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IBM DataPower Gateway vs IBM Integration Bus vs Mule ESB 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 5.9%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Integration Bus is 21.9%, up from 21.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Mule ESB is 19.3%, down from 22.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
 

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi - PeerSpot reviewer
Security features meets compliance needs and offers MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) that simplifies integration efforts
While I like IBM products, I'm not an evangelist. I work with Java, Microsoft ASP.NET, and various technologies. I'm not tied to any specific vendor. However, I do find IBM to be a bit greedy. It's a large, profit-driven company. The support team is mostly based in India, and they follow a very structured process and protocol. Sometimes, it feels like playing ping pong with them – lots of back and forth before the problem gets escalated. You might even have to get your sales rep involved to push things along. For me, the support it could be better. Indian support teams aren't inherently bad, but with IBM, it feels impersonal. They respond, sure. But if it's a complex technical issue, they might ask you a lot of questions that just seem designed to waste your time. Sometimes it feels like they hope you'll get frustrated and solve the problem yourself.
Ashraf Siddiqui - PeerSpot reviewer
Helpful for complex integrations because it has tools and functionality to integrate with other systems
Everything needs to be improved. As far as integration and the cloud are concerned, things are moving to the cloud side. When you use Kubernetes and similar technologies, IBM Integration Bus doesn't greatly facilitate these environments. Maybe I don't know enough about that, but I feel that when it comes to the DevOps environment, the tool needs to be deployed on production in a way that's just like pods. Cloud integration needs to be more facilitated with the DevOps environment. This IBM technology needs to adapt because in the recent world, in the real world, we see that everything is just a cloud pod. Whenever you need to scale anything, you just put some cloud and pod and improve it, make any server and deploy it. But in IBM Integration Bus, there is a problem because we can't do this as easily. In short, IBM needs to more emphasize or more integrate with the cloud environments as well, similar to DevOps. There are limitations in IBM Integration Bus when it comes to DevOps.
PurbayanSaha - PeerSpot reviewer
Has API-led architecture and provides a unique, user-friendly, and scalable architecture for hosting APIs
There's room for improvement in multi-file transfer functionality. It's not convenient when using MuleSoft, and it should have better capability for handling large amounts of data. For example, applications like GoAnywhere can handle huge chunks of data, so the tool should also have something to facilitate that aspect of integration.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What I like most is the stability."
"The solution is very easy to work with."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The solution is stable."
"Support for PCA and non-PCA services is valuable."
"Its initial setup was straightforward."
"I like the tool's security. Also, all functionalities are integrated within on platform."
"The performance is good. It's been very stable."
"Having the solution come from IBM you know you are receiving a product of quality in components and in the services, it is very good."
"Content is easily infiltrated in the eclipse infrastructure."
"The product is usually very easy to deploy."
"The product helps efficiently work with different connectors from different back-end systems."
"I have found IBM Integration Bus is very useful because it can integrate multiple backend applications."
"What I like best are the monitoring features."
"Seamlessly integrates your different applications."
"The error handling and monitoring functionalities of IBM Integration Bus are very good."
"I am impressed with the product's connectors and scalability."
"I like that Mule ESB provides fast and good technical support."
"The most powerful feature is DataWeave, which is a powerful language where data can be transformed from one form into another."
"The product offers a community edition that is free of cost."
"Once it is started, we don't see any problems on a day to day basis."
"The setup is straightforward."
"The most beneficial features of Mule ESB are the control plane and runtime plane."
"The most valuable feature for Mule is the number of connectors that are available."
 

Cons

"It is a costly product."
"The two biggest issues of this solution are the complexity and the maintenance procedures."
"Scripting needs improvement. It's hard for our customers."
"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."
"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."
"In the next release, I would like to see the product price reduced. It should be cheaper."
"Small and medium-sized companies might look for cloud-hosted applications due to the cost."
"The memory footprint should be minimized."
"Session management can sometimes hand forcing server reboots."
"One drawback that I have found is that there are issues with using the Java connector."
"Recently, there was a lot of instability when selecting the solution they needed for testing."
"We decided to move away from IBM Integration Bus for IT technical refreshments."
"I would like to see more metered rest and API support. IBM is already working on it on Version 11, but it still needs improvement."
"The solution needs instruction or guidance."
"Its documentation is currently lacking. We have different environments where we use our configuration services, but we are not able to find documentation about how to deploy the local code to the server and how to set it up on a server level. I would like more documents from IBM that explain which variables should be in your machine while building a project, and when you deploy the code into the server, what should be their values. There are some variable values. I could not find such documentation. While working on a project, I developed the code on a local machine, and while deploying the code to our test environment, I made a couple of mistakes. We had to change some values at the server level, but we couldn't find any documentation regarding this, which made the task difficult."
"I would like to see support for BPM in the next release of this solution."
"I cannot say that installation with Kubernetes needs to be improved to be less tricky, but more information is needed from MuleSoft. They do not help much with Kubernetes, so we should have a person who is well-versed in Kubernetes to handle this."
"It needs more samples. Also, the dependency on Maven should be removed."
"From my perspective, Mule ESB is lightweight, but it can be improved when it comes to the agility of the system."
"The Anypoint platform consumes a lot of memory, and it would be great for developers if it were more lightweight."
"In an upcoming release, I would like to see more additional concept for exception handling, batch processing, and increased integration with other application."
"There are limitations with the subscription model that comes with the product."
"In India, particularly in the banking sector, clients do not prefer cloud solutions due to regulatory and compliance requirements."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 licensing cost is very expensive."
"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."
"Most customers' use case budgets are not inlined with the price of IBM DataPower Gateway. It is too expensive."
"The tool's initial costing is expensive for small banks and financial institutions."
"The cost is very high and requires all five components in the API management solution."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The cost of this product varies from customer to customer and the relationship with IBM, including how many offerings from IBM are already being used."
"The price of the license could be cheaper."
"The licensing model of IBM Integration Bus is good. It's a yearly subscription. However, the price is depending on the model that you choose. If it's a Cloud version, then you can pay per month or you can pay it annually upfront. There are three-year options available, but it depends on what deployment you have."
"The maintenance and support of the product are very expensive."
"IBM is expensive."
"As customers, we always try to buy things as cheaply as possible. But the price for the IBM Integration Bus is fine. When we compare it to competitors, it's pretty much the same. However, there are a lot of open-source integration platforms coming to the market as well. So overall, the price is fine as far as licensed products are concerned."
"IBM Integration Bus is expensive."
"Pricing is on par with its competition."
"The price is reasonable considering the features we receive."
"You will not get any support from Mule ESB's team for the tool's community edition...You can get support with the licensed version of Mule ESB."
"The solution is expensive."
"This product is cheaper than some offered by other vendors, although there is a problem because you have to pay for some third-party adapters."
"The various features and components for this solution are no longer free."
"The licensing is yearly, and there are additional fees for services."
"Most of the challenges that I had with this solution were for smaller customers. There is not a good licensing model or pricing model. It is more expensive than other solutions, and that's the downside of MuleSoft. I had to be creative to be able to sell it to the business, but we did. This is something they have to work on because for large companies, it's affordable, but for small and medium businesses, it's very hard to sell."
"Plan your licensing model (cloud or on-premises or hybrid) that will allow seamless integration with new partners."
"I think the price is very high. If you use TIBCO BW, the license is for the CPU usage, then the IPS, and support. I also think the license for the product is a one-time expense."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Insurance Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 – ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM DataPower Gateway?
I would rate the pricing a two out of ten, with one being high price, and ten being low price. It's high-priced for s...
What needs improvement with IBM DataPower Gateway?
The DCDR process should be less complex. AI should improve developer efficiency and effort. Whenever I am writing cod...
Migration from IBM Integration Bus to Mulesoft ESB for a large enterprise tech services company
I was previously part of the Oracle SOA/OSB development team. In my current capacity I architected solutions using Mu...
IBM Integration Bus vs Mule ESB - which to choose?
Our team ran a comparison of IBM’s Integration Bus vs. Mule ESB in order to determine what sort of ESB software was t...
What do you like most about IBM Integration Bus?
The message queue, like, message queue connectors. Then they have a built in connectors for most of the systems, like...
What do you like most about Mule ESB?
The solution's drag-and-drop interface and data viewer helped us quite a lot.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Mule ESB?
Pricing is higher compared to other solutions, and the licensing costs are high.
What needs improvement with Mule ESB?
I cannot say that installation with Kubernetes ( /products/kubernetes-reviews ) needs to be improved to be less trick...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity
Salesbox, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Road Buddy, Swiss Federal Railways, Electricity Supply Board, The Hartree Centre, ESB Networks
Ube, PacificComp, University of Witwatersrand, Justice Systems, Camelot
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Salesforce, Oracle and others in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Updated: May 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.