is you have to know how to compile the module. For beginners or non-very technical aspirant(s) going for NGINX, they have to learn how to compile the modules.​"
"The center management system could be improved."
"It would be good if NGINX provided a graphical user interface."
"I would like it to have a more user-friendly graphical interface."
"The scaling should be built into the software rather than configured from an outside source."
"I would like to see the Grafana integration in NGINX which is already present in HAProxy. Grafana integration will help the solution visualize all the data analytics on the dashboard which is currently not present."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's initial costing is expensive for small banks and financial institutions."
"The product is expensive."
"Most customers' use case budgets are not inlined with the price of IBM DataPower Gateway. It is too expensive."
"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."
"The total cost of IBM DataPower Gateway would depend on the configuration, but in my experience, it can amount to 60,000 Euros per box, even for the virtual version. Usually, customers need high availability and a non-production environment, so the total price for IBM DataPower Gateway can be quite a lot. It can be 200,000 Euros or a similar figure."
"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."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The solution is free, but you can spend a lot of money with a complex solution."
"The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500."
"It's an open source solution, so it's free."
"I use the solution's community edition which is free of cost."
"​NGINX is a free tool in Brazil. There are some companies which do support it.​"
"HAProxy is cheaper than NGINX."
"Nginx is free. I don't have experience with the Plus version."
"The price is the cost to contract support with a specialized company, usually during consulting hours.​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
31%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
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?
My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred any costs.
 

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: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.