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IBM DataPower Gateway vs OpenESB 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)
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (7th), SOA Application Gateways (1st), API Management (10th)
OpenESB
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
13th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 5.1%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenESB is 3.0%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM DataPower Gateway5.1%
OpenESB3.0%
Other91.9%
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
 

Featured Reviews

AkshaySawant - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at CSB Bank Ltd
Security features excel but development limitations emerge
We are using the IBM DataPower Gateway for security purposes. As per the development perspective, there are some limitations with IBM DataPower Gateway because it only supports XML and XSLT language, but it does not support the Java language. This is the only limitation of the IBM DataPower Gateway. For the authentication and authorization purpose, we can use the IBM DataPower Gateway. It's a very good product. We are mostly using the IBM DataPower Gateway for security purposes and load balancing purposes. If we are handling the load for a particular server, then we can use the IBM DataPower Gateway. The IBM DataPower Gateway is mostly used for security purposes. If we have some APIs and we are using some security for those APIs, then we can use it. It can also be used as a load balancer. It's also used for certificate management, user management purposes, authentication, and authorization. For routing, the IBM DataPower Gateway has multiple URL-based routing and content-based routing capabilities. If we have multiple URLs, then we can use an XML script. Using the XSLT language, we can configure multiple URLs and implement URL-based routing. Content-based routing means if we have multiple requests, we can route the request to a particular URL. For this, we need to use the XSLT language only. We can't use XML, Java, or other scripting languages. With IBM DataPower Gateway, we are using all the APIs. All APIs have been configured on the gateway. We have configured the particular TLS profile and some TLS client profiles as well. Using that TLS profile, we have configured the APIs and authentication. We have configured some tokens also, including JWT tokens and different types of auth tokens. There is also a rate limiting feature which we use for handling API loads.
PP
Integration Architect at Pymma consulting
Easily define choreography and orchestration with this process-oriented solution
We provide contracted services for our customers that include coordinating with providers and implementing the solution.  A current project includes using the solution to deploy 200 microservices.  The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration. This feature…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is very easy to work with."
"It can look for the various security threats, productions, payload scanning, and perform routing based on the content type."
"Support for PCA and non-PCA services is valuable."
"You don't have to have a separate DMC proxy because DataPower Gateway is an appliance and will take care of a lot of security features. These include data validations, encryption, as well as XML or any type of scripting or security threats that are present."
"It's high-speed and it can be remotely administered via an API."
"The most valuable features for our business include the ability to monitor and log data transactions and handle multiple request at an enterprise level."
"The solution was very stable, we had no issues with it in that sense, it didn't crash or freeze and there were no bugs or glitches."
"We are mostly using the IBM DataPower Gateway for security purposes and load balancing purposes."
"The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration."
"One of the most valuable features is being able to implement business processes while keeping track of the design from BPMN to a BPEL Implementation."
"One of our clients is a signature company and developed on a classic Java enterprise application using OpenESB, and in one year they saved £20,000,000 on development and maintenance."
"OpenESB pushes the organization to clearly define service boundaries and interfaces. So it motives the business and the development teams to clearly define their business services and processes they want to implement. OpenESB supports fine and coarse-grain granularity for the services and supports top-down and bottom-up approaches for the services, processes definition, and composition."
"One of the most valuable features is being able to implement business processes while keeping track of the design from BPMN to a BPEL Implementation."
"ESL Gaming used OpenESB for its scalability and processes 1 billion of messages daily with a large configuration deployed on a private cloud."
"Millions of people were connecting every month on the system and there were no issues."
"The core is very stable."
 

Cons

"From the development perspective, it has limitations because it only supports the XSLT language. It does not support multiple languages."
"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."
"It is a costly product."
"The product should be more adapted to the DevOps process."
"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."
"They should add features to manage API integrations."
"Small and medium-sized companies might look for cloud-hosted applications due to the cost."
"Its support services could be better."
"The documentation needs to be better."
"The documentation of the product must be improved. It could be tricky to find the right documentation on a topic since the documentation is spread in many places."
"The documentation of the product must be improved. It could be tricky to find the right documentation on a topic since the documentation is spread in many places. I advise the new joiner to contact the community to get entry points and additional documentation. Tutorial and Video must be present to take up the product."
"The documentation needs to be better — maybe they could add more accurate tutorials."
"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."
"Regarding its management, a web console being able to synchronize distributed instances would be great."
"The Studio is a good tool based on NetBeans, but some of its features have to be improved, liked local schemas management."
"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."
"The appliance is a bit on the expensive side for the workloads that are not too high."
"Most customers' use case budgets are not inlined with the price of IBM DataPower Gateway. It is too expensive."
"The product is expensive."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The tool's initial costing is expensive for small banks and financial institutions."
"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."
"The licensing cost is very expensive."
"There are two versions. The first is the community version, which is free and contains the last part of the feature, but if you want to get the Enterprise version, you'll have to pay €60,000 which covers support and two instances on production."
"The Community Edition is a full product you can use in production, it does not have limitations like other alternatives."
"The cost for the prediction instrument is high because it is charged per instances based on prediction, but the rest of the solution is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise18
No data available
 

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 don't know if the current licensing cost of IBM DataPower Gateway is high, but I think it's acceptable. I don't have any complaints about it.
What needs improvement with IBM DataPower Gateway?
I noticed that the Gateway Script libraries could be improved, as they are not covering everything I need.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DataPower Gateway vs. OpenESB and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.