Fiorano would be a good choice for small-medium businesses that need integration capabilities with clients but don't want to carry the burden of an in-house development team. The software can be used by technical non-developers and the organization offers professional services to get you off the ground. For larger organizations that have an in-house development team and a wealth of internal resources, other "enterprise grade" middleware/ESB solutions may be more applicable.
If you’re bringing anything into Salesforce you should just invest now into Mule, you will get your money’s worth and find a myriad of uses to build APIs between many other systems. Once you build a component you can easily reuse it as a building block to attach to another source/destination. This makes it easy to ramp up quickly and spread usage of Mule throughout your enterprise. A good value for medium to large companies, but probably cheaper to outsource your job to a consulting firm if you are smaller.
Fioranio's underlying design is very good. In the event of a sudden shutdown, it would - in theory - be able to recover messages that were in-flight.
The visual design surface is very appealing and provides a very quick and easy way to decipher data flows. It has a definite advantage over traditional develop and document processes where documentation tends to be out of date. With Fiorano, the flow is already visualized in a relatively easy to understand way.
One thing that Fiorano had over some competitors was connections into our AS400 data queues. Not all middleware solutions have that - which is a boon for organizations that still run an iSeries in the back-end.
The support people are generally very well educated and easy to get a hold of if you have a support agreement in place.
It is best suited for Rest API development. Mule ESB uses RAML as an API descriptor which is less complex and easy to understand. RAML is an open standard majorly supported by Mulesoft. Once RAML is developed, it is very easy (a few clicks)to create flows corresponding to the resources defined in the RAML. One can also include JSON schema validation in RAML, and with the use of APIkit router, Mule ESB makes the request validation very easy (it's automatic basically.)
Mule ESB comes with a large spectrum of community and enterprise connectors. We have connectors for all the major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, SAP, etc. This enables Mule ESB to integrate with the other systems in a faster and more robust way. Mule ESB has many components to fulfill the requirements of each integration (for example batch processing, parallel processing, choice, etc.)
Mule API gateway is one of the best tools (modules) of Mulesoft's offering. It supports API governance and management very well. One can easily enforce policies on their APIs with API gateway. It enables some of the must-have features in an API solution (i.e. throttling, oAuth, access levels, etc.)
Implementing a CI/CD (DevOps) environment for Mule ESB is a very easy task. Mule majorly uses MAVEN as its build tool, which in turn makes it best suitable for CI/CD approach. Mule also provides MAVEN plugins for auto deployments to the servers. Mule also has a best Unit testing module which is MUnit. MUnit can be used for both Unit and Functional testing, and it is easy to write and generates coverage reports in various formats.
Fiorano scalability was a problem for us - specifically we were told about a limit of the number of components that could be run on a single server. This was not explained during the pre-sales and is a serious limitation of the platform.
Some of the components in Fiorano are just poorly implemented. For instance, we used the FTP component to download a large multi-GB file. Apparently, that component requires equal RAM to file size. So, if you download a 10GB file, you'll need at least 10GB of RAM to do so.
Stability was also problematic for us - some of the components or entire data flows would suddenly stop for no reason. At time they coudln't even be restarted and we were forced to restart the Fiorano service. Not an ideal situation to be in for mission critical data flows.
Consistency is a problem for the components in Fiorano. There are wide ranges of design variations in the UI between components. Even in the same component, it could be the case that you'd have to switch back to the "old" component UI to view certain important settings. This made development more difficult.
3rd party support doesn't exist - perhaps it isn't popular enough? There isn't a community supporting Fiorano which means that problems require you to go to a support person.
We are evaluating options such as Apache Nifi as a possible replacement for our Fiorano data flows. We've also used PilotFish technologies that has been able to fit the same use cases as Fiorano (minus the visual component). Generally the products mentioned above excelled in areas of stability and through-put compared to Fiorano, but none have been able to consolidate our ESB components into a single platform.
Fiorano added another piece of complexity to our ESB solution but has not pulled its weight as far as ROI. As we started ramping up on the product, it continued to show it's short-comings and we are working now to ramp it down. Overall, it has not been a positive experience.
