Cloud Elements (discontinued) vs. IBM App Connect

Areas where it would be appropriate:

1. If you want a really 'deep' integration with a third party software, and you want all the control over how it interacts with your software
2. If you want a totally white-labeled solution, that is totally invisible to your customers.
3. if you care more about a well thought out/useful API, rather than a pretty UI

Areas where it is less appropriate:

1. If you want a Zapier-esque hands-off integration for YOU.
2. if you want your customers to do more of the work, pay for it/etc.
3. if you're a really small business, it could be too expensive. But it depends on your individual contract with them.

Incentivized

IBM App Connect is well-suited to serve as a central integration hub, particularly for scenarios involving data transformation, complex routing logic, and dynamic backend routing. It excels at enabling legacy system modernization and supports real-time, event-driven architectures effectively. However, it is less appropriate for simple point-to-point integrations or for use cases requiring workflow process management and human task orchestration, where BPM or lightweight automation tools may be more suitable.

• Customer Support -- They have a knowledgeable team and are very responsive.
• Communication -- Most questions are addressed quickly
• Documentation -- The API documentation is well organized and easy to follow.

Incentivized

• Just the ability to display and consume data through a single dashboard makes this a great application for our business purposes.
• With the ability to consume their exposed API, data validation and manipulation becomes a breeze.

Incentivized

• There weren't really many cons to our experience. The only slight downside was the cost but they worked with us on that to make it work.

Incentivized

• The UI crashed constantly while trying to develop integrations.
• The UI was not nearly as intuitive as many of its competitors in the iPaaS space, which lead to a much larger learning curve.

Incentivized

It is the best on-premise application to cloud integration in the market. I guess IBM is planning to integrate IBM App Connect with the IBM API Connect solution.

Incentivized

You can do some really powerful things with this system. The overall design is an attempt to make configurable some of the routine tasks/common functionality, but allow for development/customization of the core of the application.

Incentivized

Support is good, however it takes longer than expected to get responses. When bugs are reported they often seem to fall into a black hole.

Incentivized

MuleSoft is also a similar product to Cloud Elements, but is not available as an option in this form.

Workato and MuleSoft are competing cloud API connector platforms that perform a similar function to Cloud Elements. We chose Cloud Elements over them because CE provided a more robust path to unifying the behavior of connected systems.

Zapier is a workflow automation tool that I feel draws erroneous comparison to Cloud Elements that I need to highlight. Workflow automation tools (Zapier, IFTTT, Microsoft Flow) do provide multiple integrations, but for simplistic scenarios where only a handful of explicitly described steps need accomplished. Cloud Elements is a platform for developers to deliver faster and with higher reliability than making integrations one-by-one in complex systems that solve demanding problems.

Incentivized

We selected IBM App Connect Enterprise due to our confidence in IBM as a long-term partner and our history with their integration technology (Message Broker/Bus). IBM App Connect provides the robustness and high reliability needed for our core on-premises systems, with proven scalability to the cloud. Its key strength is enabling deep integration by combining low-code with the power of complex, custom logic, ensuring the platform's capabilities exactly matched our need to handle complex flows.

Incentivized

• We are able to build integrations in HALF the time we could build them from scratch.
• They allow our development team to spend more hours focused on developing our core product, not connections to other products.
• Their large catalog of services to connect to allows us to spend much less time researching other platform integration endpoints and increases our R&D speed a considerable amount.

Incentivized

• We can integrate different applications in just few hours
• We can validate the received/sent messages
• We can monitor any error appeared in the flows