MuleSoft Anypoint Platform Reviews

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.

We transfer data between systems. We are to save the data to make the communication between systems synchronous. We use Anypoint MQ for making the communication synchronous. The source integration component will place the data into Anypoint MQ, and the target company will take it from there.

Because our customers are moving from on-premise to cloud, it's mostly costs that have been saved and nothing else.

The most valuable feature is the messaging system.

Anypoint MQ is not a pure messaging product. There are so many solutions like this, but this is not as mature as those products. The other MQ products have the capability of reprocessing and maintaining the persistence of the data. They can handle large volumes and large messages, but Anypoint MQ doesn't have those capabilities.

It can only handle a maximum size of 10 megabytes. The other MQ products have a larger capacity. IBM MQ can handle 100 megabytes of data or even solid gigabytes. This doesn't have that capability.

This solution has a lot of gaps. It's not a pure MQ product. We have sort of exposed this product with different protocols like TCP. Also, it has to evaluate these capabilities compared to the other market products.

I have been using this solution for four years. The solution is used on an iPaaS cloud provided by MuleSoft.

The stability of Anypoint is not as mature as other MQ products.

The scalability is under the hood. It is AWS, and it is reliable. It's not user-based. It is automation-based and IT products-based. We have deployed five or six individuals using Anypoint MQ.

This is not a pure provider. It is just a tactical solution cloud. In the long run, we want to go back to square one and use other MQ products like ActiveMQ or IBM MQ because of Anypoint's limitations. For instance, it can't handle more than 10 megabytes of data, and it can't hold more than 50 persistent messages.

Deployment and maintenance are automated. There is an initial automation that is required.

Technical support is good.

We previously used a stable solution. We moved to this product thinking that the cost would be reduced, but things are not working as expected. We plan to go back to using the old solution.

Initial setup was very straightforward. Deployment is a cakewalk.

You don't need an explicit skill set for deployment. Anyone can do it.

I can't give you a straightforward answer because sometimes it depends on the usage. If you're going to have fewer than 5 million messages, it is free of cost. If you're going to have more than 5 million messages, you will be charged $100 per month.

I would rate this solution 6 out of 10. 

We thought that this was a pure demo product. We moved from IBM to MuleSoft thinking that it would work like IBM, but that's not what happened.

My advice is to try to evaluate the product beforehand and see whether it fits your needs and requirements. Check if it covers all of your use cases. Otherwise, it won't work.

There are a lot of MQ products on the market, but this is suitable for small scale customers and not for large scale.

We haven't switched solutions yet, but the plan is to switch because of this product's limitations. It doesn't cover all the use cases.

We use the solution for migration and integration.

There are issues with dead-letter queues.

I have been using Anypoint MQ for one year.

The product is stable so far.

The customer service is not good enough in Hong Kong.

We chose Anypoint MQ because it is a top-rated product in the market.

For the basic setup, we use some local message queues and integrate them with the message queue. It took one year to complete the setup.

We used another tool because it was complicated, and we had to hire a third party to build the architecture. The setup is quite complicated.

Anypoint MQ has stability issues. I have experienced data loss and inconsistent behaviour. The data isn't always pushed to the SQL database. When I put a message in the SQL queue, the data should be static, but it's not. Additionally, clicking a message in Anypoint MQ can sometimes trigger database loss. This instability becomes particularly noticeable when starting or restarting the server.

Overall, I rate the solution a four 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.

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 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. 

The tool's use cases are mainly for enterprise-level integrations that require transformations and major publish-subscribe scenarios in which data needs to be published to multiple systems in different formats.

I rate the solution's ease of learning a nine out of ten. It has good documentation and self-learning videos. It promotes usability and provides an end-to-end integration solution with the Salesforce ecosystem

The tool helps with order management and automates the enterprise's orchestration, invoice creation, product maintenance, and product life cycle. The API manager feature helps us configure, secure, and call APIs. 

The tool requires programming language. 

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

I rate Mule Anypoint Platform's scalability as nine out of ten. 

The solution's deployment is 10-20 percent longer.

We have a team to deploy the tool. 

The tool's pricing is cheaper than other RPAs' since it is execution-based. Other RPAs charge based on subscriptions.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.