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Frends vs MuleSoft API Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

Frends
Ranking in API Management
37th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
MuleSoft API Manager
Ranking in API Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Frends is 0.7%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MuleSoft API Manager is 4.2%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
MuleSoft API Manager4.2%
Frends0.7%
Other95.1%
API Management
 

Featured Reviews

Lauri Vanhanen - PeerSpot reviewer
Development Manager at ELO
Integration platform has simplified logistics workflows and has streamlined complex order handling
The best aspect is that it is very easy to use. The UI is very intuitive, and you can learn it very quickly because the basic principles are straightforward and easy to search. Frends has a great UI, but the UI is missing role-based permissions. You can filter your integrations by roles and add several users to roles, but in the UI, the functionality for this kind of management feature is not optimal. User management or user role management could be improved.
D.Rajesh Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Improved Integration Efficiency and Potential for Further Enhancements in Monitoring and User Experience
The policies in MuleSoft API Manager are significant features. We get the policies by default, with more than 25 out-of-the-box policies. If any additional requirement exists specific to the customer, there is a custom policy framework. We can build the policy according to our requirement, and deploy and enable it at the API Manager level to consume across different business groups, environments, or organizations altogether within the platform. Developing the custom policy is not challenging; you just need to follow the custom policy framework to implement. The custom policy and the different levels of SLAs of the API Manager are notable. Regarding the monitoring side of the API Manager, MuleSoft provides substantial monitoring with logs, offering search capability, raw data accessibility, and different subscriptions. With the top tier, integration with third-party platforms such as ELK or Splunk becomes unnecessary because all search capabilities, dashboards, and functional monitoring can be built within the platform itself. This is excellent from the monitoring perspective, and there have been recent improvements focusing on observability. For DevOps, if you want to make your continuous integration and continuous deployment effective, irrespective of the tool, there are options to integrate. For example, you can use the Maven plugin, platform APIs, or CLI to build your end-to-end DevOps cycle.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the benefits is the speed of creating something new. Second, it's replacing the old integration quite fast. Then it is like the visibility of the integration and the possibility to see what is happening in the integration."
"The best aspect is that it is very easy to use."
"The user-friendly interface for constructing integration solutions is also a notable benefit."
"The product has valuable features for version control."
"The most effective features of Anypoint API Manager for policy enforcement include security enforcement, rate limiting, client enforcement, traffic control, service level agreement policies, and caching policies."
"It's provided a complete and architecturally sound solution for building publicly facing APIs that can be consumed and invoked by client-side devices, such as mobile."
"Technical support has been helpful."
"The most valuable features of the solution for securing APIs stem from the tool's ability to allow users to deploy policies."
"It is highly stable, and that's why MuleSoft is booming."
"Anypoint API Manager's most valuable feature is its connectors."
"The integration process was straightforward."
"Offers good integration and flexibility."
 

Cons

"It is a new application and lacks some essential features compared to competitors."
"One of the primary areas for improvement is a more mobile-friendly interface for the control center."
"Another enhancement includes the monitoring part. It would be nice to have some sort of maybe mobile app on which we can see how integrations are running if there are some problems, and getting those alerts on the mobile would be really nice."
"Logging should be better."
"I would like to see MuleSoft expand the range of APIs you can manage with it beyond HTTP, GIPC, and others."
"From an API management perspective, MuleSoft's API Manager is not as powerful as some other tools available."
"The log management for this solution needs improvement."
"I think licensing costs should be reduced, it's quite expensive."
"I'd like to see improvements in API Exchange. Currently, we can only expose APIs publicly. I want to categorize some APIs and expose them just to internal stakeholders. It would be great if they could log in to a developer portal, see our current APIs, view Swagger or RAML docs, and try request-response payloads."
"The initial setup, if you go back three or three and a half years, definitely, for us, was complex."
"In the next release, Mulesoft should make it easier for people who don't have the native connectors to build their own rather than using the APA from the power platform or outlet."
"Their studio performance is very slow, it requires a lot of memory, and should be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is quite fair."
"Recent changes in their pricing have removed this benefit, moving towards process-specific pricing."
"It's not very expensive, reasonably priced. There are no additional costs."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"The licensing fees are approximately $80,000 USD per year and there are costs for additional functionality, as well as premiums for connectors to systems such as Oracle and SAP."
"MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager is an expensive solution."
"The pricing is quite reasonable and affordable."
"The price of Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager is very high."
"The product is highly priced compared to other advanced software. It is affordable only for tier-one customers."
"The solution looks more expensive on the surface because it builds all the functions into one core component or into an integrated suite of components."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise44
 

Questions from the Community

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The Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager was designed with its users in mind. Though it is a reasonably complex piece of software, it is easy to install and upgrade. While there are different things that ...
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I have found that Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager is the best integration tool out there for API management. It is easy to implement and learn; it provides several options for deployment, (including ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager?
When it comes to pricing, I find it always expensive. The pricing is high, which is the biggest point where some customers are hesitant about adopting it, and their deployment strategy is also more...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Anypoint API Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Coca-Cola, Splunk, Citrix, UCSF, Vertu, State of Colorado, National Post, TiVo, Deakin, LLS, Oldcastle Precast, ParcelPoint, Justice Systems, Ube, Sumitomo Corporation, PacificComp, University of Witwatersrand, Groupe Initiatives, Camelot, Panviva
Find out what your peers are saying about Frends vs. MuleSoft API Manager and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.