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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)
13th
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)
5th
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 September 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of OpenESB is 1.7%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Fuse is 7.1%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Red Hat Fuse7.1%
OpenESB1.7%
Other91.2%
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

"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."
"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."
"The core is very stable."
"The installation is quite okay. We don't really change much in the configuration. Most of the time, most of the settings remain with the default and we are able to handle our needs using the default setting."
"Red Hat Fuse's best features are that it's very easy to set up and maintain."
"The most valuable feature is that it's the same as Apache Camel."
"The most valuable part of Fuse is the fact that it's based on Red Hat Apache Camel. It is really good that it already comes with so many different connectors. That makes it relatively easy to use. We use their XML definition to define the routes, making it really easy to define the routing."
"The most valuable feature is the software development environment."
"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."
"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 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."
"The documentation needs to be better."
"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."
"Containerization is one key area where the product can improve"
"The testing part, specifically when running it in the cloud, could be improved. It's a little bit complex, especially considering its cloud nature."
"The documentation for Fuse can be improved because, while it is very detailed and extensive, it is not too intuitive for someone that has to deliver some kind of troubleshooting services. In particular, for installation, re-installation, or upgrades, I find that the documentation can be improved."
"The stability of the solution is an area with a shortcoming that needs to be improved."
"While it's a good platform, the pricing is a bit high."
"It might help if, in the documentation, there were a comments section or some kind of community input. I might read a page of documentation and not fully understand everything, or it might not quite answer the question I had. If there were a section associated with it where people could discuss the same topic, that might be helpful because somebody else might have already asked the question that I had."
"The monitoring experience should be better."
"I don't know the product last versions. I know they are migrating a microservices concepts. We still didn't get there... but we are in the process."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Red Hat Fuse is an expensive tool, though I cannot answer how much it costs as that's confidential."
"The solution doesn't have independent licensing."
"We found other solutions were more costly."
"We are paying around $24 million across five years."
"The most important feature of Fuse is the cost. It is open source and a cheap option for an ESB. So, most of the clients in the Middle East and Asian countries prefer this ESB. Other ESBs, like MuleSoft and IBM API Connect, are pretty expensive. Because it is open source, Red Hat Fuse is the cheapest solution, providing almost every integration capability."
"We use the standard license, but you need the container platform in order to run it."
"My company pays for the license of Red Hat Fuse yearly. At the end of the day, it's a low-cost solution, and its support licenses are still very decently priced versus bigger operators such as IBM, etc. Red Hat Fuse is much more affordable than other solutions. On a scale of one to five, with one being cheap and five being extremely expensive, I'm rating its pricing a one."
"Red Hat Fuse saved us money. It is a lot easier to license for cloud deployments."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
16%
Hospitality Company
11%
Logistics Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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...
What is your primary use case for Red Hat Fuse?
Our company used Red Hat Fuse to integrate layers of numerous applications. The solution has also been used in our organization for orchestration purposes of multiple microservices over the years. ...
What advice do you have for others considering Red Hat Fuse?
I would rate Red Hat Fuse as eight out of ten. When the solution was being used in our organization, the JBoss or Red Hat support was great. The solution was highly stable, robust, and scalable, an...
 

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: September 2025.
867,445 professionals have used our research since 2012.