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Mule ESB vs OpenESB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 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

Mule ESB
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
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
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of Mule ESB is 20.6%, down from 22.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenESB is 1.4%, up from 1.3% 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

"The cloud and integration abilities are most useful allowing us to use applications such as Salesforce and DataWeave."
"The solution improved my company by modernizing the way we offer services and improving the user experience."
"It is easily deployable and manageable. It has microservices-based architecture, which means that you can deploy the solution based on your needs, and you can manage the solution very easily."
"The connectivity the solution provides is excellent. There are often too many systems that we have to integrate and this helps with that."
"The most beneficial features of Mule ESB are the control plane and runtime plane."
"It's open source, and there are a lot of community resources. Mule ESB makes it easy to connect to other software applications."
"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."
"The setup is straightforward."
"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."
"The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration."
 

Cons

"Documentation is cryptic, product releases are far too frequent, and upgrades become troublesome."
"Mule ESB isn't as secure as IBM. Financial companies go with IBM for that reason."
"I would like to see support for BPM in the next release of this solution."
"Community editions need more attention."
"Limitation on external subscribers to listen to the messages on the bus."
"The initial setup could be more straightforward."
"In order to meet the new trend of active metadata management, we need intelligent APIs that can retrieve new data designs and trigger actions over new findings without human intervention."
"The current version will not be supported for much longer."
"Regarding its management, a web console being able to synchronize distributed instances would be great."
"The documentation needs to be better."
"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."
"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."
 

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 is expensive. In my next project, we had to go to other vendor."
"The various features and components for this solution are no longer free."
"Mule ESB is an expensive solution."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is expensive."
"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
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
 

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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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: April 2025.
847,862 professionals have used our research since 2012.