Apache Camel vs. Cleo Integration Cloud vs. SPS Commerce

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

When you find yourself growing and finding success faster than you can keep up with, SPS Commerce will save your life and your reputation. The services they offer are easy to understand, they are available with suggestions and ideas for better ways, personalization is available to best suit your needs or the needs of your customers so that you can really shine and relieve the worries that come with growing pains. SPS also helps to keep information accurate with less human touching to cause errors.

Incentivized

• 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.
• Camel is also good for creating microservices.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We can easily create and send order confirmations.
• We respond to the corresponding receiving departments with timely and accurate ASN's.
• Once the order has shipped, customer service utilizes the invoicing function.

Incentivized

• didn't work well when our developers tried to transform heavy data sets
• Apache Camel's whole logic is based on java so team needs to have a great skill set in java
• if there are a handful of workflows then Apache Camel's full potential can't be realized

Incentivized

• A fully functional help manual would be good. Some topics have no help at all, "envelopeassemblybycontext" for instance.
• A needed feature is to be able to sort files by either file type (FM, RS, BPS) or by filename. Some of our projects have almost a hundred files.
• Better, more descriptive error messages. Sometimes a ruleset or process fails and the error message is not helpful.

Incentivized

• We have quite a few people here who use this portal, and we have it set up to receive an email when an order is available to print. As of now, you can only add a few recipients to receive those emails; it limits you.
• Invoicing is challenging at times as you have to remember to go in and invoice. If you forgot, it is hard to find the order to invoice, as it seems to disappear.
• We still haven't figured out how to have some of the invoicing features auto-populate, so there isn't so much to fill out. I wish some of those features were easier to use, or find if you have them.

Incentivized

If I can drop it, I will this year. We gave it a decent try for over 4 years and it has gotten worse with each added connection.

Ease in understanding and setup.

Incentivized

Great data manager in the cloud, at a competitive price, backed by a great company and great professionals.

Incentivized

Phone support is generally very good and you can get a person on the phone within a few minutes. Their emailed customer support however is very poor and often goes several days or longer before receiving a response, if ever at all

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

In my opinion, SPS Commerce is the bottom out of all three provided here. I think, essentially, if you are looking to be hands off and only oboard on setup and don't plan on growing your business and want to not understand anything about EDI and how it affects your company, SPS Commerce is a fine choice. Just if you want to do anything beyond that, I believe you are going to have the worst time.

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• I enrolled in a product I ended up not using because the vendor that required it ended our working relationship and SPS refused to offer a refund. After I canceled it, they continued to charge our account for three more months of service.
• The interface is simple and easy to understand and use, so it saved time when preparing shipments.

Incentivized