Mule ESB Reviews

We use this solution when we have integrations and need to connect to SAP or to some Q mechanisms like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ. The applications we develop are for administrators. We are customers of Mule ESB. 

The HTTP, SAP and RabbitMQ connectors that we use are very easy to connect. The language for writing the transformations is also very simple. This is a useful solution. The solution doesn't require much code writing and we can develop APIs very easily. 

The main issue we currently have is that the version we are using will not be supported for much longer and we'll have to migrate to the newer version. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

We use this solution every day and it is stable.

The solution is scalable although we don't need to scale for now. 

The support is pretty good. We raise a ticket when we need something and the response time is good. 

Positive

We had some initial hiccups following deployment, but since then it's been good. We deployed in-house. 

Licensing costs are relatively expensive. 

The main difference I noticed between Mule and Red Hat Fuse was the licensing cost. Mule ESB was a more expensive solution. I haven't worked much on other ESBs but when I compare it with Spring Boot or other similar technologies, Mule is better in that it doesn't require much code writing.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

When I worked for the Sprint telephone company, we used the solution as a bridge between their legacy systems and the front end. We developed a lot of the functionality, for example, logging into users' accounts and activating cell phones.

The solution improved the company by modernizing the way they offer services and improving the user experience.

In the next release, I would like to see improvement in the generator for the DataWeave language so that it's a little more graphic.

I've been using Mule ESB since 2016, so about six years.

The stability of the solution is great. In fact, the stability is another improvement that the solution brought to the company.

The solution has great scalability.

I previously used an eCommerce platform called Intershop, but it's not really an ESB. Intershop allows for the development of the whole eCommerce system, from the back end to the front end. I switched to Mule due to the needs of a new project that I was starting because it acts as a bridge between legacy systems and front-end systems.

It was kind of straightforward. We had to study their legacy systems and then make some kind of mapping between those legacy systems and the RESTful APIs handled by Mule.

We used a consultant directly from MuleSoft for deployment. It took about an hour or two to deploy the solution, plus time for testing. 

To those looking into implementing this solution, I would say that you will enjoy the experience of using Mule.

I would rate this solution as a ten out of ten. 

ESB is middleware for interacting with multiple heterogeneous systems. Our most critical use case is ensuring the connection is ready, systems are interacting seamlessly, data conversion is happening, and the business logic is being applied. 

The solution is the middleware between the producer and a consumer, and we ensure that the producer is creating the data according to the consumer's requirements. If any orchestration or any transformation is necessary, then MuleSoft performs that. 

I'm not using ESB directly. It is the integration layer, so it's running under the hood. However, the conversion and transformation performance is excellent. Anypoint Enterprise Security is also solid.

I've been working with ESB for two years, but I'm not exposed to the coding or developing aspects. It is part of the integration layer, and I deal with middleware integration testing.

Mule ESB's stability is also good.

We have a four-person DevOps team that performed the initial setup, so I wasn't involved, but I think the deployment would be smooth and straightforward because it's on the cloud.

Nine out of 10. It's one of the better open-source tools for development. It provides seamless support and transition. I give it a high rating because most organizations are using MuleSoft. 

IBM and Oracle are also in the middleware market. MuleSoft is open-source and readily available, so people can meet their needs easily with this tool. We have a REST API with minimal integration and configuration, so we can easily use this solution.

We were using it for EDI. We were using it for integration between RFID portals and our ERP system. We were also using it for the integration of customer data between the CRM and the ERP systems. I am no longer using it because I changed the company.

We were using the cloud version.

When we bought the solution, it was an in-the-cloud or PaaS solution. Because of that, I didn't have to take care of the infrastructure, which was a big plus.

It was pretty fast to develop APIs on this platform, which is something I liked about it. So, the time to value was pretty good. 

Its licensing or pricing model should be improved. If I compare it to other solutions, it is very expensive for small and medium businesses.

Their support should also be improved. Some of the tickets took a long time to be resolved, and I had to escalate to my account manager.

I used this solution for maybe five years.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. It is also easily scalable.

I had about two developers internally, and they were taking care of its deployment and maintenance. In terms of the end users, it probably impacted hundreds or thousands of employees.

It was okay. There is room for improvement. I had some tickets that were taking a long time to be resolved, and I had to escalate to my account manager to push them through. I would rate them a three out of five.

In the latest implementation, we decided to start small with a very simple project that we had, which was customer integration between our CRM and ERP solutions. We started with a very small API. It was a small integration with only about three APIs, and that was it. We had success with it, and we ran it. 

We did it in partnership with a third-party consultant, and then we took it from there. Our experience was very good.

Pretty good. I would rate it a four out of five.

Its licensing was yearly. There were minor fees additionally, but those were related to VPN's high availability. When you purchase MuleSoft, you purchase it because it is highly available. So, you have to make sure that your VPN can support that. That's pretty much it. The other tools that we picked were things to deploy the solution to build the CI/CD pipeline using MuleSoft. We picked the one that wasn't free. So, we had to pay for it, but it was a minor cost.

They have a package to get you started. I would advise using at least a partner at the very beginning so that they can show you the best practices within MuleSoft and different layers of APIs. Sometimes, there are challenges around security and things like that. So, my advice is to get external help to get your developers started on it. Once they're taught the best practices, your intermediate to senior developers will pick it fairly quickly.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

I'm a consultant in a bank in Kuwait. I suggest good products for companies that are seeking my advice.

One of the important features of Mule ESB as an enterprise architect is that it should be scalable. It should be customizable for different kinds of clients. 

For client A, we need only two products. For client B, I need to group one and three. The product must be customizable for each. 

The product should be able to identify who is calling and what the components are. We need to return them to the calling point. Mule ESB covers most of these requirements.

Last month, the Guardian had a post saying that Mule is one of the best products for enterprise applications.

The most valuable feature of Mule ESB is data transformation, i.e. our interacting with different systems and orchestrating for our business needs. 

For example, a customer has liabilities in loans and credit cards, maybe some other mortgages, like four liabilities which are split into four systems. 

I need to expose an API that can tune the data from four systems and expose it into one single API. For that, I have to call our services and complex security policies.

Mule ESB loads complex web service security policies. Sometimes, we have some FLAC files or maybe some messaging services. We need to consume those components and expose them as an API, which is nothing but some adjacent format, i.e. a REST API.

Technically, there are mainly two API standards. One we call SOAP and the other one is the REST API. SOAP is nothing but fully external. It's very old, but huge complex enterprise companies are still using SOAP-based web services. In the mobile smartphone era, most of the hand-held devices are using REST APIs. 

Mule ESB is more into the latest REST APIs, not much into the SOAP web services. Developing is all about web services and not easy with Mule. That is one of the disadvantages of Mule. In next-gen products, Mule is in a good position.

Normally, if you're declaring a parameter or a variable, you can have visibility until it's not operating the variable. As an architect, programmer, or developer, you know when it's available. Graphically, that's not been available until this tool appeared.

It is this kind of enhancement that I'm looking for from MuleSoft. Two weeks ago or a month back, they had a big release. With this package, they are saying that APIs are your products. 

You can sell your API to different organizations and the developers can register on their portal. It's available this fall. These are the best features I am looking for now. 

My product is an API. I need to market it through the internet. I can have my portal with all of the tools built-in. This kind of feature I didn't see with the competitors currently in the market.

Mule ESB is very stable. I didn't face any issues. Recently I got a new version. I faced some other components issues, but not critical, i.e. easy to identify and rectify.

I moved from Mule 4.1 to 4.2 and it was really easy if you are migrating only one or two applications. It's very fast. I'm doing some experiments on my workspace for around 20-25 applications. 

I'm opening all of my applications in one shot, and it is scaling for me. I didn't update them as a bulk application. I worked by importing them one by one and it was fine.

I'm not into any official technical support. Their forum is pretty good and it's very active, but I cannot assure you that you will get a response within a day or two.

WebMethod is very expensive, but their support is awesome. I closely work with the operating technical support team. For retrieving the code from our bank, they are working with us very closely. Sometimes they are flying over here for conducting demos. 

Especially in the Middle East, MuleSoft is not doing like that. They are not doing much marketing in the industry. Maybe they are more focusing on South America or Asia. I'm not seeing much in the Middle East.

Mule ESB is one of the best. It is easy to use and setup. You just need to install their Anypoint Studio. It's very safe for all this. It's in a good rank just for the setup.

We evaluated Oracle, AG webMethods, and Red Hat OpenShift. The final one was MuleSoft. I'm very impressed with MuleSoft because of the pricing and license.

You have to implement several components. Sometimes, according to your needs, you have to buy several licenses for each component. Those are the things we compared.

My opinion is that Mule ESB depends on the business and the continuity of their enrollment. If you are a system that has not much left to repair, then your products and your APIs are assets within your organization. 

Here in the bank, we are facing different kinds of issues when we are integrating different systems:

• We are communicating with different card carriers like Mastercard and Visa. 
• Their standards are different according to the client requirements, i.e. exactly what kind of card they're looking for.
• They can get the products according to their requirements as well as their budget. 

I would rate Mule ESB with 7.5 or 8 out of 10. 

1. It's really easy to implement.
2. It's supporting our platforms: Windows, Linux, and Mac.
3. The performance.
4. It's free.

I'm looking for an API platform that supports the whole technology as well as the next-gen. 

Mule ESB is lacking for self-support, self-training, and documentation. The documentation of the product is less because they're selling the training.

You have to enroll for the training, then you'll get the full documentation. If you're an advanced user, you will not get much information from the public documentation.

We are using the on-premises version of this solution.

The most valuable feature is DataWeave. It allows for the transformation of data, for example to JSON or from JSON. It's very powerful.

There are also many connectors available, which is nice.

We would like to have a built-in logging framework in which we can do auditing. In our case, we are working on-premise. We are not using the cloud solution, so we have MMC, which is not enough in a high transaction environment.

This is a very stable solution. It doesn't require much memory or other resources. Once it is started, we don't see any problems on a day to day basis. Even when you need to make changes, they are easy to do. 

The scalability is easy. It can be done horizontally or vertically. We are scaling horizontally because we don't have any space left in the server. If we need to expand the number of nodes then it depends upon the licensing.

Our development team has three people, and I am the lead.

The community forums for this solution have been very helpful. You find plenty of information there. In the past three or four years, I have only raised three issues. They were related to the VM, and not the product itself, so I did not need product assistance.

We did not use another solution prior to this one. We started with the open source solution, version 3.1.0, and we implemented all of the services. We then paid for a licensed version.

The initial setup is pretty easy. We have multiple applications bounded by that domain, for resource sharing, so it was easy.

I set up the solution myself.

The calculation of ROI is difficult because we work in terms of providing support to other applications. There are many departments involved, and we cannot calculate our support in terms of money.

Before moving to the licensed version of this solution, we had a meeting to discuss the IBM Oracle web method. After looking at everything, including our code and the capability that Oracle has, we decided to continue with Mule ESB because of the ease in moving from the older, open source version, to the newer one. All we had to do is download it and continue with our work.

My advice to others who are implementing this solution is to first become acquainted with the forums. There are always reports coming out about the software, and new technologies. The next thing is that I would suggest always starting with the latest version. Older versions are available, but you should install the most recent one.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use Mule ESB to exchange data between four or five systems at one time. We exchange government organizations' data.

Mule ESB is a very easy-to-use and user-friendly solution.

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.

I have been using Mule ESB for approximately two years.

The stability of Mule ESB is very good.

Mule ESB is a highly scalable solution.

I am the only one using Mule ESB in my organization and I use it daily.

The community version of Mule ESB does not have support. I  find information online if I need it.

I was previously using Talend ESB but it's more complex than Mule ESB to use. The commercial versions have more features than Talend ESB.

Mule ESB was very easy to set up. I did three months of testing Mule ESB before I went into production.

I did the implementation of Mule ESB myself. There is no maintenance required for Mule ESB.

The price of the Mule ESB commercial version is expensive. However, they have a free community version.

I recommend this solution to others. If you have any data exchanges with other systems, Mule ESB is very useful and easy to use, even if it's the commercial version.

I rate Mule ESB a nine out of ten.

I use ESB to do integrations for a company called Pelindo. Pelindo is a company that's a terminal operator. They are involved in logistics, have many partners, and require transaction detection and a payment gateway.

I like that Mule ESB provides fast and good technical support.

Mule ESB could be more user-friendly. I think users must learn about the architecture before they start coding. The price could be better. In the next release, I would like to see an EDIFACT integration.

I have been using Mule ESB since 2013, so nine years. 

Mule ESB is stable, but sometimes the traffic is unstable because the transaction rate increases and the server is obsolete.

Technical support is fast and good.

Positive

I think the initial setup was straightforward.

I have experience installing this solution for my company. I can also maintain  Mule ESB by myself.

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. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Mule ESB an eight.