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IBM DataPower Gateway vs NGINX Plus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 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 Application Infrastructure
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (4th), SOA Application Gateways (1st), API Management (7th)
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) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Infrastructure category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 4.6%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 11.4%, down 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 most valuable features for our business include the ability to monitor and log data transactions and handle multiple request at an enterprise level."
"I like the API Gateway feature."
"It is easy to use, easy to install, and it's resilient for high availability."
"What I like most is the stability."
"The solution is very easy to work with."
"I like that it is very stable, and we never experience any downtime."
"Support for PCA and non-PCA services is valuable."
"It's high-speed and it can be remotely administered via an API."
"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."
"I receive very good support."
"Application Gateway with application-level firewall tool and load distributor and balancer (also serves for A/B testing)."
"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 robust software architecture allows for it to be scalable and very stable."
"Supports IMAP, POP and SMTP protocols for the reverse proxy."
"I think installation only took a couple of minutes — no more than 10 minutes."
"With NGINX, I appreciate its ability to route traffic geographically."
 

Cons

"The two biggest issues of this solution are the complexity and the maintenance procedures."
"They should add features to manage API integrations."
"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."
"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."
"The initial setup isn't so easy, you need who has experience working with the solution to help."
"Scripting needs improvement. It's hard for our customers."
"One area that could be improved is the integration with Postgres and SQL databases. Currently, IBM DataPower Gateway only integrates with Oracle databases."
"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 drawback is that you must obtain a license for everything."
"Initially, I experienced hiccups whenever I installed the application."
"The solution's GUI is an area with certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"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."
"Lack of a feature to print data on the terminal for verification of network traffic during debugging and testing."
"One area of improvement could be that NGINX could provide a means to generate self-signed SSL certificates."
"I would suggest adding GUI-based configuration panels to NGINX Plus to simplify setup and management tasks."
"NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's initial costing is expensive for small banks and financial institutions."
"Most customers' use case budgets are not inlined with the price of IBM DataPower Gateway. It is too expensive."
"It is an expensive solution."
"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."
"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 cost is very high and requires all five components in the API management solution."
"The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."
"​NGINX is a free tool in Brazil. There are some companies which do support it.​"
"There's an open-source version of NGINX that is free."
"The cost is reasonable."
"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."
"The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500."
"Compared to other similar solutions on the market, I think it's over-priced."
"It's an open source solution, so it's free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

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...
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
 

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: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.