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IBM DataPower Gateway vs Mule ESB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 2025

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 DataPower Gateway
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (9th), SOA Application Gateways (1st), API Management (12th)
Mule ESB
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 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.
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."
"I like that it is very stable, and we never experience any downtime."
"The product is stable...The product is scalable."
"I like all of the features in this product and it does what it's supposed to do."
"The most valuable feature is the security appliance, it's very secure."
"The performance is good. It's been very stable."
"The scalability of the solution is good."
"The most valuable features for our business include the ability to monitor and log data transactions and handle multiple request at an enterprise level."
"Mule ESB helps a lot with our microservice architecture that we're trying to build, and it is still our go-to technology when it comes to that, so it's very promising for us."
"The API management capabilities are exemplary. You can apply security policies to most applications, monitor logs, and get analytical data on request reception, response generation time, associated APIs, endpoints, and inbound and outbound messages."
"The cloud and integration abilities are most useful allowing us to use applications such as Salesforce and DataWeave."
"The most valuable feature of Mule ESB is data transformation, i.e. our interacting with different systems and orchestrating for our business needs."
"I'm not using ESB directly. It is the integration layer, so it's running under the hood. However, the conversion and transformation performance is excellent. Anypoint Enterprise Security is also solid."
"The solution offers multiple deployment options."
"I like that Mule ESB provides fast and good technical support."
"The most valuable features of Mule ESB are its ease of use, documentation, ease to adapt to newer security and vulnerabilities, and a lot of help available. Additionally, there is a lot of flexibility, many patches available, and they provide APIs. They are a market standard."
 

Cons

"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."
"Making it more user-friendly would be an improvement."
"The programming language is only supported in XSLT and Gateway script."
"They should improve the solution's clustering features."
"The user interface or the application development perspective and customization of the tool could be a little better."
"The DCDR process should be less complex."
"They should add features to manage API integrations."
"Some pre-packaged connectors for integration with various applications, such as SaaS offerings, would be a useful addition."
"Mule ESB could be more user-friendly. I think users must learn about the architecture before they start coding. The price could be better. In the next release, I would like to see an EDIFACT integration."
"Mule ESB is more into the latest REST APIs, not much into the SOAP web services. Developing is all about web services and not easy with Mule."
"It's not easy to troubleshoot and we still can't make it work."
"I would like to see support for BPM in the next release of this solution."
"Lacking some connectors that could be included."
"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."
"There are some issues with both stability and scalability."
"We would like the ability to use our own code. This would allow us to develop customizations with ease. Additionally, it would be nice to have more analytics or insights on the exchanged information between databases."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive in comparison to other products."
"Most customers' use case budgets are not inlined with the price of IBM DataPower Gateway. It is too expensive."
"The cost is very high and requires all five components in the API management solution."
"The product is expensive."
"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."
"It's expensive when you compare it with others."
"The tool's initial costing is expensive for small banks and financial institutions."
"The price of the Mule ESB commercial version is expensive. However, they have a free community version."
"Mule ESB is a costly solution. We pay approximately $80,000 annually for the system. The cost of the number of instances, annual subscription, and cloud hosting services are expensive."
"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."
"Mule ESB is an expensive solution."
"The various features and components for this solution are no longer free."
"Regarding licensing and pricing, I find it somewhat flexible. They are more flexible with larger customers compared to small and medium ones, as their licensing model depends on ports and other factors. Large customers benefit from more flexibility in implementation and renewal compared to smaller ones."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Insurance Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
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 – web services, REST (JSON), and others. This flexibility simplifies things.
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 smaller companies. But it is okay for enterprises. So, the price could be more fl...
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 code, it should give recommendations automatically by incorporating AI so I can wri...
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 MuleSoft Anypoint Platform on cloud / on-premises and hybrid modes and on PCE/RTF ...
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 the best fit for our organization. Ultimately we decided to choose IBM Integratio...
What do you like most about Mule ESB?
The solution's drag-and-drop interface and data viewer helped us quite a lot.
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity
Ube, PacificComp, University of Witwatersrand, Justice Systems, Camelot
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Mule ESB and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,481 professionals have used our research since 2012.