Likelihood to Recommend I love the IBM API Connect features, performance, and security level for all our business data. The workload balancing and integration with other third-party products are very simple. The data migration speed is beneficial, especially for time management, and creating process reports through IBM API Connect is incredible.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros High security with multiple types of authentication so no need to worry about security. API creation, automation and management all can be done form a single interface which guarantees security and increases efficiency. Highly rated among it's competitors which proves it has given a good service over the years. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons The first thing challenge we faced with the product was that if you deploying it to a third party cloud, that was very challenging and we need IBM team help at every step of the way and as well all know IBM support doesn't come cheap. A reason for that is that there isn't enough documentation done on the subject from IBM side. The upgrade process is not that seamless and involves a lot of hassles. You really need to have our requirements sorted out clearly because it is not very easy to customize the UI according to your needs, So you need to involve IBM from the start and give them clear requirements and then work with them to achieve it. Read full review Make sure to not over-engineer shared components. It can complicate development Create a roadmap for where you are going - if not, you may miss components I suggest getting support, otherwise it could be a difficult learning curve Read full review Usability IBM API Connect may be less appropriate for small-scale projects with minimal API management requirements, where simpler and more cost-effective solutions suffice. Organizations lacking the necessary technical expertise or resources to harness its full potential may face implementation challenges. In static environments with infrequent API changes or limited developer engagement, the platform's comprehensive features may be excessive for the task at hand.
Read full review Alternatives Considered There are two main reasons for choosing IBM over others. 1) Pricing 2) The conversation during the sales stage. The team at IBM understood our requirements and acted as consultants instead of sales people. They genuinely focused on providing a solution to our pain points which reflected during the implementation and continued after go-live in the form of technical support
Read full review It doesn't have API . We have to go for another API manager. But in Mule, it has both API manager and ESB
Read full review Return on Investment I consider IBM API Connect as a business capability enabler - the ROI level is practically secondary. With this platform at the core, associated architectural framework and guardrails ensure that we can progress with distributed development and automation in autonomous teams - a key factor to deliver required time to market performance. At this time, security and trust is key. A flexible yet secure API manager layer is necessary to ensure our relationships with partners and customers. Read full review Overall a great tool for complex integrations Read full review ScreenShots