IBM DataPower Gateway vs webMethods.io comparison

IBM DataPower Gateway and webMethods.io are both solutions in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category. IBM DataPower Gateway is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.3, while webMethods.io is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.9. IBM DataPower Gateway holds a 6.6% mindshare in E, compared to webMethods.io’s 11.3% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of IBM DataPower Gateway users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of webMethods.io users who would recommend it.

IBM DataPower Gateway

Read 31 IBM DataPower Gateway reviews

5,383 Views
861 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

webMethods.io

Read 93 webMethods.io reviews

8,870 Views
1,508 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

IBM DataPower Gateway

webMethods.io

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM DataPower Gateway and webMethods.io are competing products in the integration and API management tools category. Based on data comparisons, IBM DataPower Gateway may have an edge in pricing and support, while webMethods.io is favored for its comprehensive features, making it a potentially superior choice for those who value functionality over cost.

Features: IBM DataPower Gateway is recognized for its robust security features, high-performance processing, and scalability for API management. It stands out for handling multiple protocols and being easily configurable to ensure security standards. webMethods.io, however, provides seamless cloud integration, intuitive automation capabilities, and extensive connectivity options, making it particularly valuable for businesses that prioritize versatility.

Room for Improvement: IBM DataPower Gateway could improve usability for less technical users and reduce the complexity of its deployment options. Adding more intuitive user interfaces and streamlining integrations could make it more accessible. webMethods.io may enhance its API governance capabilities and expand its performance metrics visibility, while bolstering integration options with legacy systems to better accommodate diverse environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: webMethods.io offers a straightforward cloud-based deployment model with efficient customer service, which facilitates easier integration and minimal operational disruption. In contrast, IBM DataPower Gateway, with its on-premises and hybrid deployment options, requires more complex setups but provides comprehensive support services. webMethods.io positions itself as more user-friendly, especially for companies seeking quick deployment.

Pricing and ROI: IBM DataPower Gateway often involves a higher initial setup cost due to its hardware and infrastructure requirements but offers substantial long-term value through its robust architecture. webMethods.io typically presents a lower upfront investment thanks to its cloud model, providing a favorable ROI by reducing maintenance and operational costs. IBM DataPower Gateway benefits larger enterprises with existing infrastructure, while webMethods.io appeals to those seeking cost-effective integration solutions with flexible pricing strategies.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM DataPower Gateway vs. webMethods.io Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway vs. webMethods.io

September 2025

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Helped 872,706 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

Ranking in API Management

12th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Infrastructure (12th), SOA Application Gateways (1st)

webMethods.io

Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

3rd

Ranking in API Management

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business-to-Business Middleware (3rd), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (11th), Cloud Data Integration (10th), Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 6.6%, up from 5.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of webMethods.io is 11.3%, up from 10.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
webMethods.io	11.3%
IBM DataPower Gateway	6.6%
Other	82.1%

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Featured Reviews

AkshaySawant

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.

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Derrick Brockel

Senior Manager of Operations at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

An integration platform that enables you to automate tasks by connecting apps and services

Follow best practices,engage in their professional services to help build your messaging system and to be PR have some PR emphasis and and blue Bluegreen deployment You could take half your your clusters out, upgrade them, and put them back in so you have a quick callback. And also patch quarterly, we got we got downbound. And and at that point, it's a little hard to get into the cycle when you're releasing software every every week, and you're trying to, go through an upgrade seven fifty servers, it's a little hard to get into the upgrade flow when when you're running that tight. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

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

"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 is easy to use, easy to install, and it's resilient for high availability."

"The API Connect gateway service and the SQL injection feature is good."

"I like the API Gateway feature."

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

More IBM DataPower Gateway pros

"The most valuable feature of the webMethods Integration Server is its reliability. It has a lot of great documentation from the service providers. Additionally, it is easy to use."

"What I like the most about the solution is that it comes with ready-made tools like handling security tokens and OAuth."

"It's a visual tool, so our transformations can be quickly implemented without a lot of fuss. The fact that we have an easy way to expose REST services is also very interesting. It offers the possibility to connect over GMS to synchronize message brokers."

"It's very flexible and a good platform to use."

"We needed a tool that was able to orchestrate and help us configure our APIs so that we could maintain and see the heartbeat, traffic, trends, etc."

"The product is powerful, straightforward, and easy to use."

"Ease of implementation and flexibility to hold the business logic are the most valuable features."

"WebMethods.io is a powerful tool, but it requires skilled people who can fully utilize its potential."

More webMethods.io pros

Cons

"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 initial setup isn't so easy, you need who has experience working with the solution to help."

"The user interface or the application development perspective and customization of the tool could be a little better."

"The product's cost for data appliances or hardware is quite high. It needs improvement."

"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."

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

"They should add features to manage API integrations."

More IBM DataPower Gateway cons

"Documentation needs tuning. There is a lot of dependency with SoftwareAG. Even with the documentation at hand, you can struggle to implement scenarios without SAG’s help. By contrast, IBM’s documentation is self-explanatory, in my opinion."

"In terms of improvements, maybe on the API monetization side, having users able to create separate consumption plans and throttle all those consumption plans towards the run time could be better."

"webMethods Integration Server could improve on the version control. I'm not sure if Web Method has some kind of inbuilt integration with Bitbucket or GitHub or some kind of version control system. However, that's one area where they can improve."

"Rapid application development has to be considered, especially for UI, where user interference is crucial."

"I would like the solution to provide bi-weekly updates."

"A while ago, they were hacked, and it took them a very long time to open their website again in order to download any service packs or any features. I don't know what they could do differently. I know that they were vulnerable, and there was some downtime, but because they were down, we were unable to download any potential service packs."

"It is difficult to maintain."

"The product's stability is an area of concern where improvements are required."

More webMethods.io cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's initial costing is expensive for small banks and financial institutions."

"The appliance is a bit on the expensive side for the workloads that are not too high."

"It is an expensive solution."

"As far as I know, they have a perpetual license for this product. They are paying perpetual fees rather than an annual subscription or annual pricing."

"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."

"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 cost of this product varies from customer to customer and the relationship with IBM, including how many offerings from IBM are already being used."

More IBM DataPower Gateway pricing and cost advice

"Some of the licensing is "component-ized," which is confusing to new users/customers."

"I do think webMethods is coming under increasing pressure when it comes to their price-to-feature value proposition. It's probably the single biggest strategic risk they have. They're very expensive in their industry. They've been raising the price recently, especially when compared with their competitors."

"The product is expensive."

"The solution's development license is free for three to six months. We have to pay for other things."

"Currently, the licensing solution for this product is pretty straightforward. The way that Software AG has moved in their licensing agreements is very understandable. It is very easy for you to see where things land. Like most vendors today, they are transaction based. Therefore, just having a good understanding of how many transactions that you are doing a year would be very wise. Luckily, there are opportunities to work with the vendor to get a good understanding of how many transactions you have and what is the right limit for you to fall under."

"I am not involved in the licensing side of things."

"This is an expensive product and we may replace it with something more reasonably priced."

"The product is very expensive."

More webMethods.io pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

29%

Insurance Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Energy/Utilities Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	17

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	23
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	63

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?

This product is definitely expensive because if any issue occurs in the live environment or production environment, and our organization faces some issue with the IBM DataPower Gateway, then the IB...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM DataPower Gateway?

I have significant experience with the IBM DataPower Gateway. As a security product, it is very good. However, from the development perspective, it has limitations because it only supports the XSLT...

See all answers

What do you like most about Built.io Flow?

The tool helps us to streamline data integration. Its BPM is very strong and powerful. The solution helps us manage digital transformation.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Built.io Flow?

webMethods.io is expensive. We have multiple components, and you need to pay for each of them.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Built.io Flow?

webMethods.io needs to incorporate ChatGPT to enhance user experience. It can offer a customized user experience.

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

Kong Gateway Enterprise vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Azure API Management vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 6% of the time

NGINX Plus vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 2% of the time

More IBM DataPower Gateway Competitors

IBM App Connect vs webMethods.io

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Integration Bus vs webMethods.io

Compared 7% of the time

IBM Sterling B2B Integration Services vs webMethods.io

Compared 7% of the time

Apigee vs webMethods.io

Compared 6% of the time

More webMethods.io Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway

October 2025

Download IBM DataPower Gateway product report

Buyer's Guide

webMethods.io

October 2025

Download webMethods.io product report

Also Known As

WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower

Built.io Flow, webMethods Integration Server, webMethods Trading Networks, webMethods ActiveTransfer, webMethods.io API

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

webMethods.io Integration is a powerful integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that provides a combination of capabilities offered by ESBs, data integration systems, API management tools, and B2B gateways.

IBM

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity

Cisco, Agralogics, Dreamforce, Cables & Sensors, Sacramento Kings

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway vs. webMethods.io

September 2025

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