MuleSoft Anypoint Platform Reviews

We are using the Mule Anypoint Platform for multiple clients. One of our clients is the largest retail chain in the US and we are using the solution for integration with E-commerce and for the largest logistics and cloud company in the US for integrating their transport management system. Additionally, we have many manufacturing organizations, where we are integrating their legacy applications, SaaS-based application, SAP database, et cetera.

The most valuable features of the Mule Anypoint Platform are the Flex Gateway, API management, easy-to-use, and connectors. Additionally, they are coming out with improvements to the solution when required.

Mule Anypoint Platform could improve by having better integration with MDM. There are challenges when doing the interaction at this time.

I have been using the Mule Anypoint Platform for approximately three years.

The stability Mule Anypoint Platform is good. It is highly reliable.

Mule Anypoint Platform is a scalable solution.

We have approximately 100 people using this solution in my company.

This solution is suitable for medium to large-sized companies.

The support from the Mule Anypoint Platform is good. They have a dashboard where you can see all the APIs. In case of any issues, you can send them different alerts, but there is some improvement needed in error handling and log inquiries.

I rate the support from the Mule Anypoint Platform a four out of five.

Neutral

I have previously used Dell Boomi. One of the main differences in features when comparing the Mule Anypoint Platform to other solutions is the availability of connectors. 

Dell Boomi has a slight edge in MDM because it can easily connect. On the EPM side, they are much stronger, whereas, on the data integration side, the Mule Anypoint Platform is much stronger. If you are doing a complex integration, I would give higher marks to the Mule Anypoint Platform. However, if you are doing a medium-scale integration or a simple integration, then Dell Boomi has the edge.

The initial setup of the Mule Anypoint Platform is straightforward. We have done the setup in the cloud and on-premise, and if you follow the steps that are recommended then it is easy.

I have not done deployment myself, but if you start from scratch on a blank server, it can take approximately two to three days for everything to be completed.

I rate the initial setup of the Mule Anypoint Platform a four out of five.

Depending on the agreement that we have with the clients, we sometimes take care of the maintenance, and other times we jointly work with MuleSoft's professional services team.

The pricing of the Mule Anypoint Platform is totally different than Dell Boomi. The Mule Anypoint Platform works on the basis of the volume, whereas Dell Boomi charges on the basis of the connectors that you buy.

The price of the Mule Anypoint Platform works on the basis of volume. For example, there is an API, and based on how much data the API will process the price is calculated on the processing units required. 

For our laptops or personal computers, we have RAM. Similarly, the Mule Anypoint Platform has vCores. The vCore size is calculated on the basis of the number of transactions that API has to process, such as 50,000, 500,000, or 1 million. Based on the transition size, they will tell you how many vCores are required. This could be any amount, such as 0.2, 10, or 50. We are then given a price, and along with that, there are many other factors, other than how many vCores are you purchasing. For example, there could be other additional solutions that need to be purchased and connectors that are not free. 

You could need other licenses, such as ones for Salesforce, there are multiple factors that they don't share.

Mule Anypoint Platform pricing is slightly higher compared to Dell Boomi.

I rate the price of Mule Anypoint Platform a three out of five.

They do not share enough information regarding the full costs.

There is cloud maintenance required for some customized setups based on the client's needs and their network.

My advice to others thinking about implementing this solution is the benefits of the solution depend on the architecture they have. The Mule Anypoint Platform is one of the best integration solutions and they come up with new updates which are required, whereas other solutions, do not have the latest updates. Dell Boomi has not come up with an update in the last year. Mule Anypoint Platform keeps on updating itself with newer versions every four to six months. They have a lot of free connectors. They have bundles so you don't have to buy different licenses. It's easy to use, very easy to configure, easy to install, easy to maintain, very stable, and secure.

I would recommend this solution to someone who is looking for API management and integration with one single license.

I rate Mule Anypoint Platform a nine out of ten

We are an integrator for Anypoint MQ, based on Mule 4.3, with several active customers. The solution is typically delivered by cloud and there are differing kinds of use cases that we see.

If there is an event-driven architecture in place, then we will use Anypoint MQ to connect the different APIs together (such as the Experience APIs, Process API, and the System API) so as to enable a seamless process while minimizing data loss. That's the main use case seen in our work.

It's easy to use and comes as a bundle package with the Anypoint Platform, removing the need for any complex setup.

Anypoint MQ's capabilities are mainly used for messaging purposes, but it doesn't have typical use cases that extend as far as other Message Queue software.

For one, it would be helpful, from an additional features perspective, to see that it can handle large files of any type, whether image files, video files, etc. And if they would include an SFTP solution such as is available in AWS or Azure, this would be an added advantage for our clients.

Stability-wise, it's okay.

With regard to scalability, there can definitely be improvement. To make it more scalable, there needs to be a change in the upper limit of file sizes for messaging purposes. Currently, it can only handle messages up to 10 MB in size. If that could be addressed, I believe it would help those customers who have to handle large files.

From a technical support perspective, we mainly deal with product-related issues. We used to go back to MuleSoft and ask for support, and they provided if the customer had bought that particular piece of support. We needed to raise a ticket first, and based on that, they provided us the solutions.

But for any technical solutions needed, we would provide them, so we would only get support from the MuleSoft product team. In our company, it's our job as an integrator to provide the support.

It's easy to install, since it comes as a bundle package with the Anypoint Platform.

It is a good product, but for the reasons previously mentioned, there are a lot of opportunities to improve this particular piece of software.

I would rate Anypoint MQ a seven out of ten.

With the Mule Anypoint Platform, we have addressed several integration scenarios. For example, when integrating systems like Workday, Oracle, ADS, and QAD, Mule Anypoint Platform has significantly improved API connectivity using its experience API system.

In another case, in the healthcare industry in North America, we faced issues with VDA transactions that occurred over two weeks. We migrated to Mule Anypoint Platform-based APIs, which included scheduling and API connectivity.

The most beneficial features for handling data integration with Mule Anypoint Platform include its ability to integrate seamlessly with other popular platforms like IBM, Dell Boomi, and Microsoft Azure. MuleSoft stands out due to its unique one-point solution for various integration problems, including application and network integration, and its iPaaS services. The

Design Center allows for designing APIs that can be made into reusable assets. Additionally, MuleSoft's capability to handle various technologies, such as Python and Java Spring Boot APIs, and monitor them using the Flex Gateway is valuable.

Regarding API management, MuleSoft offers a gateway facility, including Flex Gateway, which supports API management with robust governance capabilities. Policies like rate limiting, blocklisting, allowlisting, and client ID enforcement can all be managed through the API Manager, providing comprehensive control over API operations.

Mule Anypoint Platform should improve its pricing. In my experience, a customer using the sandbox version couldn't upgrade to the final version because it exceeded their budget.

Another area for improvement is the login mechanism. We need to integrate with third-party products for strong authentication, but it would be better if MuleSoft had its own robust login mechanism.

I have been using the Mule Anypoint Platform for the past seven years.

In terms of stability, the Mule Anypoint Platform is generally stable. Issues arise only when external factors like unstable storage or excessive database loads exist. The platform is reliable and robust, depending on how well our organization manages its resources.

Scalability is crucial in our ability to grow and manage new integrations. With both horizontal and vertical scaling options available in the cloud-based solution, it efficiently handlesincreasing workloads and processing power, supporting our growth.

Customer support from MuleSoft is essential to our operations. They provide crucial assistance post-deployment, ensuring our applications run smoothly.

Positive

The platform is easy to deploy and typically takes about three months to implement.Deployment or maintenance usually requires one architect and one DevOps person for scaling and ongoing maintenance.

Regarding pricing, I believe there could be room for improvement to align with user expectations.

Regarding AI capabilities, the Mule Anypoint Platform is evolving in that direction. While they've made strides with RPA and other AI-related features, I believe there's still progress.

Overall, I would rate Mule Anypoint Platform as nine out of ten. My recommendation to thoseconsidering it would be that if you're looking to scale your business efficiently without extensiveR&D, the Mule Anypoint Platform offers a robust solution ready for deployment, whether on-premises or in hybrid environments.

We performed a patient account integration between our CRM and our ERP. We were managing order integration between the systems. We also manage RMAs between the systems. We have an integration with a specialty pharmacy. We used the tool to capture account and order information from our external partners.

Using the solution was great. It was part of the project that we didn't worry that much about. What I also liked about it was that even though I'm not that technical, I could go in and look at thoughts and events and confirm that the information we were looking for was making it across. I could check at the interface level and lessen the burden on validation within the application.

The instrumentation within the solution is important. The ease of implementation is very important. Our partner development team had little trouble dealing with these diverse systems, with JSON on the one hand and SOAP on the other. The product’s ability to seamlessly translate protocols is great. The API-led connectivity is great.

The reason that we took on the product was that we wanted to learn about it. We wanted to figure out how to use it. A big payoff for this will be in EHR integrations. These systems are all alike, yet they are all different. They all use EPIC, and each installation is a little bit different. It’s a challenge when we go to different hospitals. MuleSoft has made a name for itself in using the integrations.

The price could be improved.

I have been using the solution for three years.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

The tool is highly scalable. We just need to put more money in. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten. The solution is priced per Core. The application's Core can be added. I'm not sure about the final price of the application's Core, but we were buying an additional increment of resources. It's nice that they have it separated like that. There are no technical challenges. We just need to write a check.

We found the customer service to be proficient, engaged, and timely.

Positive

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I rate the ease of setup a nine out of ten. It took us two or three weeks until the first integration started. The deployment was pretty quick. We needed one engineer for deployment. Maintenance requires less than a tenth of an FTE’s time. For new users, it was easy to set up and deploy new APIs to test them. We see fairly quick results.

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. The solution is pretty pricey. There might be something out there that's more expensive. We pay $250,000 per year. It includes the production and non-production environment.

We use the product because it is the best in class and are planning for much expansion. The solution provides good flexibility. I definitely would recommend the tool. I would recommend it based on its capabilities and stability. We were a medical device startup. And so, it made sense for us to spend the extra money to gain a high-quality enterprise-ready solution. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

The solution is a middleware integration tool. It's a deployment part where you deploy your Mule applications and also use Anypoint Studio.

It's like other integration tools like TIBCO. 

Mule Anypoint Platform has a good feature for batch processes where the internal tool handles everything. You don't have to handle it by yourself. If you have a large amount of data that needs to be processed, then batch processing is a very helpful part of Mule.

The product is quick to deploy and pretty straightforward. 

It can scale. 

The pricing is pretty good. 

The stability could be better. That said, they are also getting stabilized as part of increasing the versions and working on that. Previously, Mule version 3 was, of course, very unstable. However, now, version four is pretty stable now.

There have not been very good resources to help us find solutions to issues. 

I've been using the solution for around two or three years.

The stability is getting better and continues to improve, however, previous versions were quite unstable. 

It's a scalable product. If you create an image, a docker image, then you can scale it automatically. There are no issues.

We have onsite people who can help with the technical support. They have access to Mule support. I have sent a couple of queries to them, and they have contacted Mule to resolve any issues. I personally have not contacted Mule support directly.

I'm familiar with TIBCO. TIBCO has a PW container edition, and they're similar. However, PW is using expert language for internal and external transformation. Mule is using the database transformation. That database transformation, it's a totally new language. If you want to use the Mule, then you should have experience in that first.

Mule is a very good competitor of TIBCO, and Salesforce has acquired Mule. So the market has also grown drastically for Mule. 

We may have also moved based on the price, of which Mule's is better.

If they used XPath, XML query language, instead of DataWeave, it would be ideal. That way, our users don't need to worry about knowing a different language.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

If you're deploying your cloud hub, then it takes time to deploy. That said, if you have that setup on your private crowd, then it takes a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes. It's very fast.

While I'm not sure of the exact cost, it is reasonable, and less than TIBCO.

We are a Mule partner. 

When working with customers, we use both cloud and on-premises deployments. 

I'd recommend Mule to others. It is good in web surveys, REST APIs, and is easy to use. Also, they need to be aware that with Mule, they will have to understand the  DataWeave expression language. If you use DataWeave expression language, then the processing time and performance also increase.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I've used the application heavily and taken projects to production. I know it well. 

The solution is used in many projects. I'm an IT consultant. I use the tool when there's a need for asynchronous messaging.

It is a nice product to expand the functionality of our event-driven architecture.

The use of ACK is valuable. I can leave a message through the code and take advantage of the feature. I also use DLQ for the retrieval mechanism. We use other codes to reset the queue, apply the circuit breakers, and manage undeliverable messages.

The product does not provide a priority level for the message. It also does not have Topic. It has an exchange instead of Topic. The users request for the Topic functionality. Such functionalities are available in ActiveMQ. There is a limitation of 10 MB for messages. It's something we must take into consideration when we have a large payload. The storage must be expandable. We shouldn’t have to do additional setups for correlation.

I have been using the solution for a few years.

I rate the stability of the tool a nine out of ten.

I rate the scalability of the tool a ten out of ten. All the developers in our organizations are using the solution. The tool is used daily. The usage depends on the projects we work on.

The solution is deployed on the cloud. The deployment can be done quickly. We have to do the configuration through MuleSoft and do the setup.

The product can be deployed in-house. The DevOps team deployed it.

I have also used ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, and Amazon SQS. We chose to work with Anypoint MQ because it is a native solution for my company.

Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

We're using Anypoint MQ for messaging, in different types: from SAP to third party systems, global third party systems, etc. There's a hundred of them.

It's extremely expensive to change things in Anypoint MQ, e.g. we have to go through either Accenture or IBM. IBM will do the changes, but the actual change we ask for costs huge amounts of money. I'm not sure why that is, or whether that's just a contract, but they always complain about multiple changes, regression testing, etc. It sounds like it's a very long winded task just to make a simple change. This is an area for improvement for Anypoint MQ.

Another problem we have with Anypoint MQ is that some of our end systems cannot cope with the throughput. If we put too many messages down to it, then there's a delay to send those messages onto the system that can't take them in as fast, and this means that the queue blows. We have either a 40 gigabyte or 40 megabyte queue space, but if we send 7,000 messages which need to be combined and sent out, the queue blows, because it just can't manage that throughput because the output is so slow. With the memory, we don't have a big enough queue to cope, so there's that problem.

If there was a way around that problem, we could send it. What we need to do is to be able to send 50,000 messages an hour or more, which we can do SAP to SAP, but we haven't found a solution on how to cope with sending it to Anypoint MQ because it blows up, so that's the big problem we have.

What we'd like to see in the next release of Anypoint MQ is for the issue of slow output of messages to be solved. Even if we wrote into disc, e.g. the disc space is cheap, so if you could write the messages to disc and then just feed them out and when the queue is caught up with itself, that would solve our problems. It means we could send MuleSoft all the messages in one go, and then it could drip feed them out.

The additional feature we'd like to see in Anypoint MQ is to be able to write the message queue to disc, to allow for ample queueing of messages, because currently, the output to a particular system is slow.

We've been dealing with Anypoint MQ for 20 years now.

Anypoint MQ has been stable, and it has not caused us any problems.

Anypoint MQ is a scalable solution.

We have not contacted the technical support team of Anypoint MQ, because we have our own internal third parties to deal with any issue that could arise from the solution.

What we've noticed in Anypoint MQ is that it's expensive to change things.

We evaluated Apache Kafka.

I thought we had a problem with our queuing software, and it turned out that it's not the software itself, it's the third party. We're passing the messages on to the third party, and they can only receive it at a certain rate, so we had to drop the Anypoint MQ software down, but it's not actually the MQ software, rather it's the actual third party application that was causing the problem.

As I'm working on the SAP side, I'm not sure if I'm the best person to discuss about the features I like most about the solution.

My advice to others looking into implementing the solution is to first look at what you're trying to achieve, because you've got Anypoint MQ as your queueing software, and then you've got the Apache Kafka software as well, and they do different things. I didn't realize this when I started looking, because I was looking at Kafka thinking that would be the answer to our problem, but it wasn't, because it looks great if you want instantaneous messaging and loads of bandwidth, but you need to do the interpretation of messages.

I'd say, look at what you want it for, because Anypoint MQ seems to be as good as the other options, to be fair. I'd also tell them about the problem I've had with it, and that's not just going to be a problem with Anypoint MQ alone, because I think other systems will have the same problem, e.g. the queuing problem. I'll tell others to really, really look at the application. Anypoint MQ seems to be a standard application, and it's acceptable.

My overall impression of Anypoint MQ in terms of rating it, is seven out of ten, but that's just based on my feeling. I don't have any quantifiable reasons on why I'm giving it that score.

Mule Anypoint Platform is used for the integration of different services or customer databases with Microsoft solutions.

The most valuable feature of the solution is a huge list of available connectors for a lot of different platforms, which we can use very easily.

It would be better if we had a clearer view of the solution's future releases. Mule Anypoint Platform is migrating to a new JDK, and the old JDK won't be supported within a year. Currently, we do not have a calendar or scheduler about when all the connectors will support the new JDK 17.

I have been using Mule Anypoint Platform for about one year.

Mule Anypoint Platform is a pretty stable solution.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

For the moment, smaller clients would consider choosing MuleSoft as their integration platform. As a rule, the Mule Anypoint Platform is more suitable for middle or large clients.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability.

MuleSoft provides custom support for every client. You can list your account and have open tickets if you have any problems. We have pretty solid technical support from MuleSoft.

Positive

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup an eight out of ten.

With ready API, the solution can be deployed within a few minutes. If you don't have an API at all, a day will be enough to deploy a very simple but useful API from scratch.

Currently, MuleSoft is moving from the license type to the pay-as-you-go type. The solution's pricing, as per the old approach, is expensive. That is the main reason why we don't have a lot of small-sized customers. With MuleSoft's new approach, we will have new opportunities to integrate small businesses.

The solution's API Designer and API Manager have improved the management of our client's already established APIs. The most valuable features of the solution are Design Center and Runtime Manager. Mule Anypoint Platform provides some basic security approaches, including HTTPS protocol and secure configuration opportunities.

My recommendation to users is to use already described or already propagated best practices that help very much in development. The best advice for developers is to be part of the community. MuleSoft has a great community, including different channels or meetups that could help you a lot in certain cases. When you have some problems, you can address any developers, and they will be ready to talk to you.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.