MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager Reviews

We primarily use the solution for our APIs. We are moving from monoliths to API architecture and we have approximately 10,000 to 12,000 APIs across banks, which are hosted on this product. It also provides us a gateway service to ingress the traffic as well as whole policy management where stuff is taken care of from the PC Any Point. It also has some API-level runtime policy management, which we use.

The gateway service to ingress the traffic is great. 

The whole policy management has been great. 

It has some API-level runtime policy management, which is useful for us.

The solution is extremely mature.

You can scale the solution.

The only drawback is that, due to the fact that we are going into a completely API structured way of working, it is very tightly coupled with the vendor solutions. For example, the run times. What happens is when you have to do a change or you have to do anything, you have to rip off all the APIs and rebuild it.

If you see the features, they are really good in one sense, however, they have a certain drawback when you get into the operational way of working. We definitely need APIs to have policies at runtime. They provide a feature where there's a lot of policy on authorizations, however, the only problem is the runtime. 

When the runtime upgrades, we have to basically publish a new build pack and then do all the rebundling. When we were 2000, 3000 APIs, it was okay. However, when you start going up to 10,000 to 12,000 APIs, it was too much.

The whole cost is an issue. Deploying to production is not a very easy job in that bank as we go through the whole change process. The whole tight coupling of the product is a problem. 

As a bank, we didn't want to take any risk of getting so much tightly coupled with any vendor product. It should be replaceable as required. That's the only reason we are now changing products.

The upgrade is a very messy process. Mule 3.X to 4 or 4.2 requires you have to rewrite the APIs. It is not just upgrading the build pack with a runtime. That is something that gets us scared a lot. They came back and told us when we move to four run times we had to upgrade. You had to rewrite the APIs. The APIs cannot just work in a straightforward manner. There is a lot of change and we have approximately 5% Mule APIs and then the rest are boot APIs. While, now, that means 5,000 APIs need rewiring, after two years, we might have 20,000 APIs. They should have a proper way of having backward compatibility.

The initial setup is complex. 

If they are going with that control pane in a cloud, which is a very good feature and it is a managed service, they should give it 24/7, 100% uptime. They should also spin it across multiple regions. Currently, they are just the US and the EU is coming up. However, they should add, for example, China or Asia, et cetera. We operate in more than nearly 40 countries. Every country has a lot of its own governance and compliance and regulatory checks or some, where we cannot host to the cloud.

We have used the solution for three and a half to four years at this point.

We have a massive set up and definitely, there are sometimes a few issues, which come here and there, however, we manage to build a resiliency inside that.

We have scaled from a few hundred APIs to 10,000 APIs. Just on the retail part, the gateway service runs more than 125 million transactions per day. It's a huge setup we have. 

The only drawback back again is that their gateways are pretty heavy on hardware. Therefore, we spend a lot of money on the hardware. If you compare with Kong, Kong actually can just replace everything with two VMs. We have 500 VMs running for us as gateways. It has scalability, however, it will cost you, which is a problem.

Technical support has been helpful. There were also people embedded in my team.

We are migrating from Mule to Kong now. We just have signed the contracts and we are basically getting the thing set up. It is a big project and it is going to take maybe another three to four months to roll it out to non-production and maybe another five months into production as we need to get everything in compliance and clear.

The initial setup, if you go back three or three and a half years, definitely, for us, was complex. As a bank, we run through a lot of securities. Since then, they have matured the process. They worked with us, to do some upgrades. Kong also will have to do a few things for us, once we migrate. Currently, we are already finding some issues, which Kong is trying to help us and fix it. However, Mule took a bit of time to set up. If we were to do it now, it would be easy. 

They have come up with API management and cloud hub, which is the manual service. We have not used it much, however, there are some use cases from a different part of the bank that tried it out. It's a good option as you get rid of the whole operational management side of the whole control pane. The control pane we are running is a PC 1.7.3 or something, which is old and coming up on the end of support.

The cloud hub may solve the problem of the control pane, even though they have some issues with the maintenance windows and stuff. Due to the fact that the policies are cast in the control pane, and run times can struggle, if the control pane goes down or needs maintenance because we need a hundred percent of availability in some way or other, it needs to be resilient also. The maintenance windows can cause trouble for us in banking.

We originally signed a three-year licensing agreement.

There's room for improvement on the licensing. They could do better.

I'm not sure I would recommend the solution to everyone. The approach we have taken is, we have moved out completely from the Mule APIs to Spring Boot APIs. We will decouple the whole vendor locking and stuff. However, it depends on the use case for each company. There is no good and bad product. These guys are both very mature products. Depending upon the use case, you will have to consider how you will handle scaling, for example, or other challenges. 

Everything has a drawback and plus and minus, so pros and cons. Even Kong is a new product. It may be a good performer, and very lightweight, with low infrastructure needs. We don't know. 

Our cyber is very strong. Like us, people will have to evaluate, depending upon their use cases, all the pros and cons of security and see how it fits. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for API management.

Their gateway is great. They have a pay manager gateway which I find very interesting. 

We like their API manager.

Their RTF, runtime fabric, is very useful.

The stability overall has been pretty great.

We didn't have any issues with the initial setup.

Technical support has been very helpful.

Their ability to observe is good.

Some items are not ideal. For example, they should for sales management, they need better performance in the core processing.

The IO blocking isn't ideal.

We find that the enterprise level is lacking scalability.

We have some hundred Linux boxes and 400 or so APIs and for scaling, we are facing challenges. However, we haven't yet compared it to other ESBs, and therefore it's possible that all ESBs are limited in the same way.

They're in the process of evolving right now. There are many changes on the horizon that may prove to be interesting. For example, we've implemented CI/CD and now it's my understanding that the graph scale's also coming. 

I've been using the solution for four years.

The stability of the solution is pretty good. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The scalability is lacking. We're not sure if it's just this solution or ESBs in general, however, we've had trouble scaling as we need to.

We have about 100 users on the solution currently. They are mostly tech leads, senior developers, and architects.

Technical support has been great. If you raise a ticket, then they respond on the basis of the severity of the issue, the criticality of the issue. They attend to the call really quickly. We've been happy with the level of support on offer.

The initial setup is very straightforward. We didn't have any issues at all. It's simple and easy to implement and not overly complex.

We have 30 to 50 people that comprise a support team that can help handle any maintenance issues. 

We did have assistance from MuleSoft support.

I don't have any visibility on the licensing and therefore cannot speak to the exact cost of the product.

We are working with a platinum tier and have an unlimited core. It's my understanding is that there are no additional costs beyond the licensing fee itself. 

We've gone live with MuleSoft and I have been comparing it with TIBCO or Dell and IBM products. If it's threat management that can be done concurrently across platforms, maybe it can be performed better. However, I've heard TIBCO is not evolving at this time.

I was exploring other options for my own knowledge and understanding as I am looking for a job change. People not only use Mulesoft, and companies want to have knowledge in two to three platforms. I'm just comparing Mulesoft with IBM ESB, Oracle, and a few other products. 

We're just a customer and an end-user.

Previously, a Mulesoft community edition was available. We started using Mulesoft's community version. We were exploring some ESB in our organization four years back. We started using MuleSoft as we've got Salesforce. At that time, Mulesoft was not yet acquired by Salesforce and that's why we went with the community edition. It was good. It was free. Then, slowly, we purchased some courses and Mulesoft was more connected to Salesforce. Now also Salesforce is there and AWS is there and it's more well-known and integrated. We thought it would help us due to its growth.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. It's a product that's still evolving. 

I use MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager to manage and work on APIs for my company.

MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager is a great solution. I like it very much because of its speed of delivery and because it allows API-led integration.

I also find MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager beneficial because it gives me a lot of information about who's consuming my APIs. It also has an analytics feature.

As a solution, it's easy to use. I also like that you can manage APIs easily on it.

An area for improvement in MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager is the process of applying policies because it's manual. It would be great if MuleSoft could make the process easier, particularly by automating it.

I also want to see more features added to MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager. One example is deploying an API without manual intervention to make processes faster.

I've been working with MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager for five years.

I found the stability of MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager good, so the solution is a ten out of ten in that area.

Scalability is a problem in MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager mainly because of the cost to scale it. Scaling the solution is very expensive, so it's a real problem because my company needs to create a lot of architecture to solve the scalability issue, mainly because it has many APIs, which means more interfaces and channels. After all, one API is bound to a channel point of entry, and you have to separate each application or two or three applications to improve scalability, which is very difficult for my company.

Scalability-wise, I rate MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager as five out of ten.

MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager provided excellent technical support, so it's a ten for me on a scale of one to ten.

Positive

We used a different solution before MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager but went with MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager for digital transformation.

The initial setup for MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager was easy.

I'm giving it a ten out of ten in terms of setup.

My company has a lot of APIs, so for thirty applications, the total time it took to deploy MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager was two hours.

Our in-house team deployed MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager for the company.

I want MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager to be cheaper because when you scale up, it becomes very costly. Price-wise, I'd give it a seven out of ten.

I work as a tech lead. My company is a MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager customer.

About ten people from different departments take care of the deployment and maintenance of MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager.

I'd tell others planning to implement MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager that scaling the solution can be costly. Hence, it's essential to factor in the costs. I'd also tell others that MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager is easy to use. Still, as a solution, it would benefit more from improved DevOps to make it even easier for users and result in more business for MuleSoft.

I'm rating the solution eight out of ten because it's easier to run and manage than others.

API Led Composable Architecture and Batch Integrations to deal with big volumes

API Manager helped to make api's discoverable, there by improved reusability.

IPAAS Cloudhub Platform, API Manager, Flex Gateway, RTF deployment Support, Connectors.  All these enabled to build, re-use and deploy the integrations faster.   

 Mulesoft is on the higher end in terms of pricing. Clients frequently compare the price of various integration technologies for their use-cases. This is considered high for small/mid - scale enterprises with some tens of APIs to be build and managed.  Different pricing model that best suits for small/mid enterprises could help for more adoption.  As Mulesoft is a part Salesforce ecosystem, special discounts could be provided for Salesforce users for doing their integrations.  <10% of Salesforce projects are using Mulesoft and there is a huge potential. 

I have been working with various versions of MuleSoft for more than 10 years.

We are currently working with the latest version.

Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager is pretty stable.

We use the CloudHub which is the MuleSoft cloud version it has everything that is required for a product with high availability and reliability. It's pretty stable.

From a product standpoint, MuleSoft offers auto-scaling options that can be enabled. However, the majority of organizations will control it manually to avoid unpredictable higher costs.  overall,  application can be scaled easily.

 Depending on the subscription and severity of the case, technical support prioritizes the support cases. 

I would rate the technical support a three out of five.

Neutral

CloudHub is straightforward. There are alternatives as well like RTF that can be deployed on any cloud or bare metal,  On-premises deployments . It's more complicated if it's on bare metal. Mulesoft have professional services team that can assist on initial setup. 

I would rate the CloudHub setup a four and a half out of five, and for an on-premises setup, I would rate it a three out of five.

Pricing cannot be shared because it varies depending on the client's engagement with MuleSoft and subscription.

dell boomi, informatica, software AG

Mulesoft provides platform to build and deploy huge number of APIs  with good API Management capabilities.  It also supports reuse of api's that are build on other platforms. With recent introduction of RPA,  we foresee a lot of scope to automate some human tasks. With MuleSoft Composer, non technical users can build small integrations quickly. 

I would rate MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager an eight out of ten.

Mulesoft supports API-led architecture excellently.  But not every integration use-case fits in this architecture.  Integrations that need to deal with large volumes needs a batch pattern that can be well performed with other integration tools.  EDI integrations that are widely used across large-scale enterprises. There is Anypoint Partner Manager specifically designed for EDI support, but it is little complex when compared with other EDI solutions that are in the market. A special component to deal with ETL integrations could improve the adoption.   EDI integrations could be simplified further.

You can find SLA there. You can do the security level that you need. You can also do any authentication, authorization, implementation, etc.

You can create it yourself and publish it. While publishing, if there is a unique ID generated by that, it will be implemented there while creating the application. While deploying to the cloud, the Mule runtime is internally created and embedded in the API Manager.

All of these features are available in the cloud, and you can configure it. It is of great benefit to the customer.

MuleSoft has given the API solution a 3-tiered architecture. This means that there are multiple channels available in one application. The usability is very high.

MuleSoft has advanced features but is slower.

I've been working with this solution since 2017.

It is highly stable, and that's why MuleSoft is booming. Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager internally uses the AWS availability zone. When one availability zone is down, then it will automatically route to another availability zone. You will not find this kind of stability on-premises because you can have server issues. However, on the cloud it's very stable and very reliable.

MuleSoft has horizontal and vertical scaling capabilities.

The technical support is good, but it is a new solution, so it will take time to mature. I would give technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. You may have some issues when you deploy it for the first time if the team is new, but once you do it, the next time it will not take much time.

You just need half a day or one day of training, and any team member can implement the solution.

Maintenance wise, it doesn't require a lot because it's on the cloud. You do have to monitor some things on your end, but other maintenance issues are taken care of by MuleSoft.

You will need to look at your requirements and choose the solution.

Message Broker, ACE only has ESB and does not have the gateway. You will have to buy additional software, but MuleSoft has embedded both API and ESB. This is called method-oriented architecture.

In terms of the speed and process, I prefer Message Broker, ACE technology IIB. In my current project, we are processing 25 MB to 50 MB files, and Message Broker is able to do it. However, with MuleSoft it would take more time. MuleSoft has advanced features but is slower.

I would rate Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager at ten on a scale from one to ten.

Our primary use case is API connectivity when integrating different systems or applications with the help of the API. There is a very robust API architecture that helps in directing different applications. In the B2B space, they have come up with a new offering, which is a partner manager, that helps to have the B2B integration with any EDI, X12, or any other B2B transactions. 

I believe the API connectivity within the cloud marketplace is most valuable. There are a lot of services available in the form of services or microservices, which are exposed via the API. Currently, API connectivity has become a mainstream integration. When you go to the B2B space where they have the partner ecosystem, there are a lot of suppliers and vendors there. Integrating them seamlessly for your supply chain or for your inventory management creates an efficient team of partners.

I think that they can bring some transparency in reference to the terms of the microservices architecture. It is already there, but it is not obvious. 

I have been working with Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager for the past seven to eight years.

We have not seen many tickets which tells us it is very stable.

Everything is on the cloud and it is very scalable. We have around one thousand five hundred users onboard.

I think that technical support is good. They are coming out with a community edition as well as an enterprise edition. If you have full enterprise support, they are pretty responsive. 

Positive

The setup was great. Depending upon the size of the program, and the number of integrations that you are having, you will keep on adding the people based on the business requirement.

If you have a strong engineering background and capability, then you can setup everything into automation where you can have three processes. When the pipeline is setup, then the deployment can be easy. They call a C4E Center for Enablement, which helps in terms of setting up the right practices, platform, governance, and best practices.

I think that it is pretty expensive. It is very innovative in terms of multiple licensing options out there. So, depending upon the need of the organization, they can offer different kinds of licensing. 

I would rate Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for API management.

We can use both on-premises and cloud setups. 

The API policies are great.

We can use command line, and it also has a good UI.

We can select the required servers and deploy API. It's great for managing the API.

If we talk about the designing of our API site with RAML and putting it into the exchange and then looking at it as a library, it's pretty good. 

The initial setup can be pretty straightforward. 

It's stable. 

We can scale the product.

I'd like an option for having customized policies also. I'd suggest that the product provide some inbuilt customized policies alongside the ability to fully customize.

The solution is expensive. 

They're coming up with lots of new things right now. I'm looking for something like AI-based monitoring in the future.

I've been using the solution for almost three years. 

The solution looks to be stable. It is reliable so far. there are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

We've found it to be a scalable product in general. 

I'm not sure of the exact amount of users. 

We have technical support from MuleSoft, and they have a portal where we can log the ticket. We've had a couple of resolutions already.

Positive

So far, we've had pretty straightforward setups. That said, we are looking to build a more complex project right now, and that implementation may be more involved. 

We were able to do a couple of things by ourselves. We are also planning on building a complex integration with the system soon.

I'm not sure of the exact cost of the solution. 

While I haven't had detailed discussions, my understanding is that the solution is expensive. I found it pricey when I was doing some research.

I evaluated a couple of tools. We wanted to compare to see what might be better. We wanted to use one of MuleSoft's business units. MuleSoft stands out.

We're trying to build a partnership with MuleSoft right now. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I have used this solution for an Europe based customer. They have ticketing tools like ServiceNow and other applications in their multiple locations including Asia, the Pacific and North America. The idea was to integrate data communication between those applications.

When using the Mulesoft Anypoint Platform, it has a wide range of connectors that are readily available to connect with the multiple applications. They have specifically categorized the API application into three parts; backend APIs, middle APIs (which handles a business process), and front end layer APIs. These distributed API applications make Mulesoft a well matured and organized platform. 

Migrating any existing middleware platform to Mulesoft is difficult because of the transformation, conversion and integration involved. Better tools are needed to achieve quicker time to market.

The security infrastructure for this solution could be improved. Other API tools have more security options available. API Connect, for example, has specifically designed policies where I can customize my security framework for internal and external users. That kind of infrastructure is not available with Mulesoft.

I have used Mulesoft API Management for one year. 

This is a stable solution if the hardware is set up properly. You need to monitor the load of the APIs and the bandwidth they use to achieve maximum throughput. 

This is a scalable solution. 

We have hardly needed assistance from a technical perspective because their infrastructure is powerful and after sale service is good. I would rate it a four out of five.

The initial setup is complex when it comes to establishing the connectivity between on-premise services and cloud services. Deployment took between six and eight months. We have two junior resources who are responsible for maintenance but the solution does not require much maintenance after being pushed to production. 

Mulesoft is great in terms of reusability. When I design APIs for backend application, they can be reused because they are independent of the business flow. It is a good overall solution compared to other API management technologies with a quick time to value. 

The pricing for this solution is cheaper than GCP and Bluemix.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.