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Azul Zulu vs IBM DataPower Gateway 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

Azul Zulu
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
AI Customer Experience Personalization (21st), AI Content Creation (58th)
IBM DataPower Gateway
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (5th), SOA Application Gateways (1st), API Management (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Infrastructure category, the mindshare of Azul Zulu is 3.7%, down from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 3.3%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Infrastructure Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM DataPower Gateway3.3%
Azul Zulu3.7%
Other93.0%
Application Infrastructure
 

Featured Reviews

BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Standardized our Java estate and have reduced licensing costs while maintaining strong support
Azul Zulu's ability to allow us to standardize our Java estate on a single and well-supported platform stands out as one of its best features. This standardization simplifies our compliance audits and ensures all our applications receive timely security updates.Azul Zulu positively impacts our organization by providing a platform that allows us to standardize Java on a well-supported platform. Without the high cost associated with other proprietary vendors, Azul Zulu provides an excellent platform for running our applications.
AkshaySawant - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at CSB Bank Ltd
Security features excel but development limitations emerge
We are using the IBM DataPower Gateway for security purposes. As per the development perspective, there are some limitations with IBM DataPower Gateway because it only supports XML and XSLT language, but it does not support the Java language. This is the only limitation of the IBM DataPower Gateway. For the authentication and authorization purpose, we can use the IBM DataPower Gateway. It's a very good product. We are mostly using the IBM DataPower Gateway for security purposes and load balancing purposes. If we are handling the load for a particular server, then we can use the IBM DataPower Gateway. The IBM DataPower Gateway is mostly used for security purposes. If we have some APIs and we are using some security for those APIs, then we can use it. It can also be used as a load balancer. It's also used for certificate management, user management purposes, authentication, and authorization. For routing, the IBM DataPower Gateway has multiple URL-based routing and content-based routing capabilities. If we have multiple URLs, then we can use an XML script. Using the XSLT language, we can configure multiple URLs and implement URL-based routing. Content-based routing means if we have multiple requests, we can route the request to a particular URL. For this, we need to use the XSLT language only. We can't use XML, Java, or other scripting languages. With IBM DataPower Gateway, we are using all the APIs. All APIs have been configured on the gateway. We have configured the particular TLS profile and some TLS client profiles as well. Using that TLS profile, we have configured the APIs and authentication. We have configured some tokens also, including JWT tokens and different types of auth tokens. There is also a rate limiting feature which we use for handling API loads.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We achieved specific outcomes from using Azul Zulu by reducing our Java licensing and support costs by approximately 70% when compared to our previous Oracle contract."
"I like the API Gateway feature."
"The performance is good. It's been very stable."
"Support for PCA and non-PCA services is valuable."
"It can look for the various security threats, productions, payload scanning, and perform routing based on the content type."
"It is a scalable solution."
"What I like most is the stability."
"The solution is stable."
"If you have an API application in your organization that you want to make safe and secure, in addition to your existing WAF or load balancer, this product comes with all those capabilities:"
 

Cons

"Improvements for Azul Zulu could include more automated tools for unused code visibility integrated directly into the standard portal to help further optimize our cloud footprints."
"The components that they include in the product that are, in fact, a WTX, really need to be removed from the product because they tend to fail."
"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."
"They should add features to manage API integrations."
"The IBM community does not have much engagement from the IT community in Saudi Arabia and developers for this solution are difficult to find."
"I would like the tool to improve its training."
"DataPower isn't the most user-friendly tool. It is not an easy tool to use. Some things could use better wizards to guide you through processes."
"An area for improvement in IBM DataPower Gateway is its price point because it's a relatively expensive product. Sometimes, when the customer use case is just a very small subset of what's being offered in IBM DataPower Gateway, then the product can be expensive, making my company lose some of the opportunities because of the expensive pricing. A lower price point for IBM DataPower Gateway, even if that results in a less feature-rich version, would be appreciated. In terms of additional features that I'd like to see in the next release of IBM DataPower Gateway, nothing specific comes to mind because IBM constantly improves its standards and provides quarterly updates to the product, so it's quite fine."
"The programming language is only supported in XSLT and Gateway script."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."
"The solution is expensive in comparison to other products."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The cost is very high and requires all five components in the API management solution."
"The licensing cost is very expensive."
"This product is a bit expensive as IBM products are costly assets. However, for enterprise customers it is a worthwhile investment."
"IBM DataPower Gateway is quite expensive to get resources to work on this product. If the price could be cheaper, I think that will make it a little bit better and easily accessible to smaller clients. Then it could compete with other solutions that are available in the market. There's a whole lot of other solutions available that work well and are cheaper than IBM's products."
"The total cost of IBM DataPower Gateway would depend on the configuration, but in my experience, it can amount to 60,000 Euros per box, even for the virtual version. Usually, customers need high availability and a non-production environment, so the total price for IBM DataPower Gateway can be quite a lot. It can be 200,000 Euros or a similar figure."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Retailer
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Insurance Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Azul Zulu?
Improvements for Azul Zulu could include more automated tools for unused code visibility integrated directly into the standard portal to help further optimize our cloud footprints. The other core J...
What is your primary use case for Azul Zulu?
Azul Zulu serves as our primary Java runtime, providing a stable, 100% open-source, and certified solution for our production microservices. We utilize it to ensure cross-platform compatibility acr...
What advice do you have for others considering Azul Zulu?
My advice for others looking into using Azul Zulu is to perform a pilot migration with one non-critical application first. You will likely find that it is truly a drop-in replacement, which will gi...
What do you like most about IBM DataPower Gateway?
The MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) is great because it allows you to easily expose services using various protocols – web services, REST (JSON), and others. This flexibility simplifies things.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM DataPower Gateway?
This product is definitely expensive because if any issue occurs in the live environment or production environment, and our organization faces some issue with the IBM DataPower Gateway, then the IB...
What needs improvement with IBM DataPower Gateway?
The developer portal should be an integrated part of IBM DataPower Gateway to improve it. I think it is fine as is, and maybe no other additional features should be included in the next release. My...
 

Also Known As

No data available
WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Kyocera, OKI, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Voya Financial
RBL Bank, Availity
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, IBM, F5 and others in Application Infrastructure. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.