Apache Camel is an open source integration platform.
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Cin7 Omni
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Cin7, headqduartered in Auckland, aims to make complex retail and wholesale simple with all-in-one cloud inventory, POS, EDI and 3PL. Cin7 allows users to manage sales channels, inventory, point of sale and supply chain in one central, cloud-based software. Cin7 offers integrations using third party logistics (3PL) interface and electronic data interchange (EDI), catering for businesses increasing trend to sell globally.
$295
per month
Cleo Integration Cloud
Score 9.6 out of 10
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Cleo Integration Cloud is a framework providing data integration between disparate systems and people within and across organizations.
Message brokering across different systems, with transactionality and the ability to have fine tuned control over what happens using Java (or other languages), instead of a heavy, proprietary languages. One situation that it doesn't fit very well (as far as I have experienced) is when your workflow requires significant data mapping. While possible when using Java tooling, some other visual data mapping tools in other integration frameworks are easier to work with.
Cin7 is great because a business can set up quickly without having to invest in hardware/servers, and the business does not need to be concerned about backing up data. Cin7 software is easy and intuitive to use. The pricing was competitive for cloud-based software that can be customized to each business. The software is constantly updated so a business does not have to worry about paying for updates or paying a large lump sum to purchase new updated software. However, Cin7 is able to increase its fees at any time. We experienced a significant price increase after 1 year. With purchased software, a business would not have to worry about unexpected pricing changes. Cin7 offers a useful integration with BigCommerce. Unfortunately, their own B2B website is lacking in features and ultimately not useful to our company. Cin7 does not provide the most useful customer service, as they only offer paid access to phone support. Most of our issue with the software were caused by updates in the software that were not announced, and they could only be fixed via email or tickets the next day.
CLEO Integration Cloud is well suited in any environment where you need to move and translate business data from one format to another or multiple other formats. It is very well suited to replace existing EDI systems that are cumbersome, are a lot of work to add new mappings (add customers for example), or where the support is lousy and you are constantly creating support tickets to try to resolve issues. It just works very well and is constantly improving including keeping up to changes made by various services such as Shopify.
Camel has an easy learning curve. It is fairly well documented and there are about 5-6 books on Camel.
There is a large user group and blogs devoted to all things Camel and the developers of Camel provide quick answers and have also been very quick to patch Camel, when bugs are reported.
Camel integrates well with well known frameworks like Spring, and other middleware products like Apache Karaf and Servicemix.
There are over 150 components for the Camel framework that help integrate with diverse software platforms.
A great platform perfectly integrated with the rest of the company's software.
Detailed design with simple and easy access from anywhere to our information.
Multi-location and multi-device access.
We save on hardware, software and maintenance, by minimizing the user's need for powerful equipment and the programs in charge of managing and configuring them, reducing the investment in their acquisition.
Cleo integration is in charge of technical maintenance and updates.
Onboarding could be improved. We worked with a programmer who was not as familiar with our business needs. Additionally, the person in charge of our onboarding was initially difficult to schedule time with until we reached out to a manager.
Cin7 occasionally makes updates to the software that causes the software to not work properly. For example, we would experience new errors on a CVS file import for products that had worked previously to the update. Additionally, our custom field implementations would be reverted to original and require set up again.
We experienced semi-frequent outages of the software. The software would not be accessible for up to 1 hour at a time. I believe they took steps to address this and reduce down time.
The Cin7 support team has never let us down, even if they weren't able to completely solve our problem. They are willing to have conference calls, video chats, whatever works to help fix your issue.
If you are looking for a Java-based open source low cost equivalent to webMethods or Azure Logic Apps, Apache Camel is an excellent choice as it is mature and widely deployed, and included in many vendored Java application servers too such as Redhat JBoss EAP. Apache Camel is lacking on the GUI tooling side compared to commercial products such as webMethods or Azure Logic Apps.
As a wholesale focused business, we found Vend to be tailored to retail businesses. TradeGecko was well suited for our wholesale business, however, lacked the full range of capabilities that Cin7 offered (B2B website, POS). Fishbowl had many features that we would not need. OMS Office Master System offered the wholesale capabilities we needed, however, the software could use an update. Cin7 was a perfect balance in terms of features and pricing for our company.
Before choosing a solution, we did a detailed analysis of cost, performance, scaling and support. Cleo checked all the right boxes and we have been very satisfied with our choice.
Very fast time to market in that so many components are available to use immediately.
Error handling mechanisms and patterns of practice are robust and easy to use which in turn has made our application more robust from the start, so fewer bugs.
However, testing and debugging routes is more challenging than working is standard Java so that takes more time (less time than writing the components from scratch).
Most people don't know Camel coming in and many junior developers find it overwhelming and are not enthusiastic to learn it. So finding people that want to develop/maintain it is a challenge.
We have easily improved our EDI tenfold (or more) as far as ease of adding new customers for example
We have saved a ton of money by reducing chargebacks for missing ASNs for example
We have improved customer scorecards where they measure our EDI performance such as one large brand name customer we sell wholesale to who originally scored us around 28% and after implementing CLEO we quickly went to a 96%+ score.
