What TrustRadius Research Says
Mulesoft Pricing 2022
As cheesy as it sounds, automation saves lives. Think about breathing, it’s involuntary. If we had to manually breathe we’d stop because it's so tedious and then we’d die. That’s how important those dumb, repetitive tasks are to your team’s workflow.
You cannot get rid of these chores but you can automate them. With automation software like Mulesoft, you can allocate tasks to robots, and save more time for projects, decision-making, and your customers.
What is Mulesoft?
Mulesoft is a software company and business solution platform for automation and enterprise application integration. They were acquired by Salesforce in 2018. While automation is one of the biggest services on the Mulesoft platform, Salesforce acquired them because of Mulesoft for their enterprise application integration (EAI) capabilities.
With Mulesoft, Salesforce can use their application network development to offer digital transformation for clients. Through their network connections, they can provide business process automation technology as well.
The platform's 3 main services are automation, API management, and data integration. Teams can access their application integration functionality through their API management tools like their API Designer and DataGraph.
For their data integration platforms capabilities, you can go here. They offer powerful features like templates for development and real-time integration of messaging and events. Learn more about their data integration platform and ETL tool here.
Mulesoft also doubles as a robotic process automation (RPA) platform that offers automation services for businesses looking to streamline their workloads and increase productivity.
Mulesoft has 3 main products including the Mulesoft Anypoint Platform, Mulesoft Composer, and Mulesoft RPA.
The Mulesoft Anypoint Platform can be used as an all-in-one for automation, data integration, and API management. Its fully managed infrastructure CloudHub can be deployed on Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure using docker containers and Kubernetes clusters.
You can find the “pricing” breakdown for Anypoint here, but know that it does not include actual pricing for the product. It goes over features, provider support team options, and offers a FAQs section for license and subscription questions.
Mulesoft Composer is their application connection solution. It includes pre-built connectors and real-time previews so your integrations are seamlessly connected without coding. You can find Composer’s pricing here. It does include upfront pricing with their lowest plan Starter being $27K a year.
Mulesoft RPA uses both Anypoint and Composer for delivering robust automation. Some examples include data entry, data extraction, and ocular character recognition (OCR) for pulling text from images. It comes fully integrated with Salesforce Clouds in case you prefer to use it there instead. We go over automation pricing in the next section where we look at the Mulesoft Automation pricing which includes features from all 3 products.
Industry use cases for Mulesoft are primarily in IT and computer software companies. The featured use cases on the platform are manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services.
Many want to know if there is a free version of Mulesoft and the answer is technically no. Yes, they previously had open-source projects. Mule ESB Community, an integrated development environment (IDE) offering free development and production, is one of these open-source projects that are no longer free. It’s the same with Mule Studio and TCAT. If you go to their page explaining their open source projects, you’ll see broken UI that doesn’t fit the screen and the links lead you to 30-day free trials or a notice explaining it's been discontinued.
Teams can learn more about their EAI uses in the video below.
If you want to see the software in action below is a tutorial for building an application.
Build your first Hello Mule application | Getting Started with MuleSoft
For learning more about automation capabilities see their automation service demo below.
Automate Anything, Empower Everyone with MuleSoft | Salesforce Demo
What is Mulesoft’s Pricing Model?
The platform has 3 individual products and not all of them have pricing. We are focusing on their automation package because it includes access to their two other products. Mulesoft Automation encompasses all the automation features of their products. It does not have every single feature of every product; it has just what you need for an automation package.
The platform's pricing is based on the overall runtime.
Starting at 57K per year | Usage based on the number of
|
In this plan you get access to their main products including the Mulesoft Anypoint Platform, Mulesoft Composer, and Mulesoft RPA. This offers teams' 57K Automation Credits they can use with the RPA or Composer platforms. The plan comes with 6 allotted Composer Connectors (or integrations). Salesforce, Tableau, and Slack are your first 3 and the second 3 you can choose. You can find the other choices here, they are listed on the left. The package also includes integration capabilities and API building from their Anypoint Platform.
Mulesoft Alternatives
Another awesome RPA solution is UiPath. They offer robots for automation, tests, and analytics. They also offer machine learning models and a no-code designer for building tailored applications for your team.
Free | Pro | Enterprise | |
Cost | $0 | Starting at $420 per month |
In terms of cost Mulesoft is more expensive. Most of the best capabilities in UiPath are in their Enterprise plan, which requires consultation with sales. UiPath Pro still has amazing automation capabilities like self-hosted robots that don’t require supervision. If you want the full experience, the Enterprise plan has more analytics and automation testing to improve bot performance. It’s unlikely that what Enterprise does cost will be more than Mulesoft’s starting cost of $57K.
On top of being more expensive, Mulesoft has usage-based pricing which means costs can run much higher than expected. The pricing for UiPath Pro starts at $420 for the initial package and the site does not specify how much it can cost later on. It’s still not the same as a starting cost of over $50K for usage-based platform pricing.
When it comes to functionality both offer codeless automation but Mulesoft does not offer an app builder like UiPath. You can access the power of integrations in both software. Some of Uipath's integrations include Dropbox, Jira, Salesforce, and Gmail. A few Mulesoft connector options include MongoDB, Slack, SAP Hana, and Jira.
For version flexibility, UiPath only has an on-premise license for their Enterprise version whereas Mulesoft allows customers to install Mulesoft products on their own but they are in charge of installation and maintenance themselves.
UiPath is the more popular option of an RPA, taking up 54% of the market. Mulesoft on the other hand doesn’t actually rank in the RPA category but makes up 7.5% of the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) market. This is because even though Mulesoft has powerful automation products, their EAI technology is also super innovative - even according to UiPath.
For a review comparison breakdown of the UiPath and Mulesoft platforms, go here.
More Resources
Teams that want to see other robotic process automation (RPA) software can find more here. If you’re open to related software then take a look at any of the following listed below.
For those that have used any of the platforms discussed here, please leave a review to help other buyers make informed decisions.
