IBM App Connect vs. WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus

- 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

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

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

Compared to competitors the overall experience has been fine

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The product is performing well and consuming few resources

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

Our experience with the WSO2 support has beent satisfactory

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It's the only one truly open source and free.

Adding a server node is really straightforward, there are just few point in the configuration files.

Incentivized

• I don't see any negative Impact .
• I like using this tool to do my job.
• I am comfortable using this tool.

Incentivized

• 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