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IBM Integration Bus vs OpenESB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 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 Integration Bus
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
OpenESB
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
13th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of IBM Integration Bus is 21.9%, up from 21.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenESB is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
 

Featured Reviews

Ashraf Siddiqui - PeerSpot reviewer
Helpful for complex integrations because it has tools and functionality to integrate with other systems
Everything needs to be improved. As far as integration and the cloud are concerned, things are moving to the cloud side. When you use Kubernetes and similar technologies, IBM Integration Bus doesn't greatly facilitate these environments. Maybe I don't know enough about that, but I feel that when it comes to the DevOps environment, the tool needs to be deployed on production in a way that's just like pods. Cloud integration needs to be more facilitated with the DevOps environment. This IBM technology needs to adapt because in the recent world, in the real world, we see that everything is just a cloud pod. Whenever you need to scale anything, you just put some cloud and pod and improve it, make any server and deploy it. But in IBM Integration Bus, there is a problem because we can't do this as easily. In short, IBM needs to more emphasize or more integrate with the cloud environments as well, similar to DevOps. There are limitations in IBM Integration Bus when it comes to DevOps.
PP
Easily define choreography and orchestration with this process-oriented solution
We provide contracted services for our customers that include coordinating with providers and implementing the solution.  A current project includes using the solution to deploy 200 microservices.  The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration. This feature…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is stable and can scale relatively easily."
"Facilitates communication between parties and legacy systems."
"We use IBM Integration Bus for document conversions."
"I found all features valuable. There are a lot of connectors."
"like the API lead integration, which is more focused, and I also like real-time integration."
"REST API design and development support are useful. Building and exposing APIs using GUI API designer with editor makes implementation a breeze."
"The product is a user-customized tool so that you can adjust it to your specific needs pretty well with little trouble."
"It makes the communication between multiple and heterogeneous applications so easy. We can bring together different messages and applications from different platforms and connect them through IBM Integration Bus."
"The core is very stable."
"OpenESB pushes the organization to clearly define service boundaries and interfaces. So it motives the business and the development teams to clearly define their business services and processes they want to implement. OpenESB supports fine and coarse-grain granularity for the services and supports top-down and bottom-up approaches for the services, processes definition, and composition."
"The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration."
"One of the most valuable features is being able to implement business processes while keeping track of the design from BPMN to a BPEL Implementation."
 

Cons

"The product does not provide API management."
"I think security should be more simplified."
"The memory footprint should be minimized."
"The next versions are moving toward container use. It would be a shame to make the product highly complex just to support one pattern of deployment. It is my hope that IBM continues to focus on practical functionality that is simple and cost-effective."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"The password settings need improvement."
"They could integrate AI technologies with the product. Additionally, ongoing developments and enhancements in integration technologies could be beneficial."
"The product could be improved by including more resources on SQL."
"The documentation needs to be better."
"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."
"The documentation of the product must be improved. It could be tricky to find the right documentation on a topic since the documentation is spread in many places. I advise the new joiner to contact the community to get entry points and additional documentation. Tutorial and Video must be present to take up the product."
"Regarding its management, a web console being able to synchronize distributed instances would be great."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As customers, we always try to buy things as cheaply as possible. But the price for the IBM Integration Bus is fine. When we compare it to competitors, it's pretty much the same. However, there are a lot of open-source integration platforms coming to the market as well. So overall, the price is fine as far as licensed products are concerned."
"IBM is expensive."
"For small companies, First of all, there are a lot of free products that could be used for integration. It can use the cloud or new implementation in the past. But if the tool is IBM, the official box in your company, you can make your submission and also publish the cloud to the work file. But let’s say, if you are working with premises, then you have to buy a reasonable main full support and gain experience with your product."
"The price of this product could be lower."
"It is not cheap. It has its cost. It is one of the high-cost solutions."
"IBM Integration Bus is expensive. There are cheaper products in the marketplace."
"The price of the license could be cheaper."
"Support costs are high compared to the competition. Otherwise, the support is good."
"The Community Edition is a full product you can use in production, it does not have limitations like other alternatives."
"The cost for the prediction instrument is high because it is charged per instances based on prediction, but the rest of the solution is free."
"There are two versions. The first is the community version, which is free and contains the last part of the feature, but if you want to get the Enterprise version, you'll have to pay €60,000 which covers support and two instances on production."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Migration from IBM Integration Bus to Mulesoft ESB for a large enterprise tech services company
I was previously part of the Oracle SOA/OSB development team. In my current capacity I architected solutions using MuleSoft Anypoint Platform on cloud / on-premises and hybrid modes and on PCE/RTF ...
IBM Integration Bus vs Mule ESB - which to choose?
Our team ran a comparison of IBM’s Integration Bus vs. Mule ESB in order to determine what sort of ESB software was the best fit for our organization. Ultimately we decided to choose IBM Integratio...
What do you like most about IBM Integration Bus?
The message queue, like, message queue connectors. Then they have a built in connectors for most of the systems, like SAP, oracle database, and this Civil connector is there. Of course, we have thi...
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Also Known As

IBM WebSphere ESB
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Salesbox, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Road Buddy, Swiss Federal Railways, Electricity Supply Board, The Hartree Centre, ESB Networks
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Integration Bus vs. OpenESB and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.