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IBM DataPower Gateway vs Zend PHP Engine comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 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 Application Infrastructure
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (5th), SOA Application Gateways (1st), API Management (12th)
Zend PHP Engine
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Infrastructure category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 4.5%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zend PHP Engine is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Infrastructure
 

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.
SatyendraGupta - PeerSpot reviewer
The fact that it is available open-source is the best feature
The fact that it is available open-source is the best feature.  A general scripting language should be further developed and should be embedded into it. I have been Zend PHP Engine for nine years.  Multiple people are using the solution.  Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.…

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."
"The solution is scalable, our customers are mostly South African banks and they handle mostly transactions with this solution."
"The solution is very easy to work with."
"It is very easy to set up and configure, even for users with no prior experience."
"I like the API Gateway feature."
"What I like most is the stability."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The product is stable...The product is scalable."
"The Zend Framework provides an easy, open source way to produce coding based on the needs of our customers.​"
"​Zend Engine is the core of PHP. It makes PHP fast, efficient, and basically, the language of choice for web applications."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the speed at which it compiles and sends the dynamic cache."
"The cache modules that Zend provides have been able to optimize and accelerate the loading of the pages when there was exponential growth in data volume and quantity of requests. At the same time, the monitoring console allowed us to have a real-time understanding of the resources and to make decisions when they were at the limit."
"Offers a complete environment to develop PHP applications. It is valuable because it allows you to have a complete stack (PHP, MySQL, Zend Server) enabling the building of a development environment, and to deploy to the production system."
"The fact that it is available open-source is the best feature."
"This solution is really easy for me to use."
"Zend PHP Engine is a good tool for developing and collecting data, offering strong performance."
 

Cons

"IBM DataPower Gateway is quite big for smaller organizations, looking at different types of clients who are virtually assisted in this, I would say it's not really a good product for smaller firms."
"It is a costly product."
"Small and medium-sized companies might look for cloud-hosted applications due to the cost."
"Some pre-packaged connectors for integration with various applications, such as SaaS offerings, would be a useful addition."
"The user interface or the application development perspective and customization of the tool could be a little 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."
"The solution requires a lot of training manuals in order to get to know it better and to be able to use it effectively."
"In the next release, I would like to see the product price reduced. It should be cheaper."
"The process of installing and configuring the product is a bit complex and could be improved."
"The biggest problem with PHP is you have to write lot of conditions or have to use a framework."
"In terms of improvement, it doesn't support concurrent processing. When we want to process anything on a concurrent basis, we have to divide it into a number of things, like a queue, or we have to run it using Cron jobs. We would like to have the capability to run any thread or process in parallel."
"Integration of MVC with ORM tools for PHP is okay, but lacking a short list of decent ORM tools for PHP to choose from; there is ample room for improvement in both areas."
"Integrating AI tools would make PHP more competitive, as other tools already have AI features."
"A general scripting language should be further developed and should be embedded into it."
"The main area that Zend needs to improve is to support asynchronous programming tasks, which is facilitated in PHP 7, but not at the same degree as HHVM.​​"
"The solution can be quicker."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 licensing cost is very expensive."
"The cost is very high and requires all five components in the API management solution."
"The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."
"Most customers' use case budgets are not inlined with the price of IBM DataPower Gateway. It is too expensive."
"It's expensive when you compare it with others."
"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 solution is open source and you just pay for the server cost."
"No problem with pricing and licensing, as tools are open source. You have to consider training cost, mindset setup cost, as part of the TCO."
"The Zend PHP engine is open source technology, so there's no need for us to worry about licensing or other costs."
"Zend PHP Engine is not an expensive solution."
"Its pricing depends on the number of users."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Insurance Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
University
10%
 

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 Zend PHP Engine?
The fact that it is available open-source is the best feature.
What needs improvement with Zend PHP Engine?
Integrating AI tools would make PHP more competitive, as other tools already have AI features.
 

Also Known As

WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower
PHP Engine
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity
Cisco
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Zend PHP Engine and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.