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IBM DataPower Gateway vs SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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 API Management
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (4th), Application Infrastructure (6th), SOA Application Gateways (1st)
SEEBURGER Business Integrat...
Ranking in API Management
23rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
Business-to-Business Middleware (6th), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (14th), Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 3.9%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

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.
VARUNKUMAR - PeerSpot reviewer
Great end-to-end integration, data mapping, and communication protocols
At this moment, everything is working fine. When we are talking to them, when we are trying to bring all this mapping in-house, right now, SEEBURGER is doing everything for us. However, when we are thinking of going onto the cloud, so they are not using any of AWS or Azure which are more stable. They have their own private cloud. That's the reason we did not go ahead with managing everything by ourselves or moving into the cloud. They said that they're going to be doing it within the next two years, having access to Azure and AWS. That would be something we would like to see.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is easy to use, easy to install, and it's resilient for high availability."
"I like the API Gateway feature."
"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."
"I like that it is very stable, and we never experience any downtime."
"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 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."
"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."
"It has enabled digital business processes. It's the connection between our ERP system and the rest of the company. We were able to automate processing invoices digitally like an inbound invoice and FastPay payments."
"We can use it to script and monitor processes."
"I like that the tool has all the adapters — all the possible protocols that are in the industry. You pay for those adapters but at least it's all in one package. You don't have to get another tool or application to support another partner."
"What would have been a manual process of transmitting data items around between us and third-parties has been automated. SEEBURGER BIS handles the automation and mapping side of the communications. The automation, along with the efficiency around time and cost, has improved our organization. Around 20,000 messages a month have been automated. These typically would be financial/order transactions and confirmations in invoicing that have been automated."
"If SEEBURGER plans to do something, they will meet their target. We haven't been disappointed by them at all. For example, we had six trading partners to onboard and they said, "We'll make it happen," and they did make it happen. They did exactly what they said they would do. That's a really positive thing."
"One of the things that SEEBURGER always touts is their ability to do "any to any" formatting... it doesn't matter if you want to take a CSV file or an XML file or a flat file or a PDF file or a structure EDI file; you can transform it from one format to another - any to any or even to the same format - which is a really nice feature."
"With SEEBURGER BIS, you can string as many different activities together in your workflows as you want. You can put them in any order, like a piece of code. One leads into the next, which leads into the next. It is just very flexible from that vantage point. This makes it so easy to use and reduces the number of moving parts that you need to have. It is just a lot less frustrating not having to conform to how some other vendor software works."
"SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is simple to use and straightforward."
 

Cons

"They should add features to manage API integrations."
"An area for improvement in IBM DataPower Gateway is its price point because it's a relatively expensive product. Sometimes, when the customer use case is just a very small subset of what's being offered in IBM DataPower Gateway, then the product can be expensive, making my company lose some of the opportunities because of the expensive pricing. A lower price point for IBM DataPower Gateway, even if that results in a less feature-rich version, would be appreciated. In terms of additional features that I'd like to see in the next release of IBM DataPower Gateway, nothing specific comes to mind because IBM constantly improves its standards and provides quarterly updates to the product, so it's quite fine."
"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."
"Making it more user-friendly would be an improvement."
"The programming language is only supported in XSLT and Gateway script."
"I would like the tool to improve its training."
"Small and medium-sized companies might look for cloud-hosted applications due to the cost."
"The two biggest issues of this solution are the complexity and the maintenance procedures."
"A person whom I work with, and is not very technical, found the setup complex, as there are a lot of steps."
"There might be some improvements they could make to the portal, but they're not anything that stops me from working."
"There are a lot of service packs during the year. I know that part is the process for updating features, but sometimes it's difficult to update service packs every month."
"The speed of development needs improvement. If you acquire any customization, it can be a slightly slow process. I would like to see more flexibility around customizations. The time frame right now depends on the sophistication and customization, but we have to go through a process of getting them to develop, implement, and test it. This might take a couple of weeks. If it was a simpler system to customize, the time could probably be cut by half or down by even 25 percent of what it would normally take."
"Java is very old technology and they should move away from it, to anything that's better."
"The initial set up was done by SEEBURGER consulting. It can be complex due to various factors, such as server settings, database settings, and security settings."
"Their traditional model is a vendor flow. We are looking to do a customer-based flow, which which require significant development from SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). We are working with them to do this using their WebEDI. It is a brand new area for them, but it could be an option in the future."
"There are some aspects at the front, the actual queries that you use, that could be improved. They're all very minor to be honest."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Most customers' use case budgets are not inlined with the price of IBM DataPower Gateway. It is too expensive."
"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 is an expensive solution."
"The appliance is a bit on the expensive side for the workloads that are not too high."
"The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."
"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 product is expensive."
"The solution is expensive in comparison to other products."
"We pay for a maximum number of setups, then we pay per customer map, and we pay maintenance on each one of those. BIS provides the flexibility to pay as you grow. The price of each customer map is €200 and the hourly rate for maintenance is fairly reasonable."
"We pay maintenance of between $75,000 and $100,000 per year, per box."
"Sometimes it seems a little pricey, especially when some of the stuff is available through freeware, like SFTP communications... It costs a lot more money to buy this stuff from SEEBURGER but I think it's worth it in the long run."
"I had a problem at one time with their invoicing. I told them, then we worked on the process and improved it. They installed the connection between SAP and SEEBURGER BIS in Europe first. This was awhile ago. When I came along, I became involved in the project and started working with them. Every time that I made a request, the work was done well, but I was not receiving my invoices. I knew I had to pay for the work and was trying to find someone to send me the invoices or a report of what was being done. From that end, it was really not working. After a few years, I was complaining and not happy. At the end of the year, they would come with a long list of invoices to pay, which was really bad. So, I asked for a change. We worked on the process, and since five years ago, I have worked with SEEBURGER based in North America. Now, when I have a question, I know who to contact. They send me a report with invoices every month. They really reacted to my concern, and we improved the process. Since then, I have had no problem."
"The cost-based model is slightly different now in SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). They changed the licensing, based on adapters and other things. In the old style of licensing, the whole suite was one license..."
"It has a very goofy pricing model in the sense that they have so many components and it's not very clear what components you require to do your work. When you ask for that, you learn that there's a surcharge for them. It's not that you buy a product and you can use all the compatibilities. They have all these different bits and pieces of it and you have to pay extra for all those things."
"On an annual basis, our support costs, which are based on the licensing, are about £120,000."
"Our licensing model is based on transactions. We have a base service contract which is priced against a volume of transactions and another volume of individual transactions, which are covered by one service agreement. Then, we have development services on top of that. Our annual spend is around £80,000. It's about mid-priced, as there are some cheaper alternatives out there and some more expensive ones. It's neither cheap nor expensive. It's somewhere in the middle."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Retailer
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...
What do you like most about SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite?
SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is a highly stable solution that offers rich features for our B2B integration.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite?
I've heard that the solution is cheaper when compared to other products in the market.
What needs improvement with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite?
Overall, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is a robust and standard product. However, providing more training materials, especially when new products are released, would be beneficial. Acquiring...
 

Also Known As

WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower
SEEBURGER BIS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity
Altis, Autoliv, Cebi, Cofresco, MoneyGram International, Samsonite Europe, VSP Global, BMW Group, OSRAM, Magna, Lavazza
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DataPower Gateway vs. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,963 professionals have used our research since 2012.