MuleSoft Anypoint Platform Reviews

We mostly use it for reprocessing messages in case of failures within asynchronous flows across millions of applications.

We use it for integrating different applications within our infrastructure.

We have a use case involving licenses and applications deployed on our CloudHub. We needed a solution within the MuleSoft ecosystem, and that's why we chose Anypoint MQ. 

Our main purpose for using Anypoint MQ is reprocessing. We have a three-layer architecture where we send messages between layers to ensure message persistence. Since the flow is completely asynchronous, messages can be lost if there's an issue on the backend. Anypoint MQ helps us with reprocessing to prevent this.

We use simple queues and exchanges to route messages to multiple queues. The publish/subscribe model is also helpful.

When it comes to external systems, we need to use APIs. So, it needs some extra effort.

When we are integrating with other applications, readily available connectors make it easy. However, when it comes to external applications, connectivity isn't as straightforward. 

We need to use RESTful APIs to get and push messages. While it's doable, it's not as simple as using the pre-built connectors.

In future releases, Anypoint MQ can increase the message size limit a little bit. We faced issues while working with SAP integrations. SAP can have very large files, and we couldn't handle those within the Anypoint MQ limit.

I have been using it for three years. 

So far, it's meeting our requirements well. There are around 300+ applications using it.

Currently, we have three administrators.

The customer service and support are good. 

Positive

I worked on Kafka before, but in this company, Anypoint MQ is the first one.

The advantage for MuleSoft, I see, is it's integrated within the platform. We are trying to have MuleSoft as our primary integration platform, so that meets the use case of the company.

We don't use Anypoint MQ for all the external systems. It's only for the internal communication within MuleSoft applications. It's easy to integrate with MuleSoft products.

It is easy to set it up. Managing queues or exchanges in Anypoint MQ – the usage, is that straightforward as well.

I would recommend using it. If it's for MuleSoft integrations, then definitely a green signal for Anypoint MQ. In the case of external applications, I haven't actually tried it.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Mule Anypoint Platform is used for the integration of different services or customer databases with Microsoft solutions.

The most valuable feature of the solution is a huge list of available connectors for a lot of different platforms, which we can use very easily.

It would be better if we had a clearer view of the solution's future releases. Mule Anypoint Platform is migrating to a new JDK, and the old JDK won't be supported within a year. Currently, we do not have a calendar or scheduler about when all the connectors will support the new JDK 17.

I have been using Mule Anypoint Platform for about one year.

Mule Anypoint Platform is a pretty stable solution.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

For the moment, smaller clients would consider choosing MuleSoft as their integration platform. As a rule, the Mule Anypoint Platform is more suitable for middle or large clients.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability.

MuleSoft provides custom support for every client. You can list your account and have open tickets if you have any problems. We have pretty solid technical support from MuleSoft.

Positive

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup an eight out of ten.

With ready API, the solution can be deployed within a few minutes. If you don't have an API at all, a day will be enough to deploy a very simple but useful API from scratch.

Currently, MuleSoft is moving from the license type to the pay-as-you-go type. The solution's pricing, as per the old approach, is expensive. That is the main reason why we don't have a lot of small-sized customers. With MuleSoft's new approach, we will have new opportunities to integrate small businesses.

The solution's API Designer and API Manager have improved the management of our client's already established APIs. The most valuable features of the solution are Design Center and Runtime Manager. Mule Anypoint Platform provides some basic security approaches, including HTTPS protocol and secure configuration opportunities.

My recommendation to users is to use already described or already propagated best practices that help very much in development. The best advice for developers is to be part of the community. MuleSoft has a great community, including different channels or meetups that could help you a lot in certain cases. When you have some problems, you can address any developers, and they will be ready to talk to you.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is a middleware integration tool. It's a deployment part where you deploy your Mule applications and also use Anypoint Studio.

It's like other integration tools like TIBCO. 

Mule Anypoint Platform has a good feature for batch processes where the internal tool handles everything. You don't have to handle it by yourself. If you have a large amount of data that needs to be processed, then batch processing is a very helpful part of Mule.

The product is quick to deploy and pretty straightforward. 

It can scale. 

The pricing is pretty good. 

The stability could be better. That said, they are also getting stabilized as part of increasing the versions and working on that. Previously, Mule version 3 was, of course, very unstable. However, now, version four is pretty stable now.

There have not been very good resources to help us find solutions to issues. 

I've been using the solution for around two or three years.

The stability is getting better and continues to improve, however, previous versions were quite unstable. 

It's a scalable product. If you create an image, a docker image, then you can scale it automatically. There are no issues.

We have onsite people who can help with the technical support. They have access to Mule support. I have sent a couple of queries to them, and they have contacted Mule to resolve any issues. I personally have not contacted Mule support directly.

I'm familiar with TIBCO. TIBCO has a PW container edition, and they're similar. However, PW is using expert language for internal and external transformation. Mule is using the database transformation. That database transformation, it's a totally new language. If you want to use the Mule, then you should have experience in that first.

Mule is a very good competitor of TIBCO, and Salesforce has acquired Mule. So the market has also grown drastically for Mule. 

We may have also moved based on the price, of which Mule's is better.

If they used XPath, XML query language, instead of DataWeave, it would be ideal. That way, our users don't need to worry about knowing a different language.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

If you're deploying your cloud hub, then it takes time to deploy. That said, if you have that setup on your private crowd, then it takes a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes. It's very fast.

While I'm not sure of the exact cost, it is reasonable, and less than TIBCO.

We are a Mule partner. 

When working with customers, we use both cloud and on-premises deployments. 

I'd recommend Mule to others. It is good in web surveys, REST APIs, and is easy to use. Also, they need to be aware that with Mule, they will have to understand the  DataWeave expression language. If you use DataWeave expression language, then the processing time and performance also increase.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I've used the application heavily and taken projects to production. I know it well. 

Our company is working with a client to create standardization or uniformity across departments and domains. 

Every domain operated on a pilot approach with its own set of standards and technology. There were multiple point form connections and API discoverability for assets. 

We analyzed the environment and found there were issues with transferring master data from SAP to downstream systems. There was an iDOC on the SAP level which contained a batch master for new material and served as a point-to-point connector for downstream systems such as SAP to Salesforce, Informatica, or other systems. 

We recommended that material master data should be implemented in an observable or pub/sub approach. Upgrades or changes to the material master should be generated from the CP side and sent to the solution for dissemination to downstream systems. This eliminates bad jobs and is a real-time approach to point-to-point connections. 

There were also many APIs built in different technologies throughout the organization, with no standard API management capabilities or governance to enforce policies, security, or best practices. We recommended Universal API Management for API registrations because it allows any type of technology or platform and serves as a single point for discoverability, enforced policies, governance, and traffic. 

The exchange and API management features are the best in the market. 

The solution handles EDI-based integrations very well. 

The platform's data integration tools need improvement on the processing side. We move large amounts of data from databases to other source systems and the solution does not handle this well. 

It is difficult to become a partner with the solution because their standards are very high. 

I have been using the solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable and depends on your deployment model. With Cloud Orbit, it is very easy to scale or configure auto scaling. On-premises or private clouds require a bit of extra care but are still easy to do. 

Technical support for partners and customers is good and the community forum for developers is strong.

I rate support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The setup is very simple. 

The solution is the priciest in the market which is an issue for some clients. It is intended for use with enterprise or mid-level companies who have available resources. 

When comparing products, the solution wins every time for integration capabilities and API management but falls short for pricing. Demographics play an important role because clients in Asia cannot afford the solution but price is not an issue for clients in the US, Australia, Canada and Europe. The size of a company is also important as the solution is intended for the enterprise or mid-level range. 

The solution is more focused on EDI-based integrations and has a partner that offers an onboarding management tool because many legacy companies are migrating from Sterling Integrator. Perhaps the solution should be marketed more for EDI integrations. 

There are more valid tools for data integration such as Informatica, SSI, and Talend.

The solution is great for new developers who want to learn about integrations because it includes free or self-payer courses.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We are using the solution for building business logic. It's like having a particular private cloud service that we can host on our premises, which is less cost-effective than Microsoft Logic Apps. It provides storage and data integration in a very good manner.

The solution's deployment and proxy processes are very good.

Although the solution's proxy design and process are good, it faces connecting issues because it lacks data integration. You have to filter the data before integrating it.

I have been using Mule Anypoint Platform for around one year.

I rate Mule Anypoint Platform a nine out of ten for stability.

We have to reintegrate it and create another structure on the same file instead of modifying the base one. We have to create other versions also. The solution's scalability is questionable compared to Microsoft Logic Apps.

Around 10 to 20 users are using the solution in our organization.

I rate Mule Anypoint Platform a six or seven out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support is not so good, but they are trying to provide on-time support. They take around 24 to 48 business hours to provide the solutions.

I rate the solution’s technical support eight and a half out of ten.

Positive

On a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy, I rate Mule Anypoint Platform ten out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

The solution's deployment takes around five to seven minutes maximum.

Firstly, we have to understand how we can integrate with the clients provided, then build the proxies of APIs and deploy from Anypoint Studio to CloudHub. A single person was required to deploy the solution.

On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing as four or five out of ten.

As it is free of cost and we have to take an enterprise license, there is probably no fee.

For the big layer ones, Mule Anypoint Platform will be better than Microsoft Logic Apps or any other integration platform.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform's most valuable features are its observability and stability.

MuleSoft Anypoint platform is a great integration platform. It's a bouquet of benefits. The solution's benefits, including observability and support, are brilliant.

The negative side of MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform is its cost. The solution's pricing model is very strange, and it will be really expensive if you use APIs a lot.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is a highly stable solution. I have worked for almost two years, and only twice did I see the platform go down for five to ten minutes.

I rate MuleSoft Anypoint Platform ten out of ten for stability.

I rate the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform ten out of ten for scalability because its features are amazing. You can keep adding, but you must have enough licenses to support the scalability.

The solution's initial setup is pretty straightforward. MuleSoft Anypoint Platform has a brilliant customer success team that helps you with everything.

The solution's deployment is pretty straightforward and doesn't take much time. The solution has a beautiful UI, and you can directly deploy from your IDE to your instances. Generally, it takes 15 to 20 minutes for one application to be deployed. They have some plugins available directly with which you can deploy them for both CloudHub and RTF.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform really needs to work on its pricing model because it's very complicated. CloudHub's pricing is pretty straightforward because they charge based on the number of codes you use. However, it's very tricky to calculate the cost of RTF. Moving from CloudHub to RTF creates a lot of challenges, including overshooting the license purchase. It was a nightmare for us to take down everything and change our infrastructure.

So while using RTF, we need to plan how to integrate things well in advance. If we do not use the reusability features within MuleSoft, we will add APIs which will cost more. So we have to find a way to reuse the APIs and be smart in making the integrations.

I was the central point of contact for MuleSoft. I was not an integration developer, but I managed the entire structure of MuleSoft.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is not just an API gateway platform but also an integration platform. Instead of using two tools or two applications, you can use one. Generally, your gateway will be separate, which is an exposure layer, and underneath, you will need to have your service desk established, where you write your integrations to connect to the back end. MuleSoft Anypoint Platform has got both into one. It's a good integration platform as a service tool recommended if you have a big budget.

We have to be really careful and cautious about how we will design our APIs. We have to keep an eye on the reusability of APIs, which is very critical while using the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform.

We never faced issues on the usage part. The solution's connections to third parties and ability to pull the data using APIs are brilliant. They have a bunch of platform APIs, and the data you see on the dashboard can be pulled out very easily using APIs. You can then push it to some BI tools or wherever you want.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is a brilliant tool. If you have small use cases and don't have a huge amount of traffic being transferred between the APIs, the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is the best-suited integration platform for you. You don't have to buy multiple applications and break your head to manage your observability and deployments because everything is integrated into one platform.

Overall, I rate MuleSoft Anypoint Platform a nine out of ten.

We're using Anypoint MQ for messaging, in different types: from SAP to third party systems, global third party systems, etc. There's a hundred of them.

It's extremely expensive to change things in Anypoint MQ, e.g. we have to go through either Accenture or IBM. IBM will do the changes, but the actual change we ask for costs huge amounts of money. I'm not sure why that is, or whether that's just a contract, but they always complain about multiple changes, regression testing, etc. It sounds like it's a very long winded task just to make a simple change. This is an area for improvement for Anypoint MQ.

Another problem we have with Anypoint MQ is that some of our end systems cannot cope with the throughput. If we put too many messages down to it, then there's a delay to send those messages onto the system that can't take them in as fast, and this means that the queue blows. We have either a 40 gigabyte or 40 megabyte queue space, but if we send 7,000 messages which need to be combined and sent out, the queue blows, because it just can't manage that throughput because the output is so slow. With the memory, we don't have a big enough queue to cope, so there's that problem.

If there was a way around that problem, we could send it. What we need to do is to be able to send 50,000 messages an hour or more, which we can do SAP to SAP, but we haven't found a solution on how to cope with sending it to Anypoint MQ because it blows up, so that's the big problem we have.

What we'd like to see in the next release of Anypoint MQ is for the issue of slow output of messages to be solved. Even if we wrote into disc, e.g. the disc space is cheap, so if you could write the messages to disc and then just feed them out and when the queue is caught up with itself, that would solve our problems. It means we could send MuleSoft all the messages in one go, and then it could drip feed them out.

The additional feature we'd like to see in Anypoint MQ is to be able to write the message queue to disc, to allow for ample queueing of messages, because currently, the output to a particular system is slow.

We've been dealing with Anypoint MQ for 20 years now.

Anypoint MQ has been stable, and it has not caused us any problems.

Anypoint MQ is a scalable solution.

We have not contacted the technical support team of Anypoint MQ, because we have our own internal third parties to deal with any issue that could arise from the solution.

What we've noticed in Anypoint MQ is that it's expensive to change things.

We evaluated Apache Kafka.

I thought we had a problem with our queuing software, and it turned out that it's not the software itself, it's the third party. We're passing the messages on to the third party, and they can only receive it at a certain rate, so we had to drop the Anypoint MQ software down, but it's not actually the MQ software, rather it's the actual third party application that was causing the problem.

As I'm working on the SAP side, I'm not sure if I'm the best person to discuss about the features I like most about the solution.

My advice to others looking into implementing the solution is to first look at what you're trying to achieve, because you've got Anypoint MQ as your queueing software, and then you've got the Apache Kafka software as well, and they do different things. I didn't realize this when I started looking, because I was looking at Kafka thinking that would be the answer to our problem, but it wasn't, because it looks great if you want instantaneous messaging and loads of bandwidth, but you need to do the interpretation of messages.

I'd say, look at what you want it for, because Anypoint MQ seems to be as good as the other options, to be fair. I'd also tell them about the problem I've had with it, and that's not just going to be a problem with Anypoint MQ alone, because I think other systems will have the same problem, e.g. the queuing problem. I'll tell others to really, really look at the application. Anypoint MQ seems to be a standard application, and it's acceptable.

My overall impression of Anypoint MQ in terms of rating it, is seven out of ten, but that's just based on my feeling. I don't have any quantifiable reasons on why I'm giving it that score.

We are an integrator for Anypoint MQ, based on Mule 4.3, with several active customers. The solution is typically delivered by cloud and there are differing kinds of use cases that we see.

If there is an event-driven architecture in place, then we will use Anypoint MQ to connect the different APIs together (such as the Experience APIs, Process API, and the System API) so as to enable a seamless process while minimizing data loss. That's the main use case seen in our work.

It's easy to use and comes as a bundle package with the Anypoint Platform, removing the need for any complex setup.

Anypoint MQ's capabilities are mainly used for messaging purposes, but it doesn't have typical use cases that extend as far as other Message Queue software.

For one, it would be helpful, from an additional features perspective, to see that it can handle large files of any type, whether image files, video files, etc. And if they would include an SFTP solution such as is available in AWS or Azure, this would be an added advantage for our clients.

Stability-wise, it's okay.

With regard to scalability, there can definitely be improvement. To make it more scalable, there needs to be a change in the upper limit of file sizes for messaging purposes. Currently, it can only handle messages up to 10 MB in size. If that could be addressed, I believe it would help those customers who have to handle large files.

From a technical support perspective, we mainly deal with product-related issues. We used to go back to MuleSoft and ask for support, and they provided if the customer had bought that particular piece of support. We needed to raise a ticket first, and based on that, they provided us the solutions.

But for any technical solutions needed, we would provide them, so we would only get support from the MuleSoft product team. In our company, it's our job as an integrator to provide the support.

It's easy to install, since it comes as a bundle package with the Anypoint Platform.

It is a good product, but for the reasons previously mentioned, there are a lot of opportunities to improve this particular piece of software.

I would rate Anypoint MQ a seven out of ten.