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OpenESB vs Red Hat Fuse 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

OpenESB
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat Fuse
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
24
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 OpenESB is 1.5%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Fuse is 7.2%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
 

Featured Reviews

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…
Kaushal Kedia - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a single console for all applications and supports Camel routing
Containerization is one key area where the product can improve, but it probably has already improved in JBOS integration. On a few occasions, our company's production team faced an issue with Red Hat Fuse; the screen displayed that the containers had gone down while, in reality, they were running in the background. The user interface and the back-end code were not in sync in the aforementioned situation, which our organization frequently faced while using Red Hat Fuse. But at our company, we were using an older version of Red Hat Fuse in which we faced the issues. From the JBOS end, the product was very frequently changed from Red Hat, and it was difficult for our clients to keep investing money in every upgrade. Six or seven years back, Red Hat Fuse was one of the best solutions.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The core is very stable."
"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."
"The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration."
"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 workflow, where we can orchestrate and design the application by defining different routes, is really useful."
"I found it was quite easy to set up and implement."
"Because we have been doing Red Hat Fuse projects for three years, and over time we have matured, we can employ similar use cases and make use of accelerators or templates. It gives us an edge when we deliver these services or APIs quickly."
"More than a feature, I would say that the reliability of the platform is the most valuable aspect."
"The stability has been good."
"What I like about Red Hat Fuse is that it's a well-established integration software. I find all aspects of the tool positive."
"We use it because it is easy to integrate with any other application...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution nine out of ten."
"We usually had used PowerCenter for master data integration (by replication). But in some cases, it was better to use Fuse for providing the master data online. It doesn't make it necessary to replicate data."
 

Cons

"The documentation needs to be better."
"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."
"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."
"While it's a good platform, the pricing is a bit high."
"Containerization is one key area where the product can improve"
"There is definitely a bit of a learning curve."
"The stability of the solution is an area with a shortcoming that needs to be improved."
"What could be improved in Red Hat Fuse is the deployment process because it's still very heavy. It's containerized, but now with Spring Boot and other microservices-related containers, deployment is still very heavy. Red Hat Fuse still has room for improvement in terms of becoming more containerized and more oriented."
"The pricing model could be adjusted. The price should be lower."
"Red Hat is not easy to learn. You can learn it but you sometimes need external expertise to implement solutions."
"For improvement, they can consider the way we collaborate with other applications...Right now, in Red Hat Fuse, everything is not available under one umbrella."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The Community Edition is a full product you can use in production, it does not have limitations like other alternatives."
"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."
"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."
"Red Hat Fuse is an expensive tool, though I cannot answer how much it costs as that's confidential."
"After doing some Googling and comparisons, the main standouts were MuleSoft and Red Hat Fuse. One of the big factors in our decision to go with Fuse was the licensing cost. It was cheaper to go with Fuse."
"We found other solutions were more costly."
"We are paying around $24 million across five years."
"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."
"This is an expensive product. It costs a lot and although it's worth the money, the explanations that we need to give to our top executives are highly complicated."
"We use the standard license, but you need the container platform in order to run it."
"You need to pay for the license. It's not free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Hospitality Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What do you like most about Red Hat Fuse?
The process workflow, where we can orchestrate and design the application by defining different routes, is really useful.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Red Hat Fuse?
You need to pay for the license. It's not free. I'm not aware of the exact prices. There are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing since it is a subscription-based solution.
What needs improvement with Red Hat Fuse?
Containerization is one key area where the product can improve, but it probably has already improved in JBOS integration. On a few occasions, our company's production team faced an issue with Red H...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Fuse ESB, FuseSource
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Avianca, American Product Distributors (APD), Kings College Hospital, AMD, CenturyLink, AECOM, E*TRADE
Find out what your peers are saying about OpenESB vs. Red Hat Fuse and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.