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Mule ESB vs OpenESB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Mule ESB
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
OpenESB
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of Mule ESB is 25.2%, up from 24.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenESB is 1.4%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
 

Featured Reviews

PurbayanSaha - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 9, 2024
Has API-led architecture and provides a unique, user-friendly, and scalable architecture for hosting APIs
We're using our Mule ESB mostly for integration projects for multinational companies that do business on a B2C or B2B basis. We also work with companies with multiple third-party vendors employed under their payroll. The Mule ESB helps integrate data from third-party systems or vendors with the…
PP
Jul 14, 2020
Enables us to define the business process and integrate it with other software
I used to work with Integration Bus. What is interesting is that the two products were made mainly by the same team, but OpenESB is lighter, you can run it on a simple GBM. It's lighter and has quite a few resources, no application server, and no database. This provides you with more intelligence because there is some kind of friction in the routing service, and you can play with that friction to provide some connection policy, like the last deployed policy. For example, if you were to install version one, and afterward, you deployed version two, automatically — if you decided that your connection will be the right deployed connection — you would be routed to the last version. If it doesn't work, you would just need to redeploy version one. Also, there are higher-level concepts, such as the interface of services, which allows you to define your interface and choose the method of implementation, like Java for example. On the other hand, with OpenESB, I am more connected. At the monitoring level, you can trust the level and replay the process, which is interesting, but because you have to store everything on the database, you have a conventional system that makes your system require more resources. The push ability to extract data from the process and then publish it in the data container is very interesting. For example, by using a database like Google's big data analytic search, you can create your own analytics from the data in your process without disturbing the process.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Once it is started, we don't see any problems on a day to day basis."
"The solution's drag-and-drop interface and data viewer helped us quite a lot."
"The connectivity the solution provides is excellent. There are often too many systems that we have to integrate and this helps with that."
"The solution improved my company by modernizing the way we offer services and improving the user experience."
"It's open source, and there are a lot of community resources. Mule ESB makes it easy to connect to other software applications."
"The setup is straightforward."
"Mule ESB has a user-friendly design, and everything is in one place. The API and architecture are popular right now. Also, MuleSoft has a large and supportive online community."
"I like that Mule ESB provides fast and good technical support."
"The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration."
"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."
"The core is very stable."
"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."
 

Cons

"In an upcoming release, I would like to see more additional concept for exception handling, batch processing, and increased integration with other application."
"From the product perspective, it was sometimes hard to manage the dependencies. When we had to add dependencies on a couple of different packages, it was sometimes confusing. It was hard to update them with Anypoint Studio, as well as with MuleSoft. There were challenges with that. So, that's one of the areas that could be improved."
"I would like to see support for BPM in the next release of this solution."
"The Anypoint platform consumes a lot of memory, and it would be great for developers if it were more lightweight."
"MuleSoft isn't as mature as some other integration technologies out there like IBM WebSphere. There's room for growth, and MuleSoft is working toward that."
"Documentation is cryptic, product releases are far too frequent, and upgrades become troublesome."
"It would be great to see implementing security modules as a feature."
"From an improvement perspective, there should be fewer coding challenges for users in Mule ESB."
"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."
"Regarding its management, a web console being able to synchronize distributed instances would be great."
"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."
"The documentation needs to be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Mule ESB is a costly solution. We pay approximately $80,000 annually for the system. The cost of the number of instances, annual subscription, and cloud hosting services are expensive."
"The licensing is yearly, and there are additional fees for services."
"The pricing must be improved."
"You will not get any support from Mule ESB's team for the tool's community edition...You can get support with the licensed version of Mule ESB."
"This product is expensive, but it does offer value for money."
"Plan your licensing model (cloud or on-premises or hybrid) that will allow seamless integration with new partners."
"The various features and components for this solution are no longer free."
"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."
"The Community Edition is a full product you can use in production, it does not have limitations like other alternatives."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Wellness & Fitness Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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 ...
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.
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Comparisons

 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ube, PacificComp, University of Witwatersrand, Justice Systems, Camelot
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Mule ESB vs. OpenESB and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.