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IBM DataPower Gateway vs WSO2 API Manager 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)
WSO2 API Manager
Ranking in API Management
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 WSO2 API Manager is 4.9%, up from 4.1% 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.
VishalSingh14 - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to deploy APIs and easy to manage CORS configuration
I have used WSO2 Store and WSO2 API Manager at the architecture level. I worked on two versions, namely WSO2 API Manager 2.6.0 and 5.7.0. I have also worked with WSO2 Identity Server versions 5.7 and 5.11. There are certain things that Apigee handles better than WSO2 API Manager. The user interface of WSO2 API Manager is much easier than that of Apigee. The scope of flexibility was much greater in Apigee. In WSO2 API Manager, we had little flexibility and were restricted to a specific software or tool. On the other hand, we had the scope of customization in Apigee.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a scalable solution."
"I like that it is very stable, and we never experience any downtime."
"The most valuable feature is the security appliance, it's very secure."
"It is very easy to set up and configure, even for users with no prior experience."
"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 scalability of the solution is good."
"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."
"The solution is stable."
"Yes WSO2 API Manager is scalable"
"WSO2 API Manager provides strong internal API security, including token-based authentication and HTTPS support for various formats like REST. However, the newer API security features that are emerging are not available yet. They might be in development, but for now, internal API security is well-covered."
"API management lifecycle is the most valuable."
"There are a lot of tools to help the manager. WSO2 is very easy to install. It has all the principal functionalities that you think about when you want to put up the management solution. It's a very friendly tool."
"A complete integration suite and a good platform."
"Helped us to quickly publish our Microservice APIs and enforcing different policies against them, it comes up with features like Security, Throttling policy and it provides complete access to customize API's which actually saves development effort and time."
"As far as I am aware this solution is the first API Publisher that allows you to create and publish API and to manage the API lifecycle."
"The product is easy to use."
 

Cons

"It is a costly product."
"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."
"Some pre-packaged connectors for integration with various applications, such as SaaS offerings, would be a useful addition."
"The solution requires a lot of training manuals in order to get to know it better and to be able to use it effectively."
"The two biggest issues of this solution are the complexity and the maintenance procedures."
"We are always looking for more features wherein it could be easily integrated with cloud applications. We are looking for either a cloud solution or a cloud integration option."
"One area that could be improved is the integration with Postgres and SQL databases. Currently, IBM DataPower Gateway only integrates with Oracle databases."
"In the next release, I would like to see the product price reduced. It should be cheaper."
"I would like it to be a more stable solution. Maybe in the last version that is approved. For me it would be good if they had a community established version."
"The price and the complexities attached to the solution are two areas of concern where improvements are required."
"I can say that user management is not really flexible. So, if I want to create 1,000 store users, I can't do it as a publisher. You have to register as a store user using the store URL."
"We had some problems with the reverse proxy not being able to invoke fully qualified domain names, so we have to build some custom scripts to solve this issue."
"I would improve the product documentation. There are some gaps, and it can be difficult to find the proper documentation for the product if you need to solve something."
"Basically, mTLS is a certificate-based communication protocol that WSO2 API Manager doesn't support."
"The stability is pretty good, but it could be improved."
"From a product perspective, the first thing is that although the documentation provided by WSO2 is good, it could be much better. We're in the middle of a complex migration, moving away from VMs to Kubernetes with the latest version of WSO2 and good documentation is essential to us right now."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The appliance is a bit on the expensive side for the workloads that are not too high."
"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."
"Most customers' use case budgets are not inlined with the price of IBM DataPower Gateway. It is too expensive."
"This product is a bit expensive as IBM products are costly assets. However, for enterprise customers it is a worthwhile investment."
"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 solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."
"It's expensive when you compare it with others."
"My previous company paid about 1.2 million dollars, and my current company pays about 300k. Both companies are at the enterprise level."
"WSO2 API Manager is a costly solution, and its pricing is not competitive enough compared to other products."
"I am using the free version."
"We use the open-source version — the free version."
"WSO2 API Manager is a low-cost solution. It is one of the most affordable solutions."
"The solution costs less than 20,000 euros a year. I'm not sure of the exact number."
"As far as I'm aware, the costs are not minimal but satisfactory."
"It's not expensive, but it could be cheaper."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
18%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

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 WSO2 API Manager?
It is possible to scale up and scale down with the solution...I can say that I have not seen any issues related to scalability.
What needs improvement with WSO2 API Manager?
We have encountered some concerns with concurrency. Our integrations do not handle high-volume transactions, and when benchmarking, some issues arose with concurrent testing. It is uncertain whethe...
What is your primary use case for WSO2 API Manager?
We use WSO2 API Manager ( /products/wso2-api-manager-reviews ) to integrate our telecom products with third-party REST APIs. We are orchestrating services where our business process defines the int...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity
1. eBay 2. StubHub 3. Cisco 4. Verizon 5. T-Mobile 6. Vodafone 7. Orange 8. BT Group 9. Telstra 10. Deutsche Telekom 11. Swisscom 12. AT&T 13. Sprint 14. Telefonica 15. O2 16. British Airways 17. Lufthansa 18. Emirates 19. Qatar Airways 20. Etihad Airways 21. Air France 22. KLM 23. American Express 24. Visa 25. Mastercard 26. PayPal 27. Western Union 28. Citibank 29. HSBC 30. Barclays 31. Santander 32. Goldman Sachs
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DataPower Gateway vs. WSO2 API Manager and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.