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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)
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of OpenESB is 2.8%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Fuse is 6.1%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat Fuse6.1%
OpenESB2.8%
Other91.1%
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
 

Featured Reviews

PP
Integration Architect at Pymma consulting
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…
Nilay Rathod - PeerSpot reviewer
Chapter Area Lead/GM Group Architecture & IT at Spark New Zealand
Microservices have transformed our integrations and now highlight room to improve AI-driven tooling
There are areas in Red Hat Fuse that have room for improvement. We were recently having a discussion with Red Hat team building agentic AI, which we call AI SDLC. Something that the team is actively working on, but I have not really seen any production-level version of it is MCP. For us to use Red Hat Fuse with AI models, we need MCP so that we can be very confident that it can deliver us a really solid outcome when developers are using it, whether it is any of the integration patterns or messaging bus patterns. I have not seen that yet. Even though Red Hat has an alternative to that, such as a plugin, it is not as advanced as some of the MCPs that we see around.

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."
"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."
"This solution's adaptability to our use case has helped us integrate our systems seamlessly."
"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."
"The solution is stable. We have gone for months or years without any issue. There are no memory restarts, so from my point of view, it's very stable."
"With a premium, one can get support 24 hours."
"What I like about Red Hat Fuse is that it's a well-established integration software. I find all aspects of the tool positive."
"The support training that comes with the product is amazing."
"I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. We are an enterprise business."
"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."
 

Cons

"The documentation needs to be better."
"Regarding its management, a web console being able to synchronize distributed instances would be great."
"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."
"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."
"The pricing model could be adjusted. The price should be lower."
"The commercial that you normally get earlier in the time when you sign up is not the commercial that is going to stick around for a long time."
"The user interface is not good, and it is a very technical tool."
"Red Hat is not easy to learn. You can learn it but you sometimes need external expertise to implement solutions."
"The testing part, specifically when running it in the cloud, could be improved. It's a little bit complex, especially considering its cloud nature."
"I would like to see more up-to-date documentation and examples from Red Hat Fuse."
"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."
"Our clients would like to see the user interface improved so that it is more user-friendly."
 

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."
"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."
"Red Hat Fuse saved us money. It is a lot easier to license for cloud deployments."
"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."
"Pricing has been something that we have been working with Red Hat on, year over year. We have preferred pricing with the university because we are involved in education and research."
"We are paying around $24 million across five years."
"We use the standard license, but you need the container platform in order to run it."
"Red Hat Fuse is an expensive tool, though I cannot answer how much it costs as that's confidential."
"You need to pay for the license. It's not free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Red Hat Fuse?
When considering pricing for Red Hat Fuse, this is a pretty interesting question. When you consider cost, it is not just the cost of the software, but also the cost of development, cost of usage, a...
What needs improvement with Red Hat Fuse?
There are areas in Red Hat Fuse that have room for improvement. We were recently having a discussion with Red Hat team building agentic AI, which we call AI SDLC. Something that the team is activel...
What is your primary use case for Red Hat Fuse?
Red Hat Fuse serves as our enterprise integration platform. We do use some of the message bus features as well, but it is not the enterprise message bus.
 

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: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.