IBM DataPower Gateway vs Mule ESB comparison

IBM and Salesforce are both solutions in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category. IBM is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5, while Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.0. IBM holds a 6.0% mindshare in E, compared to Salesforce’s 18.7% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Salesforce users who would recommend it.

IBM DataPower Gateway

Read 29 IBM DataPower Gateway reviews

5,878 Views
940 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Mule ESB

Read 52 Mule ESB reviews

4,192 Views
3,102 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

IBM DataPower Gateway

Mule ESB

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 2025

IBM DataPower Gateway and Mule ESB are competing in the integration solutions space, each offering unique strengths. Mule ESB appears to have an edge with superior features and flexibility, enhancing its value for the price.

Features: IBM DataPower Gateway is known for its robust API management, security features, and integration capabilities, making it ideal for secure enterprise environments. Mule ESB stands out with its extensive connectivity options, API-led connectivity approach, and versatile Anypoint Platform, enhancing its ability to meet diverse integration needs.

Room for Improvement: IBM DataPower Gateway could improve with a more user-friendly deployment process and reducing the need for specialized knowledge. Enhanced customization options would benefit users. Mule ESB might enhance its initial cost-effectiveness and streamline licensing options. Better centralized management tools could further simplify user operations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM DataPower Gateway, with its structured deployment model, suits enterprises but requires specialized skills. IBM’s customer service is comprehensive. Mule ESB offers agile, cloud-based deployment solutions, allowing faster implementations. Its customer service excels in providing accessible resources and smoother experiences.

Pricing and ROI: IBM DataPower Gateway offers competitive setup costs with significant ROI in secure, large-scale environments. Mule ESB may involve higher initial expenses but delivers notable long-term ROI, thanks to its flexibility and feature-rich platform.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Mule ESB Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Mule ESB

July 2025

Download the complete report

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

IBM DataPower Gateway

Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

6th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Infrastructure (12th), SOA Application Gateways (2nd), API Management (12th)

Mule ESB

Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 6.0%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Mule ESB is 18.7%, down from 22.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi

Co-Founder at tenekit

Security features meets compliance needs and offers MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) that simplifies integration efforts

While I like IBM products, I'm not an evangelist. I work with Java, Microsoft ASP.NET, and various technologies. I'm not tied to any specific vendor. However, I do find IBM to be a bit greedy. It's a large, profit-driven company. The support team is mostly based in India, and they follow a very structured process and protocol. Sometimes, it feels like playing ping pong with them – lots of back and forth before the problem gets escalated. You might even have to get your sales rep involved to push things along. For me, the support it could be better. Indian support teams aren't inherently bad, but with IBM, it feels impersonal. They respond, sure. But if it's a complex technical issue, they might ask you a lot of questions that just seem designed to waste your time. Sometimes it feels like they hope you'll get frustrated and solve the problem yourself.

Read full review

Maharsh-Kapadia

Enterprise Integration Architect at Tata Consultancy

Transforms enterprise integration with comprehensive platform and excellent support

The best features of this solution are that everything we get into a single platform, whether it's integration, API, or data modeling; everything is available in one platform. It's a hybrid, including cloud and on-premise solutions with good connectivity and good connectors. From the benefits of using Mule ESB, we could reduce the manual tasks to 50% in one to two years. The cost is still something we are trying to make lower because we see some advantages when we move from point-to-point integration to API-led connectivity. We have seen a lot of reusable assets, so the cost is reduced. Ultimately, we want to see how it's transformed into business revenue; that's what we are still looking into.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"You don't have to have a separate DMC proxy because DataPower Gateway is an appliance and will take care of a lot of security features. These include data validations, encryption, as well as XML or any type of scripting or security threats that are present."

"What I like most is the stability."

"Support for PCA and non-PCA services is valuable."

"I like that it is very stable, and we never experience any downtime."

"The solution is stable."

"It is very easy to set up and configure, even for users with no prior experience."

"The product's most valuable features are AAA policies and security features."

"If you have an API application in your organization that you want to make safe and secure, in addition to your existing WAF or load balancer, this product comes with all those capabilities:"

More IBM DataPower Gateway pros

"The most powerful feature is DataWeave, which is a powerful language where data can be transformed from one form into another."

"It is easily deployable and manageable. It has microservices-based architecture, which means that you can deploy the solution based on your needs, and you can manage the solution very easily."

"Once it is started, we don't see any problems on a day to day basis."

"The product is very stable."

"I'm not using ESB directly. It is the integration layer, so it's running under the hood. However, the conversion and transformation performance is excellent. Anypoint Enterprise Security is also solid."

"The product offers a community edition that is free of cost."

"The architecture based on events has several connectors which allow integration from external and internal applications of the company."

"Mule Expression Language"

More Mule ESB pros

Cons

"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."

"One area that could be improved is the integration with Postgres and SQL databases. Currently, IBM DataPower Gateway only integrates with Oracle databases."

"Traceability could be improved, especially for business operations. The traceability of the transactions could be an improvement point for DataPower to work on. It would be better if they provided JSON support. JSON protocol data has changed format. It started performing internal transformation to JSONx. This might be an additional complexity."

"DataPower isn't the most user-friendly tool. It is not an easy tool to use. Some things could use better wizards to guide you through processes."

"In the next release, I would like to see the product price reduced. It should be cheaper."

"An area for improvement in IBM DataPower Gateway is its price point because it's a relatively expensive product. Sometimes, when the customer use case is just a very small subset of what's being offered in IBM DataPower Gateway, then the product can be expensive, making my company lose some of the opportunities because of the expensive pricing. A lower price point for IBM DataPower Gateway, even if that results in a less feature-rich version, would be appreciated. In terms of additional features that I'd like to see in the next release of IBM DataPower Gateway, nothing specific comes to mind because IBM constantly improves its standards and provides quarterly updates to the product, so it's quite fine."

"The programming language is only supported in XSLT and Gateway script."

"IBM DataPower Gateway is quite big for smaller organizations, looking at different types of clients who are virtually assisted in this, I would say it's not really a good product for smaller firms."

More IBM DataPower Gateway cons

"MuleSoft isn't as mature as some other integration technologies out there like IBM WebSphere. There's room for growth, and MuleSoft is working toward that."

"The stability could be improved."

"In order to meet the new trend of active metadata management, we need intelligent APIs that can retrieve new data designs and trigger actions over new findings without human intervention."

"From an improvement perspective, there should be fewer coding challenges for users in Mule ESB."

"From the product perspective, it was sometimes hard to manage the dependencies. When we had to add dependencies on a couple of different packages, it was sometimes confusing. It was hard to update them with Anypoint Studio, as well as with MuleSoft. There were challenges with that. So, that's one of the areas that could be improved."

"The Anypoint platform consumes a lot of memory, and it would be great for developers if it were more lightweight."

"Improvements could be made in performance."

"The price of Mule ESB could improve."

More Mule ESB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As far as I know, they have a perpetual license for this product. They are paying perpetual fees rather than an annual subscription or annual pricing."

"IBM DataPower Gateway is quite expensive to get resources to work on this product. If the price could be cheaper, I think that will make it a little bit better and easily accessible to smaller clients. Then it could compete with other solutions that are available in the market. There's a whole lot of other solutions available that work well and are cheaper than IBM's products."

"Most customers' use case budgets are not inlined with the price of IBM DataPower Gateway. It is too expensive."

"The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."

"This product is a bit expensive as IBM products are costly assets. However, for enterprise customers it is a worthwhile investment."

"The tool's initial costing is expensive for small banks and financial institutions."

"It's expensive when you compare it with others."

"The cost of this product varies from customer to customer and the relationship with IBM, including how many offerings from IBM are already being used."

More IBM DataPower Gateway pricing and cost advice

"This product is expensive, but it does offer value for money."

"The price of the Mule ESB commercial version is expensive. However, they have a free community version."

"Most of the challenges that I had with this solution were for smaller customers. There is not a good licensing model or pricing model. It is more expensive than other solutions, and that's the downside of MuleSoft. I had to be creative to be able to sell it to the business, but we did. This is something they have to work on because for large companies, it's affordable, but for small and medium businesses, it's very hard to sell."

"The pricing must be improved."

"I think the price is very high. If you use TIBCO BW, the license is for the CPU usage, then the IPS, and support. I also think the license for the product is a one-time expense."

"The various features and components for this solution are no longer free."

"Mule ESB is a costly solution. We pay approximately $80,000 annually for the system. The cost of the number of instances, annual subscription, and cloud hosting services are expensive."

"This is expensive. In my next project, we had to go to other vendor."

More Mule ESB pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

29%

Insurance Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM DataPower Gateway?

The MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) is great because it allows you to easily expose services using various protocols – web services, REST (JSON), and others. This flexibility simplifies things.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM DataPower Gateway?

I would rate the pricing a two out of ten, with one being high price, and ten being low price. It's high-priced for smaller companies. But it is okay for enterprises. So, the price could be more fl...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM DataPower Gateway?

The DCDR process should be less complex. AI should improve developer efficiency and effort. Whenever I am writing code, it should give recommendations automatically by incorporating AI so I can wri...

See all answers

Migration from IBM Integration Bus to Mulesoft ESB for a large enterprise tech services company

I was previously part of the Oracle SOA/OSB development team. In my current capacity I architected solutions using MuleSoft Anypoint Platform on cloud / on-premises and hybrid modes and on PCE/RTF ...

See all answers

IBM Integration Bus vs Mule ESB - which to choose?

Our team ran a comparison of IBM’s Integration Bus vs. Mule ESB in order to determine what sort of ESB software was the best fit for our organization. Ultimately we decided to choose IBM Integratio...

See all answers

What do you like most about Mule ESB?

The solution's drag-and-drop interface and data viewer helped us quite a lot.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM API Connect vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 34% of the time

Apigee vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Azure API Management vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 7% of the time

Kong Gateway Enterprise vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 6% of the time

webMethods.io vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM DataPower Gateway Competitors

IBM Integration Bus vs Mule ESB

Compared 22% of the time

Oracle Service Bus vs Mule ESB

Compared 12% of the time

IBM B2B Integrator vs Mule ESB

Compared 9% of the time

webMethods.io vs Mule ESB

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat Fuse vs Mule ESB

Compared 5% of the time

More Mule ESB Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway

August 2025

Download IBM DataPower Gateway product report

Buyer's Guide

Mule ESB

August 2025

Download Mule ESB product report

Also Known As

WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower

No data available

Overview

IBM DataPower Gateway is a robust, secure next-generation enterprise-grade single multichannel API gateway that supplies dynamic access, integration, control, and outstanding security. The solution is available in a broad range of workload capabilities, including application programming interface (API), service oriented architecture (SOA), B2B, cloud, web, and mobile. These dynamic capabilities ensure users are able to quickly increase the reach of an organization's critical IT resources to new channels, which will provide shareholders, team members, and clients with safe, secure access at all times.

DataPower Gateway is very flexible and is widely available in virtual, cloud, traditional, physical, Docker, and Linux form factors.

IBM DataPower Gateway Features

IBM DataPower Gateway has many value-added features. Some of these features are included below:

Control: The solution provides decision point authorization and authentication for all standards, including Lightweight Direct Access Protocol (LDAP) and Open Authorization (OAuth), which allow for better access control across an organization’s entire network.
DataPower dashboard: The dashboard is specifically designed to enhance performance and determine problematic processes. The solution provides intuitive real-time performance transparency to diagnose operational and performance anomalies and offer repair and restoration recommendations.
Enhanced messaging: Users are able to easily mediate messaging and protocols by incorporating the best of today’s traditional and modern application standards.
Integration: IBM DataPower Gateway offers super fast mainframe connectivity, database connectivity, transport protocol bridging, content-based routing, and any-to-any message transformation, ensuring secure and immediate connect service.

IBM DataPower Gateway Benefits

IBM DataPower Gateway provides many benefits. Some of those benefits include:

Flexibility: The solution is easy to use and configure and provides for a pleasant, intuitive overall user experience. The solution can immediately be used out of the box, which makes overall process management simple.
Protection: The solution provides sturdy continuous service protection and application performance using robust powerful routing and traffic control.
Security: The solution’s enterprise-grade De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) ready gateway enables users to enforce the desired runtime application security across all messaging protocols.
Profitability: The solution’s design ensures significant reduction of development costs in addition to the streamlining of overall operations. Users are able to achieve reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and experience a near-immediate ROI.

Reviews from Real Users

“My company has a good impression of IBM DataPower Gateway. What I like about it is that because it's an appliance, it's a turnkey solution that's very fast and out of the box. Another valuable feature of IBM DataPower Gateway is that it's easy to integrate with other products.”- Bálint T., Solution Manager at Intalion

“You don't have to have a separate DMC proxy because DataPower Gateway is an appliance and will take care of a lot of security features. These include data validations, encryption, as well as XML or any type of scripting or security threats that are present. From a security point of view, being an appliance in the DMC zone, IBM DataPower Gateway will take care of the entire security angle for the infrastructure.” - Sathyan K., Founder/Director at perfTech Solutions Pvt Ltd

IBM

For companies looking to modernize and unlock the value of existing on-premises systems and applications, an enterprise service bus (ESB) architecture serves as a critical foundation layer for SOA. When deployed as an ESB, the Mule runtime engine of Anypoint Platform combines the power of data and application integration across legacy systems and SaaS applications, with a seamless path to the other capabilities of Anypoint Platform and the full power of API-led connectivity.

Salesforce

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity

Ube, PacificComp, University of Witwatersrand, Justice Systems, Camelot

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Mule ESB

July 2025

Free Report: IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Mule ESB

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