Mule ESB vs OpenESB comparison

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Mule ESB

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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: March 2025).

Mule ESB vs. OpenESB

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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

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

OpenESB

Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

14th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of Mule ESB is 21.0%, down from 22.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenESB is 1.4%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Featured Reviews

PurbayanSaha

Technology Consultant at Ernst & Young

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.

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PaulPerez

Integration Architect at Pymma consulting

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.

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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

"The most valuable features of Mule ESB are its ease of use, documentation, ease to adapt to newer security and vulnerabilities, and a lot of help available. Additionally, there is a lot of flexibility, many patches available, and they provide APIs. They are a market standard."

"The most valuable feature is the Salesforce integration."

"The solution doesn't require much code writing and we can develop APIs very easily."

"The solution has a good graphical interface."

"Mule Expression Language"

"I like that Mule ESB provides fast and good technical support."

"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."

"We can use Java expressions anywhere in the flow."

More Mule ESB pros

"The core is very stable."

"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 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

"Lacking some connectors that could be included."

"There are some features on the commercial version of the solution that would be great if they were on the community version. Additionally, if they added more authorization features it would be helpful."

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

"The payment system needs improvement."

"I would like to see support for BPM in the next release of this solution."

"It would be much more beneficial if the solution included AI and business process management."

"The solution's setup needs to be a bit more straightforward and its support needs to respond faster."

"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."

More Mule ESB cons

"The documentation needs to be better."

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

"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."

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"Plan your licensing model (cloud or on-premises or hybrid) that will allow seamless integration with new partners."

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

"The licensing is yearly, and there are additional fees for services."

"The pricing must be improved."

More Mule ESB pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

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 ...

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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 30% of the time

Oracle Service Bus vs Mule ESB

Compared 12% of the time

IBM B2B Integrator vs Mule ESB

Compared 8% of the time

webMethods.io vs Mule ESB

Compared 7% of the time

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Oracle Service Bus vs OpenESB

Compared 33% of the time

More OpenESB Competitors

Product Reports

Mule ESB

Download Mule ESB product report

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.

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Mule ESB vs. OpenESB