IBM’s App Connect is a cloud-based data integration platform with data mapping and transformation capabilities within connectors between high-volume systems. App Connect also offers near-real time data synchronization and an API builder that is adaptable to the user’s coding skill level.
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Mule ESB
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Mule ESB, from Mulesoft, is an open source middleware solution.
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Pricing
IBM App Connect
Mule ESB
Editions & Modules
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Pricing Offerings
IBM App Connect
Mule ESB
Free Trial
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No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Community Pulse
IBM App Connect
Mule ESB
Considered Both Products
IBM App Connect
Verified User
Engineer
Chose IBM App Connect
IBM App Connect started as MQSeries Integrator (MQSI) more than 20 years ago. In the IT environment, this is like an eternity. And this allowed a lot of customer experience and needs to be embedded in the product. Without it becoming a legacy application. The changes done in …
- great when you need to integrate applications without any message lost or duplicated and when transnationality is important - if you need the highest throughput possible and not much (or not at all) mapping is required, a system like Kafka is more appropriate
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.
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.
The development and the transformation capability is not so great. I believe IBM is looking to incorporate some of features of IBM APP Connect into API Connect.
The authentications features are no way close to CA API Management (f.k.a Laye r7).
The development experience is not as good as Apigee's.
The GUI should be improved. Maybe the product team should see the other API management tools in their offering.
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.
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.
We did not select Cast Iron as our iPaaS solution, it was the weakest competitor in the field that we evaluated. Our experience was that it was not nearly as easy to learn, without in-depth training and guidance, and the developer UI was extremely buggy. We subjected each of the vendors to a battery of integrations, from simple to challenging, and it fell short on each one. One of the most simple integrations was grabbing a CSV file from an FTP source, parsing the data, doing a small amount of transformation, then inserting that data into an Azure MSSQL DB. After 2 hours on the phone with the Cast Iron support team, we were still unable to get this working.
