Mule ESB Reviews

Flexibility and high performance.

I can perform integrations with any environment and scenery as well as growth in apps integration, is an agnostic tool architecture ie can generate components on different architectures are JEE or .Net.  

Mule ESB has a lot components and tools that apply integration patterns making it easier to development without much knowledge of patterns

It allows communication between different applications with different protocols. It's also helped solve business integration issues.

Mule ESB is the heart of applications that required routing and improvement of messages such as electronic invoicing

The documentation is not extensive and is limited to examples which are too basic.

We've used the tool for about six years.

• Writing your complex business logic as a simple workflow which can be understood by not so technical people
• Hot deployment of those workflows, which helps in automation and self-learning/healing.
• Provides a variety of connectors: SalesForce, Twitter, SAP, Facebook, and WebService consumer. Most of them come for free with the Community Edition.
• Async/concurrent execution of services within a flow
• Logging

We had to design a complex diagnostic and analysis tool that catered to different ERPs. For example, connecting to different types of data sources and listening from different types of services (over Web and FTP).

Business services for diagnostics should be modified by admin/functional people and applications should be updated on-the-fly without any down time.

The Mule runtime engine served the purpose and we developed a drag-and-drop workflow designer (web app) that is built on top of Mule to make it easy for admins to create and edit services.

I’ve been using Mule ESB for 18 months.

We have had no issues with stability.

We did have scalability issues. It demanded more RAM at times, when there were a larger number of requests while listening over FTP. This is the case with any web container.

I am a Community Edition user, so I can’t comment about the enterprise support by Mule. However, you will not get an immediate response for your queries in any of the technical forums.

I did not use any ESB earlier, but this is the best Community Edition ESB available in the market. However, we abused it as a workflow engine.

To get an initial setup is straightforward.

1. Write a simple HTTP-based listener workflow.
2. Print whatever you send in a context path in a browser.
3. Dump it in a standalone runtime.
4. Start it.

I would advise using the Community Edition if you are developing an application as an additional service to a customer or a non-critical Tier-2 application. You can do this without support.

Apart from support and a few additional connectors, the enterprise edition is not so different from CE.

I was not part of choosing this solution.

Don’t abuse it. Be clear if you want a Mule application to solely solve your business problems, or if you want it as an add-on to solve a few problems that your main application can’t solve.

You may get into scalability issues if you are not clear about this basic difference.

• Routing
• Enrichment
• DataWeave
• Choice of connectors
• Light weight containers
• Packaging and deploying
• API management
• Scalability and load balancing

• Ability to integrate disparate systems with a seamless movement of data on-premises and in the cloud
• Gives the power to make decisions and quick market penetration
• Provides the time to build and release new features
• Has Agile driven builds

• Limitation on external subscribers to listen to the messages on the bus.
• VM queues and memory/thread management need more stability.

I have been using this solution for over five years.

Not major issues but there are some rare version compatibility issues with connectors.

We did not encounter any stability issues.

No issues with scalability. Especially the Cloud deployments can scale on demand and are seamless and reliable.

Customer SLAs are one of the top priorities at MuleSoft and they have been supportive in every situation.

I found technical support to be very resourceful and experts are at hand.

We switched because this solution was found to be cost effective, freely available for community edition, and an easy transition from any programming background.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward with few easy steps.

In-house

Get your basics right about your requirements and plan ahead especially w.r.t volumes, any premium connectors to be purchased and a rough estimate on integration touch points to get some idea on the overall cost.

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

We looked at Apache Camel, Fuse ESB, Dell Boomi, and TIBCO.

Plan your use cases and set your expectations on the features that need to be implemented.

It is an ESB that can deploy seamlessly on-premises and in the cloud with strong API management and governance and has a strong integration with open source products like JBPM and Drools if these features are part of your requirements.

We normally use the API-led connectivity approach. We get the architecture and follow the basic rules and principles that Mule has.

We have had our research analysis team do six months of work looking into if this solution was going to benefit our organization and they determined it fit perfectly into our business. 

The cloud and integration abilities are most useful allowing us to use applications such as Salesforce and DataWeave. Additionally, the exception handling is good. We have experienced zero downtime since moving to this solution.

In an upcoming release, I would like to see more additional concept for exception handling, batch processing, and increased integration with other application.

I have been using the solution for the past five years.

The solution is very stable we have not had any issues

The scalability is good. We have a banking application running worldwide through the solution which attracts many users.

The installation is straightforward.

I rate Mule ESB a nine out of ten.

The most valuable features are the connectors, DataWeave, and the way it simplifies the application development and deployable files.

Connectors:

• Being a Java developer, I have experienced how much logic and coding one needs to put in while accessing the database.
• With the DB Connectors developer, I just need to place the query, and in some cases the drivers, if Mule doesn't provide out-of-the-box support.
• With the HTTP Connector and the APIkit router with RAML, managing the resources and handling is made easy.
• With Mule's expected release in Q3 of 2017, generating RAML would also be made easy.

DataWeave:

• With good knowledge of DataWeave operators, anything can be achieved in a couple of lines of code, which otherwise would be time consuming in Java.

It has reduced interdependency.

The Mule IDE (Integrated Development Environment) could be more stable. For example, in Anypoint Studio, when we add some components and then remove them, they don't get deleted from XML in the background. It gives a duplicate error when we try to add them another time. However, this has been fixed with Anypoint Studio 6.

I have used this solution for around a year.

The older versions of Mule IDE, Anypoint Studio 5.x.x are more unstable.

There were no scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 4.5/5.

The setup was pretty straightforward.

This is an affordable product.

Since most organizations are now going digital and opening up their resources via APIs, companies should explore using this solution.

Mule ESB acts as an intermediary that assists with integration between multiple layers.

Mule ESB is quite lightweight.

Everything runs in Java, which is a useful feature.

There are some issues with both stability and scalability.

I have experienced some issues with clustering.

We have been using Mule ESB for probably three years.

The stability of this product can be improved.

I have had a couple of issues with scalability. Our use case has traffic that depends a lot on the SDK, so there are a lot of users.

The LAN team has been in contact with technical support.

Prior to Mule ESB, we were using an IBM solution that was pretty good. Mule ESB is cheaper but I would choose the IBM product instead.

The installation and setup had been completed before I joined the company.

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.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

I use ESB to do integrations for a company called Pelindo. Pelindo is a company that's a terminal operator. They are involved in logistics, have many partners, and require transaction detection and a payment gateway.

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

Mule ESB could be more user-friendly. I think users must learn about the architecture before they start coding. The price could be better. In the next release, I would like to see an EDIFACT integration.

I have been using Mule ESB since 2013, so nine years. 

Mule ESB is stable, but sometimes the traffic is unstable because the transaction rate increases and the server is obsolete.

Technical support is fast and good.

Positive

I think the initial setup was straightforward.

I have experience installing this solution for my company. I can also maintain  Mule ESB by myself.

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. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Mule ESB an eight.

We implemented the Mule solution for our orchestration. We use it to follow up with the customer so the online order gets orchestrated to the target automated system.

The features that I have found most valuable are that the product is updated regularly and Mule's framework. Overall the performance is good.

For our current solution, I think what Mule provides out-of-box is a sufficient product.

As for what can be improved, in my experience the SMPT connectors need some improvement. 

It definitely takes some amount of integration knowledge but it is still pretty easy to learn. But I would request that the documentation be more informative. That would help the development community to understand the solution better, to deal with whatever challenges they face and ensure they'll be able to solve them on their own. 

The integrations are complicated so maybe that aspect of the solution should also be made simpler to use so that it wouldn't require such experienced resources to build a more complex integration.

Additionally, there are limitations with the subscription model that comes with the product. If you subscribe to the platinum subscription, you get more benefits. Now there are limitations in keeping the logs and the ability to handle the max of 30 days. They could improve that.

Lastly, they could provide us a bit more coding features.

I have been using Mule ESB for past one and a half years.

In terms of stability, we did found some bugs which we reported to Mule support, but overall I would say it's good.

Mule ESB's scalability is pretty good. It performs well.

In terms of numbers of people using the solution, actually Mule ESB plays an integrated role, so none of the users directly use it. But otherwise if you ask the production team and the development team, I would say close to 20 members are using this platform.

We definitely plan on increasing usage for Mule ESB because our customer is starting to do more AP's on the platform.

I think customer support is good. The support team responds to us, but due to some challenges in the product core, we are still waiting for them to respond to some issues.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I know that the setup is straightforward, but I did not do it myself. One person from our team did it. Everything is straightforward and pretty easy, including the deployment and the promotion from one level to another level.

I would definitely recommend Mule ESB for others to evaluate when they are choosing a product.

On a scale of one to ten, I would definitely rate Mule ESB an eight.

For it to be a higher rating they would need to improve the recording logs and encoding feature.