IBM DataPower Gateway vs Red Hat Fuse comparison

IBM and Red Hat are both solutions in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category. IBM is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.6, while Red Hat is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.0. IBM holds a 6.0% mindshare in E, compared to Red Hat’s 7.0% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

IBM DataPower Gateway

Read 29 IBM DataPower Gateway reviews

6,131 Views
981 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Red Hat Fuse

Read 24 Red Hat Fuse reviews

1,801 Views
1,765 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM DataPower Gateway

Red Hat Fuse

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 2025

IBM DataPower Gateway and Red Hat Fuse are competing products in the application integration and data management category. IBM DataPower Gateway has the upper hand in security and gateway functionalities, while Red Hat Fuse excels in integration capabilities and flexibility.

Features: IBM DataPower Gateway's most valuable features include advanced security, API management, and efficient service virtualization. Red Hat Fuse is recognized for its open-source environment, seamless integration, and flexibility, supporting multiple programming languages and cloud environments.

Room for Improvement: IBM DataPower Gateway could improve by streamlining its deployment process, reducing complexity, and enhancing support for non-IBM environments. Red Hat Fuse would benefit from enhancing its user interface, improving detailed documentation, and strengthening security features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Red Hat Fuse offers a simpler deployment process due to its modular architecture and cloud accessibility, making it adaptable in hybrid scenarios. IBM DataPower Gateway, with more complex deployment, offers extensive configuration options and robust customer service.

Pricing and ROI: IBM DataPower Gateway has higher initial setup costs due to its enterprise-level security features, delivering significant ROI for secure data handling. Red Hat Fuse provides a cost-effective solution with lower upfront costs, offering high flexibility and scalability for potentially higher ROI in diverse integration environments.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Red Hat Fuse Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Red Hat Fuse

July 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 864,155 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in other categories

Application Infrastructure (9th), SOA Application Gateways (1st), API Management (12th)

Red Hat Fuse

Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 6.0%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Fuse is 7.0%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi

Co-Founder at tenekit

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.

Read full review

Kaushal Kedia

Technical Architect at Accenture

Offers a single console for all applications and supports Camel routing

Containerization is one key area where the product can improve, but it probably has already improved in JBOS integration. On a few occasions, our company's production team faced an issue with Red Hat Fuse; the screen displayed that the containers had gone down while, in reality, they were running in the background. The user interface and the back-end code were not in sync in the aforementioned situation, which our organization frequently faced while using Red Hat Fuse. But at our company, we were using an older version of Red Hat Fuse in which we faced the issues. From the JBOS end, the product was very frequently changed from Red Hat, and it was difficult for our clients to keep investing money in every upgrade. Six or seven years back, Red Hat Fuse was one of the best solutions.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is very easy to set up and configure, even for users with no prior experience."

"The product's most valuable features are AAA policies and security features."

"The most valuable feature is the security appliance, it's very secure."

"It can look for the various security threats, productions, payload scanning, and perform routing based on the content type."

"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."

"The solution is scalable, our customers are mostly South African banks and they handle mostly transactions with this solution."

"My company has a good impression of IBM DataPower Gateway. What I like about it is that because it's an appliance, it's a turnkey solution that's very fast and out of the box. Compared to other gateways, I also like that IBM DataPower Gateway is function-rich. For example, for one of the projects, there was a need for specific transformation and security features available in IBM DataPower Gateway out of the box, so my team just needed to configure the appliance. There was no need for separate development, and I found it quite neat. Another valuable feature of IBM DataPower Gateway is that it's easy to integrate with other products."

"I like the tool's security. Also, all functionalities are integrated within on platform."

More IBM DataPower Gateway pros

"Red Hat Fuse's best features are that it's very easy to set up and maintain."

"The solution is stable. We have gone for months or years without any issue. There are no memory restarts, so from my point of view, it's very stable."

"The features I found most valuable in Red Hat Fuse are the OSB framework, containerization, and the integration of Apache technologies such as the NQ channel, CXF, etc. These are the features that are very prominent in the solution. Red Hat Fuse also offers flexibility, so it's another valuable characteristic of the solution."

"With a premium, one can get support 24 hours."

"The solution has more tooling and options."

"The most valuable part of Fuse is the fact that it's based on Red Hat Apache Camel. It is really good that it already comes with so many different connectors. That makes it relatively easy to use. We use their XML definition to define the routes, making it really easy to define the routing."

"The stability has been good."

"I found it was quite easy to set up and implement."

More Red Hat Fuse pros

Cons

"They should add features to manage API integrations."

"Scripting needs improvement. It's hard for our customers."

"Its support services could be better."

"Traceability could be improved, especially for business operations. The traceability of the transactions could be an improvement point for DataPower to work on. It would be better if they provided JSON support. JSON protocol data has changed format. It started performing internal transformation to JSONx. This might be an additional complexity."

"In terms of OEM support, it is poor. If I raise a CBRT one, as per the SLA, they should respond in one hour, however, sometimes it takes four or five hours to respond."

"The programming language is only supported in XSLT and Gateway script."

"They should improve the solution's clustering features."

"The IBM community does not have much engagement from the IT community in Saudi Arabia and developers for this solution are difficult to find."

More IBM DataPower Gateway cons

"What needs to be improved in Red Hat Fuse is on the development side because when you use it for development purposes, it lacks a user interface compared to what MuleSoft has, so it's a bit difficult for users."

"The pricing model could be adjusted. The price should be lower."

"The stability of the solution is an area with a shortcoming that needs to be improved."

"Red Hat is not easy to learn. You can learn it but you sometimes need external expertise to implement solutions."

"My company doesn't have any experience with other messaging tools, so it's difficult to mention what areas could be improved in Red Hat Fuse, but it could be pricing because I find it expensive."

"Currently, the main point of concern for us is how flexible it is to cater to different requirements. It should be more flexible."

"What could be improved in Red Hat Fuse is the deployment process because it's still very heavy. It's containerized, but now with Spring Boot and other microservices-related containers, deployment is still very heavy. Red Hat Fuse still has room for improvement in terms of becoming more containerized and more oriented."

"For improvement, they can consider the way we collaborate with other applications...Right now, in Red Hat Fuse, everything is not available under one umbrella."

More Red Hat Fuse cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive solution."

"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."

"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."

"It's expensive when you compare it with others."

"The product is expensive."

"The licensing cost is very expensive."

"This product is a bit expensive as IBM products are costly assets. However, for enterprise customers it is a worthwhile investment."

"The cost is very high and requires all five components in the API management solution."

More IBM DataPower Gateway pricing and cost advice

"Our license for Red Hat Fuse is around $27,000 per year, which is very expensive."

"The solution doesn't have independent licensing."

"The most important feature of Fuse is the cost. It is open source and a cheap option for an ESB. So, most of the clients in the Middle East and Asian countries prefer this ESB. Other ESBs, like MuleSoft and IBM API Connect, are pretty expensive. Because it is open source, Red Hat Fuse is the cheapest solution, providing almost every integration capability."

"We are paying around $24 million across five years."

"After doing some Googling and comparisons, the main standouts were MuleSoft and Red Hat Fuse. One of the big factors in our decision to go with Fuse was the licensing cost. It was cheaper to go with Fuse."

"Red Hat Fuse saved us money. It is a lot easier to license for cloud deployments."

"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."

"Red Hat Fuse is an expensive tool, though I cannot answer how much it costs as that's confidential."

More Red Hat Fuse pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

864,155 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

29%

Insurance Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Red Hat Fuse?

The process workflow, where we can orchestrate and design the application by defining different routes, is really useful.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Red Hat Fuse?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Red Hat Fuse?

Our company used Red Hat Fuse to integrate layers of numerous applications. The solution has also been used in our organization for orchestration purposes of multiple microservices over the years. ...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM API Connect vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 35% of the time

Apigee vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Azure API Management vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon API Gateway vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 6% of the time

Kong Gateway Enterprise vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM DataPower Gateway Competitors

IBM Integration Bus vs Red Hat Fuse

Compared 28% of the time

JBoss ESB vs Red Hat Fuse

Compared 19% of the time

Mule ESB vs Red Hat Fuse

Compared 19% of the time

Oracle Service Bus vs Red Hat Fuse

Compared 16% of the time

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator vs Red Hat Fuse

Compared 11% of the time

More Red Hat Fuse Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway

April 2025

Download IBM DataPower Gateway product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Fuse

July 2025

Download Red Hat Fuse product report

Also Known As

WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower

Fuse ESB, FuseSource

Overview

IBM DataPower Gateway is a robust, secure next-generation enterprise-grade single multichannel API gateway that supplies dynamic access, integration, control, and outstanding security. The solution is available in a broad range of workload capabilities, including application programming interface (API), service oriented architecture (SOA), B2B, cloud, web, and mobile. These dynamic capabilities ensure users are able to quickly increase the reach of an organization's critical IT resources to new channels, which will provide shareholders, team members, and clients with safe, secure access at all times.

DataPower Gateway is very flexible and is widely available in virtual, cloud, traditional, physical, Docker, and Linux form factors.

IBM DataPower Gateway Features

IBM DataPower Gateway has many value-added features. Some of these features are included below:

Control: The solution provides decision point authorization and authentication for all standards, including Lightweight Direct Access Protocol (LDAP) and Open Authorization (OAuth), which allow for better access control across an organization’s entire network.
DataPower dashboard: The dashboard is specifically designed to enhance performance and determine problematic processes. The solution provides intuitive real-time performance transparency to diagnose operational and performance anomalies and offer repair and restoration recommendations.
Enhanced messaging: Users are able to easily mediate messaging and protocols by incorporating the best of today’s traditional and modern application standards.
Integration: IBM DataPower Gateway offers super fast mainframe connectivity, database connectivity, transport protocol bridging, content-based routing, and any-to-any message transformation, ensuring secure and immediate connect service.

IBM DataPower Gateway Benefits

IBM DataPower Gateway provides many benefits. Some of those benefits include:

Flexibility: The solution is easy to use and configure and provides for a pleasant, intuitive overall user experience. The solution can immediately be used out of the box, which makes overall process management simple.
Protection: The solution provides sturdy continuous service protection and application performance using robust powerful routing and traffic control.
Security: The solution’s enterprise-grade De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) ready gateway enables users to enforce the desired runtime application security across all messaging protocols.
Profitability: The solution’s design ensures significant reduction of development costs in addition to the streamlining of overall operations. Users are able to achieve reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and experience a near-immediate ROI.

Reviews from Real Users

“My company has a good impression of IBM DataPower Gateway. What I like about it is that because it's an appliance, it's a turnkey solution that's very fast and out of the box. Another valuable feature of IBM DataPower Gateway is that it's easy to integrate with other products.”- Bálint T., Solution Manager at Intalion

“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. From a security point of view, being an appliance in the DMC zone, IBM DataPower Gateway will take care of the entire security angle for the infrastructure.” - Sathyan K., Founder/Director at perfTech Solutions Pvt Ltd

IBM

Red Hat JBoss Fuse is a lightweight, flexible integration platform that enables rapid integration across the extended enterprise - on-premise or in the cloud. JBoss Fuse includes modular integration capabilities, an enterprise service bus (ESB), to unlock information.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity

Avianca, American Product Distributors (APD), Kings College Hospital, AMD, CenturyLink, AECOM, E*TRADE

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Red Hat Fuse

July 2025

Free Report: IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Red Hat Fuse

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Red Hat Fuse and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

864,155 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Red Hat Fuse report.

See our list of best Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) vendors.

We monitor all Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.