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JBoss ESB vs Mule ESB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

JBoss ESB
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
13th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Mule ESB
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of JBoss ESB is 3.1%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Mule ESB is 20.1%, down from 22.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
 

Featured Reviews

RS
Easy to use with flexible pricing, but needs more flexibility surrounding integrations
The EPA, from what I understand, lacks a lot of features and it doesn't really know how to interface with legacy systems or how to develop APIs for legacy systems. I'm not sure if it is possible, however, we would like to see features that allow for legacy systems so that they can continue to be developed and managed well. The solution should provide some more general studio features. We should be able to manipulate the platform in order to do some integrations on our own. There needs to be a bit more flexibility.
PurbayanSaha - PeerSpot reviewer
Has API-led architecture and provides a unique, user-friendly, and scalable architecture for hosting APIs
There's room for improvement in multi-file transfer functionality. It's not convenient when using MuleSoft, and it should have better capability for handling large amounts of data. For example, applications like GoAnywhere can handle huge chunks of data, so the tool should also have something to facilitate that aspect of integration.

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 very easy to use. I can download the trial version and just give it a go."
"The most valuable feature for Mule is the number of connectors that are available."
"Once it is started, we don't see any problems on a day to day basis."
"Mule ESB helps a lot with our microservice architecture that we're trying to build, and it is still our go-to technology when it comes to that, so it's very promising for us."
"It is one of the best integration tools in the market."
"The most beneficial features of Mule ESB are the control plane and runtime plane."
"What Mule provides out-of-box is a sufficient product."
"Mule ESB has a user-friendly design, and everything is in one place. The API and architecture are popular right now. Also, MuleSoft has a large and supportive online community."
"It is easily deployable and manageable. It has microservices-based architecture, which means that you can deploy the solution based on your needs, and you can manage the solution very easily."
 

Cons

"The EPA, from what I understand, lacks a lot of features and it doesn't really know how to interface with legacy systems or how to develop APIs for legacy systems."
"The solution isn't as stable as we'd like it to be. There are some ongoing issues and therefore Mule has to provide frequent patches. Mule's core IP should be more stable overall."
"The price of Mule ESB could improve."
"From the product perspective, it was sometimes hard to manage the dependencies. When we had to add dependencies on a couple of different packages, it was sometimes confusing. It was hard to update them with Anypoint Studio, as well as with MuleSoft. There were challenges with that. So, that's one of the areas that could be improved."
"We would like the ability to use our own code. This would allow us to develop customizations with ease. Additionally, it would be nice to have more analytics or insights on the exchanged information between databases."
"There are some issues with both stability and scalability."
"The initial setup is not easy."
"The stability could be improved."
"There are some features on the commercial version of the solution that would be great if they were on the community version. Additionally, if they added more authorization features it would be helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"This product is expensive, but it does offer value for money."
"The solution is expensive."
"The various features and components for this solution are no longer free."
"Mule ESB is a costly solution. We pay approximately $80,000 annually for the system. The cost of the number of instances, annual subscription, and cloud hosting services are expensive."
"You will not get any support from Mule ESB's team for the tool's community edition...You can get support with the licensed version of Mule ESB."
"Plan your licensing model (cloud or on-premises or hybrid) that will allow seamless integration with new partners."
"I think the price is very high. If you use TIBCO BW, the license is for the CPU usage, then the IPS, and support. I also think the license for the product is a one-time expense."
"Most of the challenges that I had with this solution were for smaller customers. There is not a good licensing model or pricing model. It is more expensive than other solutions, and that's the downside of MuleSoft. I had to be creative to be able to sell it to the business, but we did. This is something they have to work on because for large companies, it's affordable, but for small and medium businesses, it's very hard to sell."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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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 Mule ESB?
The solution's drag-and-drop interface and data viewer helped us quite a lot.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rancore, Sprint, ResMed, Brazil's Ministry of Health, ING Services Polska
Ube, PacificComp, University of Witwatersrand, Justice Systems, Camelot
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Salesforce, Oracle and others in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Updated: May 2025.
859,579 professionals have used our research since 2012.