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Mule ESB vs OpenESB 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

Mule ESB
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
49
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 January 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of Mule ESB is 25.5%, up from 24.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenESB is 1.5%, 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
Has API-led architecture and provides a unique, user-friendly, and scalable architecture for hosting APIs
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.
PP
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

"Mule Expression Language"
"Easy connectivity and easy integration."
"The solution has a good graphical interface."
"It was pretty fast to develop APIs on this platform, which is something I liked about it. So, the time to value was pretty good."
"This tool has exceptional API management and integration connectors in addition to multiple out of the box connectors."
"The most valuable feature for Mule is the number of connectors that are available."
"I like that Mule ESB provides fast and good technical support."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"The Anypoint platform consumes a lot of memory, and it would be great for developers if it were more lightweight."
"It needs more samples. Also, the dependency on Maven should be removed."
"The initial setup is not easy."
"The current version will not be supported for much longer."
"It's not easy to troubleshoot and we still can't make it work."
"There are some issues with both stability and scalability."
"The solution isn't as stable as we'd like it to be. There are some ongoing issues and therefore Mule has to provide frequent patches. Mule's core IP should be more stable overall."
"From an improvement perspective, there should be fewer coding challenges for users in Mule ESB."
"The documentation needs to be better."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The various features and components for this solution are no longer free."
"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."
"Plan your licensing model (cloud or on-premises or hybrid) that will allow seamless integration with new partners."
"This product is expensive, but it does offer value for money."
"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."
"The pricing must be improved."
"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."
"The price of the Mule ESB commercial version is expensive. However, they have a free community version."
"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 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Real Estate/Law Firm
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
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Find out what your peers are saying about Mule ESB vs. OpenESB and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.