Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review WSO2 ESB is an awesome product for companies looking to venture into the world of SOA with an ESB. They have a lot of other products too that can work really well with their carbon infrastructure. The interface is simple for deploying and managing proxy services. You can also write custom modules within the ESB using Java with IDE like Eclipse
Read full review Pros 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 It has a definite advantage over traditional develop and document processes where documentation tends to be out of date.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. Read full review One of the basic requirement of an ESB product is that it should be able to support transformation. WSO2 ESB provides support of XSLT, so you can transform your request to whatever format. Moreover, transformations like converting your xml payload into JSON and JSON payload to XML are out of the box available. WSO2 ESB provides a scheduler feature, by which you can configure your own scheduler to call a proxy service at a particular time of day or or initiate sequence. WSO2 ESB provides excellent error handling techniques, WSO2 ESB provides detailed error handling scenarios to tackle all the situations. WSO2 ESB also provides custom error handling by which you can make your own custom error message before sending it back to client. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review While it's easy to configure for a quick start, it is not so easy to deploy by yourself in a complex production scenario. Not very stable for production usage, we encountered several trivial bugs that make us believe that this product is still not widely adopted. Lack of a built in mechanism for auto-restart in case of an application server crash. Read full review Usability Compared to competitors the overall experience has been fine
Read full review Reliability and Availability Lack of auto-restart built-in capabilities. In case of running out of memory there are no built-in methods to recover from a crash, just for example, Oracle WebLogic Node Manager.
Read full review Performance The product is performing well and consuming few resources
Read full review Support Rating Our experience with the WSO2 support has beent satisfactory
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review It's the only one truly open source and free.
Read full review Scalability Adding a server node is really straightforward, there are just few point in the configuration files.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Very well documented tutorials and case studies makes it easy to learn. It has a really supportive community It is fast and it can easily handle 300 tps of average use on a VM with 4Gig RAM Read full review ScreenShots