IBM DataPower Gateway vs. WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus

WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.

Incentivized

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

• The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
• DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
• The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.

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 old interface is being really missed by our team as the new WebUI interface is not that intuitive or easy to work with. It takes a lot of time to load. There should be an inbuilt wizard for creating a Rest service as well like there is for an XML based service.
• IBM support is very knowledgeable but it's not that easy to reach them. They don't release the fix patches very soon which also becomes a big issue in certain situations where critical projects are involved.
• Lastly, DataPower has its steep learning curve and it requires time and effort on your end to gain full control and make the most of the advanced features which it offers. Finding the right resource in the market is not that easy.

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

Cost of the appliance

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

Our experience with the WSO2 support has beent satisfactory

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

• It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
• We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
• It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.

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