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IBM App Connect vs SharePlex 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

IBM App Connect
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (18th)
SharePlex
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (47th)
 

Featured Reviews

Nirav Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior QA Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Cloud workflows have accelerated integrations and now demand better debugging and DevOps support
IBM App Connect provides many features, but there are several areas for improvement. Better debugging and observability would help us track any single transaction end-to-end across steps and connectors. Features such as a step-by-step line view and one-click download for flow execution would be beneficial. Improved CI/CD pipeline and GitOps experience would be valuable. The team wants flows as code and predictable promotion across development, test, and production environments. Stronger native Git integration, export-import functionalities, and first-class pipeline templates like Jenkins, GitHub, and Azure DevOps would be beneficial. More cloud-native, lightweight runtime options would be very helpful. Connector reliability and consistency need improvement because some connectors feel more mature than others, and version changes can break mapping. Pricing and licensing clarity is important because the licensing is complex and can slow down adoption and planning. Some improvement areas include handling very complex structures that the platform currently does not support. Improvements on the DevOps side, particularly providing templates, would be beneficial. The platform is somewhat expensive and hard to predict in terms of cost. Debugging features need to be provided. For CI/CD, the flows are not truly accurate and need improvement.
KW
Oracle DBA at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
It reduces the downtime and migration time exponentially
I would rate SharePlex's high availability, and disaster recovery features highly. It works as advertised in terms of rapid fill-over and switch-over opportunities. It reduces the migration time for a multi-terabyte database to an hour or less because it performs real-time replication. SharePlex reduces downtime and migration time exponentially. Something that could take 12 to 24 hours is cut down to one to two hours. By the time you start to migrate, the only remaining replication is a slight difference in data from the point when SharePlex has shut down, and the application has to also switch over to the new database. It allowed the company to replicate data more transparently. Some of the business executives probably don't even know it's there. It works 100 percent of the time, with little downtime or problems. It provides what is needed. There's little concern about whether or not it functions. It's allowed the company to achieve its objectives with its clients, reducing and minimizing downtime for substantial migrations and upgrades. It can reduce hardware and storage costs, but my company doesn't utilize it with high-availability architecture.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We are using App Connect because it's a more comprehensive solution that can handle many projects."
"There is a friendly interface for configuration, and integration is made easy."
"The solution is fast and supports Open UI 3.0 certification."
"IBM App Connect provides a very easy way to integrate many systems with zero manual code."
"We use IBM App Connect for the integration between the applications."
"One of the most beneficial features is the ability to handle multiple communication technologies, like integrating Kafka flows, which is helpful as other teams heavily use it. Regarding error handling, I initially wrote most of the handling myself. While built-in features for error handling are built-in, it largely depends on the developer. We use a custom solution that catches all exceptions, logs them in a database, and replays them as needed. It has been effective for us for over twenty years."
"The solution is a good product in the integration space and a leader in the market."
"It can handle API conversions with mapping and transformation rules, simplifying the development process."
"I like SharePlex's Compare and Repair tool."
"The core replication and its performance. Performance is crucial, and SharePlex is by far the fastest. The way it handles replication to multiple targets along with basic filtering, as well as from multiple sources to a single target, is very efficient."
"Try it out in your production and you won't be disappointed."
"The synchronization, data backup, and data transfer are all valuable features of the solution."
"Because of the volume of the transactions, we heavily use a feature that allows SharePlex to replicate thousands of transactions. It's called PEP, Post Enhancement Performance, and that has helped us scale tremendously."
"There are some capabilities within SharePlex where you can see how the data is migrating and if it still maintains good data integrity. For example, if there are some tables that get out of sync, there are ways to find them and fix the problem on the spot. Since these are very common issues, we can easily fix these types of problems using utilities, like compare and repair. So, if you find something is out of sync, then you can just repair that table. It basically syncs that table from source to target to see if there are any differences. It will then replicate those differences to the target."
"SharePlex has been a good fit for us because it was not as expensive compared to GoldenGate, it was stable compared to AWS DMS, and it was a good product for what we were looking for and within our budget too."
"The core features of the solution we like are the reliability of the data transfer and the accuracy of data read and write. The stability of the solution is also excellent."
 

Cons

"I've been using IBM App Connect for about twenty-five years, and while I like it, there are some areas for improvement. The trace policy is ridiculous, and the biggest issue is the cost—it's expensive. People would use it much more if the price point weren't so high."
"Critical issues are resolved quickly by technical support, but there is a delay in response to items related to the product, deployment, or low production environments."
"The product should improve its support."
"It is not easy to deploy. It requires someone with a high level of knowledge in the solution to deploy it, not just anyone can do it."
"More connectors could be available for the product as some of the third-party software doesn't have default connectors."
"If I call within the next two hours, someone should be there at least on a call to support me."
"IBM App Connect should improve security features."
"One more important point is that if IBM improves its CI/CD capabilities, it will make a big difference. Right now, I have to create my own CI/CD setup from scratch for every client, which is inefficient."
"I don't know how easy it would be to change the architecture in an already implemented replication. For example, if we have a certain way of architecting for a particular database migration and want to change that during a period of time, is that an easy or difficult change? There was a need for us to change the architecture in-between the migration, but we didn't do it. We thought, "This is possibly complicated. Let's not change it in the middle because we were approaching our cutover date." That was one thing that we should have checked with support about for training."
"I would like the solution to have some kind of machine learning and AI capabilities."
"I would like the solution to have some kind of machine learning and AI capabilities. Often, if we want to improve the performance of posting, we have to bump up a parameter. That means we need to stop the process, come up with a figure that we want to bump the parameter up to, and then start SharePlex. Machine learning and AI capabilities for these kinds of improvement would tremendously help boost productivity for us."
"The reporting features need improvement. It would be very good for users to have a clear understanding of the status of replication."
"I would like more ability to automate installation and configuration in line with some of the DevOps processes that are more mature in the market. That would be a considerable improvement."
"For its function in relation to replication (i.e. filtering), I'd give it a six or seven out of 10. GoldenGate has much more functionality by comparison."
"I don't know how easy it would be to change the architecture in an already implemented replication."
"The reporting features need improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is very expensive if we want to scale."
"Initially, App Connect was quite expensive because the cost was based on the number of processors we used. However, it's now based on containers, which means we can be more specific about our consumption and get a better price."
"IBM App Connect's pricing is high compared to other products."
"The cost depends upon the consumer."
"The licensing cost for IBM App Connect is very high."
"The solution's pricing isn't cheap, but you can get good discounts based on your competitive deal."
"App Connect is not cheap."
"The price could be better."
"It is not as expensive as Oracle GoldenGate and has worked really well within our budgets."
"It's really good value for the money. There are some things they could improve on, but in terms of the pricing, features, and support, as a holistic package, we are not thinking of anything else at this point in time."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
6%
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise21
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM App Connect?
Configuration time varies by implementation. For insurance companies with simple JDBC connections, the process is straightforward. However, companies requiring multiple configurations for ODBC, JDB...
What is your primary use case for IBM App Connect?
IBM App Connect serves as our integration platform, allowing us to connect application systems and data without heavy load or heavy coding. In my current organization, we use the AWS cloud, and IBM...
What advice do you have for others considering IBM App Connect?
We are using the private cloud deployment on AWS. My company purchased IBM App Connect through the AWS Marketplace. IBM App Connect is a very user-friendly tool, and we can very easily integrate wi...
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Also Known As

IBM Cast Iron
Dell SharePlex, SharePlex
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

United Way of Allegheny County, Saint-Gobain CPS, Ricoh, SunTrust Banks Inc.
Bodybuilding.com, Priceline.com, Ameco Beijing, Viasat, SK Broadband
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