Mule ESB vs OpenESB comparison

Salesforce and OpenESB are both solutions in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category. Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.0, while OpenESB is ranked #13. Salesforce holds a 16.5% mindshare in E, compared to OpenESB’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Salesforce users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of OpenESB users who would recommend it.

Mule ESB

Read 54 Mule ESB reviews

3,829 Views
2,910 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

OpenESB

Read 4 OpenESB reviews

462 Views
462 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Mule ESB

OpenESB

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 2025

Mule ESB and OpenESB are integration platforms competing in the enterprise environment. Mule ESB has the upper hand with its comprehensive features and robust customer support, while OpenESB offers advantages in simplicity and quick deployment.

Features: Mule ESB provides robust connectivity with seamless integration to cloud services, APIs, and complex applications. It supports various protocols and features sophisticated data mapping and transformation capabilities. OpenESB emphasizes lightweight integration with efficient business process automation and service orchestration, offering a modular architecture suitable for smaller deployments without compromising on flexibility.

Ease Of Deployment and Customer Service: Mule ESB offers extensive documentation and a supportive community which enhances customer service and facilitates a smoother deployment process. Its rich ecosystem aids quick setup but can introduce complexity. OpenESB's simpler architecture allows for faster initial deployment in basic scenarios and demands more technical knowledge for complex setups. Mule ESB provides better customer support compared to OpenESB.

Pricing and ROI: Mule ESB involves higher upfront costs with licensing and subscription models but offers long-term ROI through scalable features. OpenESB, being open-source, is cost-effective with lower initial costs appealing to budget-conscious buyers, yet might incur hidden maintenance costs. Mule ESB's larger initial investment is often justified by its scalability, whereas OpenESB offers rapid ROI for basic needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Mule ESB vs. OpenESB Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Mule ESB vs. OpenESB

February 2026

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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

Mule ESB

Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

5.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

OpenESB

Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

13th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of Mule ESB is 16.5%, down from 21.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenESB is 2.7%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Mule ESB	16.5%
OpenESB	2.7%
Other	80.8%

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Featured Reviews

Srinivas-Kanduri

Enterprise integrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Integration architecture has enabled reliable multi-channel messaging and secure API management but now needs better analytics and simpler development

In my opinion, the real-time analytics part of Mule ESB is not up to the mark for the decision-making process. While there are some analytics features, they lack the standards needed for enterprise use. Compared to other analytics tools such as Power BI, MuleSoft falls short.Points for improvement in Mule ESB definitely include enhancing the analytics capabilities because currently, they rely on external logging tools such as Splunk or ELK, which is lagging behind compared to other tools such as Workato that offer more analytical features. Additionally, issues arise with AI-based use cases due to dependencies on Salesforce tools such as agent force, making development more complicated when it should be more independent. Developing AI-based agents without being tied to Salesforce applications could also enhance functionality.

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PaulPerez

Integration Architect at Pymma consulting

Easily define choreography and orchestration with this process-oriented solution

We provide contracted services for our customers that include coordinating with providers and implementing the solution. A current project includes using the solution to deploy 200 microservices. The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration. This feature…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the key features I find unique and most useful in Mule ESB is the loosely coupled architecture, allowing for multi-delivery where the same data can be sent to multiple systems."

"For complex cases, we employ the SSLi engine, whereas for simpler ones like healthcare or response data, such as EDI 270 or 271. We prefer to use an external XRT engine instead of handling it within the ESB for ease of management."

"The architecture based on events has several connectors which allow integration from external and internal applications of the company."

"Mule ESB platform provided is very cohesive, and that's why it's leading in the Gartner quadrant as well and it's one of the best integration products as of now, especially when it comes to APIs, which has helped integration projects, particularly in terms of control and efficiency."

"The connectors help to connect with a variety of applications."

"I'm not using ESB directly. It is the integration layer, so it's running under the hood. However, the conversion and transformation performance is excellent. Anypoint Enterprise Security is also solid."

"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."

"The solution improved my company by modernizing the way we offer services and improving the user experience."

More Mule ESB pros

"The core is very stable."

"The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration."

"OpenESB pushes the organization to clearly define service boundaries and interfaces. So it motives the business and the development teams to clearly define their business services and processes they want to implement. OpenESB supports fine and coarse-grain granularity for the services and supports top-down and bottom-up approaches for the services, processes definition, and composition."

"One of the most valuable features is being able to implement business processes while keeping track of the design from BPMN to a BPEL Implementation."

Cons

"The current version will not be supported for much longer."

"Limitation on external subscribers to listen to the messages on the bus."

"It needs more samples. Also, the dependency on Maven should be removed."

"One area that could be improved is the way that policies are propagated when APIs are moved from one environment to another. It's an issue, but when you develop and test the rest APIs in a lower environment and need to move them, there's a propagation process. This process moves certain aspects of the APIs, like the basic features. But when we move them, the policies don't always move with them. The policies should be able to move so we don't have to redo them manually. There are some APIs we use, but it's a bit tedious."

"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."

"It would be beneficial if users could navigate the UI easily without extensive training or learning curves."

"We would like to have a built-in logging framework in which we can do auditing."

"There are some issues with both stability and scalability."

More Mule ESB cons

"The documentation of the product must be improved. It could be tricky to find the right documentation on a topic since the documentation is spread in many places. I advise the new joiner to contact the community to get entry points and additional documentation. Tutorial and Video must be present to take up the product."

"The documentation needs to be better."

"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."

"Regarding its management, a web console being able to synchronize distributed instances would be great."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the price is very high. If you use TIBCO BW, the license is for the CPU usage, then the IPS, and support. I also think the license for the product is a one-time expense."

"This is expensive. In my next project, we had to go to other vendor."

"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."

"This product is expensive, but it does offer value for money."

"The pricing must be improved."

"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."

"The solution is expensive."

"This product is cheaper than some offered by other vendors, although there is a problem because you have to pay for some third-party adapters."

More Mule ESB pricing and cost advice

"There are two versions. The first is the community version, which is free and contains the last part of the feature, but if you want to get the Enterprise version, you'll have to pay €60,000 which covers support and two instances on production."

"The Community Edition is a full product you can use in production, it does not have limitations like other alternatives."

"The cost for the prediction instrument is high because it is charged per instances based on prediction, but the rest of the solution is free."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	23
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	38

No data available

Questions from the Community

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 ...

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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...

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What do you like most about Mule ESB?

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

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Comparisons

IBM Integration Bus vs Mule ESB

Compared 31% of the time

Oracle Service Bus vs Mule ESB

Compared 9% of the time

webMethods.io vs Mule ESB

Compared 8% of the time

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator vs Mule ESB

Compared 6% of the time

Neuron ESB vs Mule ESB

Compared 2% of the time

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IBM WebSphere Message Broker vs OpenESB

Compared 18% of the time

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator vs OpenESB

Compared 18% of the time

Aurea CX Messenger vs OpenESB

Compared 15% of the time

Oracle Service Bus vs OpenESB

Compared 13% of the time

TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus vs OpenESB

Compared 13% of the time

More OpenESB Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Mule ESB

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

OpenESB

January 2026

Download OpenESB product report

Overview

For companies looking to modernize and unlock the value of existing on-premises systems and applications, an enterprise service bus (ESB) architecture serves as a critical foundation layer for SOA. When deployed as an ESB, the Mule runtime engine of Anypoint Platform combines the power of data and application integration across legacy systems and SaaS applications, with a seamless path to the other capabilities of Anypoint Platform and the full power of API-led connectivity.

Salesforce

OpenESB is a Java-based open-source enterprise service bus. It can be used as a platform for both enterprise application integration and service-oriented architecture. OpenESB allows you to integrate legacy systems, external and internal partners and new development in your Business Process.

OpenESB

Sample Customers

Ube, PacificComp, University of Witwatersrand, Justice Systems, Camelot

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Mule ESB vs. OpenESB

February 2026

Free Report: Mule ESB vs. OpenESB

Find out what your peers are saying about Mule ESB vs. OpenESB and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.

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