FME vs TIBCO BusinessWorks comparison

Safe Software and TIBCO are both solutions in the Data Integration category. Safe Software is ranked #23 with an average rating of 8.5, while TIBCO is ranked #17 with an average rating of 8.4. Safe Software holds a 1.8% mindshare in DI, compared to TIBCO’s 1.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Safe Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of TIBCO users who would recommend it.

FME

Read 7 FME reviews

2,778 Views
2,167 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

TIBCO BusinessWorks

Read 28 TIBCO BusinessWorks reviews

3,269 Views
1,667 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

FME

TIBCO BusinessWorks

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

FME and TIBCO BusinessWorks compete in the data integration and transformation category. While FME gains an advantage due to affordability and strong community support, TIBCO BusinessWorks stands out for its extensive feature set, justifying its higher cost.

Features: FME is noted for its spatial data integration, compatibility with a variety of data formats, and intuitive drag-and-drop interface. TIBCO BusinessWorks offers extensive connectors, high-performance integration activities, and comprehensive process automation.

Room for Improvement: FME could benefit from enhanced enterprise service bus capabilities and improved scalability features. TIBCO BusinessWorks might improve in simplifying its deployment process, enhancing its user interface, and reducing initial setup complexity for smaller teams.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: FME is easy to deploy and popular among smaller teams due to strong community support and detailed documentation. TIBCO BusinessWorks, with its complex deployment ideal for large-scale environments, provides enterprise-grade service and tailored customer support.

Pricing and ROI: FME offers a cost-effective solution with lower initial setup costs, delivering substantial ROI, particularly beneficial for projects involving spatial data. TIBCO BusinessWorks, while more expensive, justifies the cost with significant process optimization and scalability, ensuring high ROI for enterprise-level operations.

To learn more, read our detailed FME vs. TIBCO BusinessWorks Report (Updated: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

FME vs. TIBCO BusinessWorks

August 2025

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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

FME

Ranking in Data Integration

23rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

TIBCO BusinessWorks

Ranking in Data Integration

17th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of FME is 1.8%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TIBCO BusinessWorks is 1.1%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Alan Bloor

Geographic Information System Developer at Public Sector

Great for handling large volumes of data, but it is priced a bit high

When I do coding, I think about every single function. Some of these functions can be very elementary, like doing a substring or some capitalization. But FME removes all that coding because it's a transformer, so the time to develop an application to get to a point where you're producing results is decreased massively. It used to take weeks and months to develop software, and now I can use something like FME, and within one day, we get results. We can look at and validate data. We make minor subtle changes to the workbenches to improve it. We can share the workbenches. We don't have to use GitHub or anything else.

Read full review

Moustafa Fares

Senior Analyst at Etisalat

Connects systems securely, simplifies data communication, and benefits from AI integration potential

I would like to see an AI project with BusinessWorks. I haven't worked with cloud architecture using BusinessWorks, so I would like to work with it as a cloud architect. I am still learning the documentation, so I don't have a complete experience with TIBCO. The learning curve takes time compared to webMethods.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"All spatial features are unrivaled, and the possibility to execute them based on a scheduled trigger, manual, e-mail, Websocket, tweet, file/directory change or virtually any trigger is most valuable."

"It has standard plug-ins available for different data sources."

"FME is spatially aware and understands how to deal with the conversion of spatial objects and their attributes."

"It has a very friendly user interface. You don't need to use a lot of code. For us that's the most important aspect about it. Also, it has a lot of connectors and few forms. It has a strong facial aspect. It can do a lot of facial analysis."

"The most valuable feature of FME is the graphical user interface. There is nothing better. It is very easy to debug because you can see all steps where there are failures. Overall the software is easy to optimize a process."

"We make minor subtle changes to the workbenches to improve it. We can share the workbenches. We don't have to use GitHub or anything else."

"From my reseller perspective, the best features in FME are the ease of operation and the fact that it works."

"It's a great software application for the middleware use cases to connect the front channels to the back ends in a secure and safer way."

"Customer support is very efficient."

"Good TIBCO BusinessWorks features are the admin console and the ability to roll back to the previous version."

"The high availability, tolerance, and load balancing features are top-notch. Its scalability features are also pretty cool."

"Areas for improvement would be the cloud fitness of the product and the ease of migrating to newer versions."

"The most valuable feature is the integration."

"It is very valuable for my work, helping me communicate with other branches, parse data, and change data formats to respond to the front channels with the correct format."

"It is user friendly, it's not complex."

More TIBCO BusinessWorks pros

Cons

"The one thing that always appears in the community is the ability to make really easy loops to loop through data efficiently. That needs to be added at some point."

"We are looking at the possibility of using Glue instead of FME, using the native AWS product."

"Improvements could be made to mapping presentations."

"FME can improve the geographical transformation. I've had some problems with the geographical transformations, but it's probably mostly because I'm not the most skilled geographer in-house. The solution requires some in-depth knowledge to perform some functions."

"To get a higher rating, it would have to improve the price and the associated scalability. These are the main issues."

"FME's price needs improvement for the African market."

"Its price can be improved. For medium enterprises, it is a very expensive tool. In the market, you won't get many resources for this solution. You won't find many developers in the market very easily. The latest version of TIBCO (6.4 or 6.x) is not very stable. It has got many issues. We have raised this with TIBCO, and they are taking a lot of time to come up with a fix, which is making us move away from this product. Some of the performance-tuning aspects are also missing in version 6. They should provide performance-related fixes, which will be helpful for the customers. If you are migrating from the current version to the container-supported version, it is quite expensive. The product has evolved, but it is very pricey. That's one of the challenges. They have provided all the features that are there in other products, but this is a platform upgrade. The platform has completely been changed from 5.x to 6.x, and we can't use the same environment. We can't run both versions on the same server as VM. The development environment is entirely different. In version 5.x, there was a proprietary designer. Now, it has common plug-ins developed on top of Eclipse."

"The communication protocols could be improved."

"Improve Business Studio's stability to further minimize development time."

"The learning curve takes time compared to webMethods."

"Cloud fitness is lacking"

"TIBCO BusinessWorks needs to improve its digital IDs and data processing capabilities. It will benefit small and medium businesses."

"Could be more user friendly in the development area."

"I'd like to see a new cloud approach in the next release. They need to work on integrations, stability and management issues on their cloud platform."

More TIBCO BusinessWorks cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's price is reasonable."

"FME Server used to cost £10,000; now it can cost over £100,000."

"We used the standard licensing for our use of FME. The cost was approximately €15,000 annually. We always welcome less expensive solutions, if the solution could be less expensive it would be helpful."

"TIBCO BusinessWorks is expensive."

"I give the cost of the solution a four out of ten."

"TIBCO licensing is yearly and very costly for a company like ours."

"The solution is too expensive. It's one of the most expensive solutions out there, particularly because there are so many open-source competitors on the market. I don't know the exact numbers, however."

"I think BusinessWorks is more expensive compared to other products. We have the ELA, so at least we have some sort of bargain or discount with that. But for a start-up, it's very expensive compared to other ESBs."

"The payments made for service are the only addition to the standard licensing fees that we pay for the solution."

"The cost depends on the components required."

"My understanding is that the licensing is very costly."

More TIBCO BusinessWorks pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

31%

Energy/Utilities Company

13%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about FME?

We make minor subtle changes to the workbenches to improve it. We can share the workbenches. We don't have to use GitHub or anything else.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FME?

The pricing is really bad. Last year, they rebranded the whole pricing structure. It used to be moderately priced at about £400 per user per year. Now they've changed the whole thing, and it's expe...

See all answers

What needs improvement with FME?

The one thing that always appears in the community is the ability to make really easy loops to loop through data efficiently. That needs to be added at some point. There must be a technical or comm...

See all answers

How does TIBCO BusinessWorks compare with Mule Anypoint Platform?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether TIBCO BusinessWorks or Mule Anypoint platform integration and connectivity software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Mule...

See all answers

What do you like most about TIBCO BusinessWorks?

The ability to link to different technologies is valuable to us.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TIBCO BusinessWorks?

Pricing is for an enterprise application, so the company pays for it with a company license. Everything comes packaged with the license.

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

FME

August 2025

Download FME product report

Buyer's Guide

TIBCO BusinessWorks

July 2025

Download TIBCO BusinessWorks product report

Overview

FME is the data integration platform with the best support for spatial data. Run workflows on the desktop or deploy them in a server or cloud environment.

Safe Software

TIBCO BusinessWorks allows to connect applications, whether on-premises or in the cloud, providing proven reliability and scalability, out-of-the-box. With a drag-and-drop graphical development environment, TIBCO BusinessWorks eliminates the pain and cost of point-to-point application integration, connecting and unifying business processes across applications, data sources, and APIs, with access to real-time data across all your platforms.

TIBCO

Sample Customers

Shell, US Department of Commerce, PG&E, BC Hydro, City of Vancouver, Enel, Iowa DoT, San Antonio Water System

Euler Hermes, QSuper, Scandinavian Airlines

Buyer's Guide

FME vs. TIBCO BusinessWorks

August 2025

Free Report: FME vs. TIBCO BusinessWorks

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