MuleSoft Anypoint Platform Reviews

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 use the Mule Anypoint Platform for API management and integration.

I am not an end-user of the platform because I'm an architect, and we simply evaluated and deployed it for the business to use. I am not able to provide platform usage analytics.

The ability to define multi-tiered APIs and reuse them is a fantastic platform feature.

Code quality, Code Security, SaaS, and DaaS security, can all be improved.

We recently onboarded and we went live only in the month of February. We are still new to the platform. 

We have been working with the Mule Anypoint Platform for just three months. 

So far it has been good. We are still evolving for broader usage of the platform.

Mule Anypoint Platform is a stable product.

We haven't gotten to that layer yet, but I believe it is scalable, based on the description that we have.

It's a new platform, a new setup in Azure, and I don't believe that we have yet met the scalability criteria. We are still attempting to consume the platform's threshold, which we have acquired.

Mule Anypoint Platform is not being used by a single department. It is being used by the entire organization.

Technical support is both helpful and supportive.

We used DevOps to deploy. We have set up the pipelines on Azure.

I haven't deployed any directly, but deployments can be done within minutes.

It is easy to set up. We have excellent documentation on the deployment and configuration steps.

I am not aware of the cost. It is completely managed by the vendor management team.

They should be knowledgeable about their industry. They should leverage the platform's use cases and try to deploy it only when it is required.

I am a client of this product.

I would rate Mule Anypoint Platform an eight 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 use the infrastructure of the Mule Anypoint Platform to host our application and services on Amazon. We are end-users and I'm a technical delivery manager.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of developing APIs. It's very, very easy and very fast. Anypoint offers good performance and security. 

The pricing should be improved, it's an expensive product. 

I've been using this solution for six years. 

The solution is stable. 

The scalability is good but again, you need to be aware that if you want to scale up your APIs, it requires spending more. 

We're not so happy with the technical support, it could definitely be improved. 

Generally, deployment of one API wouldn't take more than 10-15 minutes. We use CICD DevOps for our deployment strategy and it's carried out in-house. We use this product continuously and extensively.

It's important to be aware of the cost implications of using this solution. Unless you know the extent to which you are going to use MuleSoft, you'll begin with a handful of APIs that need to be developed and then you'll start implementing more and more until you realize it's become quite expensive. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

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.

We are customers of Mule.

This is a good platform for designing, flowing out APIs, and then doing API-based integrations. It also offers a lot of adapters for commercial products like Salesforce, SAP and the like. It has good monitoring abilities. If you use it for API management, security monitoring and things like that, it works well at the experience API layer.

One of the issues I have is that Jira tries to be more than an API-based integration platform and it encourages writing of Java-based applications underneath the cover, even though it's not meant to be an app service, so it's slow. That's how they try to sell it. The solution has three layers; the experience layer, the process layer and the system layer. The system layer is used to connect the systems; the process layer can be used to create processes like transformations, logic, etc.; and the experience layer is used to interface with whoever's going to consume it. The problem is that the process layer is not efficient. It acts like an interpreter and interpreters are slow, and if you give it some path like converting to a 100 kilobyte file, it takes 15 times more memory than if I just wrote a program 

When you try using it for the processing layer, it doesn't work well. We ended up pulling back to .NET for our own internal microservices that do a lot of processing. We use the .NET microservices as the process layer, because we know it's faster. Then we plug it into Mule to experience the API interface and that's when we need to make a choice, do we put our system APIs right through our microservice, or do we use Mule as a system API layer, but then let it interface with our process API. We just had to make choices.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The solution has threading, but it has the interpreter feature which I think slows it down.

The technical support is not great and documentation is sparse. You really have to rely on the community, more experienced MuleSoft users, who know the strengths and weaknesses, rather than relying on the company. You can get an architect to assist with implementation.

It's an expensive solution and then you have to try and find a MuleSoft engineer, which is even harder.

The issue seems to be the way they've positioned the product, advocating the experience layer, process layer and system layer through Mule. As it competes with the likes of webMethods, it rates as an eight out of 10. As an end-to-end solution, however, I would rate it a five at best. 

I use the solution for NetSuite and Salesforce integrations. 

The tool's visual features are attractive. 

Mule Anypoint Platform is complex for beginners. Users without programming skills will find it complex. It should also improve its pricing. 

I have been using the product for half a year. 

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

I am the single user of the product in my company. I rate its scalability a ten out of ten. 

I haven't contacted the technical support team. 

The product doesn't require the installation of agents. 

Mule Anypoint Platform is affordable. 

You would need programming skills to use the product. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

Since we work in a consulting firm, we develop apps on MuleSoft Anypoint MQ. We mainly use this solution for integrations.

The solution is very scalable with solid performance and the capability of extending it using any custom Java in case you don't have anything out of the box. MDP is strong. It is good compared to other products regarding its capabilities in managing or orchestrating the issue load.

The solution is very costly. The solution should provide a package with fewer capabilities at a lower price for specific companies that don’t have a big IT budget. Not every customer requires all the capabilities of the software. It will be a good fit in the market, and they will easily sell it more.

I have been using Anypoint MQ for four years.

The solution is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

The solution is scalable. The solution is for the enterprise solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability a nine out of ten.

I will compare the solution with SAP CPI. It is also for enterprise-level customers like companies with a very big IT spend and infrastructure. It is better in terms of capabilities and ease of use. CPI is more complicated, and it requires a lot of time to learn it.

The initial setup is not very complex. It depends upon the VPN, architecture, and customer. VPN is difficult because you need a network team and an understanding of what’s happening, but it is not involved in Anypoint; instead, it is the whole architecture of the IP landscape, which makes it complex.

We help our customers with initial implementation and then hand it over to the support team for maintenance.

The tool is heavily bundle-priced. I rate the solution’s pricing five on a scale of ten, where one is expensive, and ten is cheap. 

I recommend the product for an enterprise level.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use Mule Anypoint Platform in our company for API integration, API orchestration, and other related things.

Mule Anypoint Platform's valuable features are its flexibility in terms of deployment and its SaaS capabilities. One of the solution's features is its connectors, which allow for any specific integrations within any other package software. Mule provides a lot of connectors for integration purposes.

I think Mule Anypoint Platform is one of the market leaders, so our customers prefer it, which is why I also use it.

The solution's user interface has shortcomings and can be made much better. Mule Anypoint Platform can be made more user-friendly so that people with lesser technical knowledge can understand the product. Mule Anypoint Platform can get too complex for non-technical people.

I have been working as a system integrator using Mule Anypoint Platform for two to three years.

It is a scalable solution.

My company caters to the needs of medium-sized businesses.

Mule's technical support is good. I rate the technical support between eight and nine out of ten.

Positive

Regarding Mule Anypoint Platform's installation, I can say that since we use the SaaS platform, we didn't face any issues with the installation of SaaS modules.

Mule Anypoint Platform is a SaaS system. The platform is available, so you just configure it and don't need to deploy anything. You just have to configure whether you want high availability, DR, or anything else. Otherwise, there is nothing much to deploy since it all falls on the SaaS capabilities.

We have only three engineers required for the configuration and adaptation of the product.

Price-wise, it is a good product since it is reasonably priced.

The product's maintenance part is easy and requires only one person.

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