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IBM DataPower Gateway vs NGINX Plus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

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 Application Infrastructure
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (4th), SOA Application Gateways (1st), API Management (7th)
NGINX Plus
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Infrastructure category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 4.6%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 11.4%, down from 11.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Infrastructure
 

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Ritesh-Bakhru - PeerSpot reviewer
Quick installation and very easy to manage while doing orchestration or automation
NGINX cannot be a replacement for your traditional load balancer with what we use in the network today. However, with applications going toward microservices, NGINX is definitely a way forward. F5 has many traditional load balancing features, so they still need to bring some of those features to NGINX. NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5. I think F5 is trying to implement those features in NGINX so they can improve the balancing on NGINX, but I think that will take some time. With the traditional F5 set up, the same OS can do load balancing, firewalls, and even policy enforcement. If we are able to bring some of those capabilities to NGINX, I think it would become a versatile solution and usage would definitely increase.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Support for PCA and non-PCA services is valuable."
"Since it is a gateway, it provides a lot of security features."
"The most valuable feature is the security appliance, it's very secure."
"The performance is good. It's been very stable."
"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. Compared to other gateways, I also like that IBM DataPower Gateway is function-rich. For example, for one of the projects, there was a need for specific transformation and security features available in IBM DataPower Gateway out of the box, so my team just needed to configure the appliance. There was no need for separate development, and I found it quite neat. Another valuable feature of IBM DataPower Gateway is that it's easy to integrate with other products."
"What I like most is the stability."
"It is easy to use, easy to install, and it's resilient for high availability."
"The solution is robust."
"It's lightweight software that can handle heavy loads efficiently."
"NGINX provides a cost advantage, value addition, and effective support."
"Supports IMAP, POP and SMTP protocols for the reverse proxy."
"NGINX Plus also has NGINX App Protect. It's a separate module, which is inspired by the F5 apps."
"This solution has everything."
"Its most valuable features are load balancing and application delivery. This is the most efficient application for these features because of stability and its efficiency."
"The best solution, by far, for web traffic control for things in production and just around the house."
"​The flexibility of its modules allow it to be scalable.​"
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"The two biggest issues of this solution are the complexity and the maintenance procedures."
"We are always looking for more features wherein it could be easily integrated with cloud applications. We are looking for either a cloud solution or a cloud integration option."
"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."
"The programming language is only supported in XSLT and Gateway script."
"One area that could be improved is the integration with Postgres and SQL databases. Currently, IBM DataPower Gateway only integrates with Oracle databases."
"In the next release, I would like to see the product price reduced. It should be cheaper."
"It would be great if there was even more automation to make it even easier to maintain."
"The biggest room for improvement would be to allow NGINX Core machines to cluster for memory zones in some way with a plug and play module. ​"
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."
"Initially, I experienced hiccups whenever I installed the application."
"It would be good if NGINX provided a graphical user interface."
"NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5."
"Lack of a feature to print data on the terminal for verification of network traffic during debugging and testing."
"I would like it to have a more user-friendly graphical interface."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing cost is very expensive."
"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."
"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."
"The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."
"The appliance is a bit on the expensive side for the workloads that are not too high."
"Most customers' use case budgets are not inlined with the price of IBM DataPower Gateway. It is too expensive."
"The solution is expensive in comparison to other products."
"This product is a bit expensive as IBM products are costly assets. However, for enterprise customers it is a worthwhile investment."
"The cost is reasonable."
"The solution is free, but you can spend a lot of money with a complex solution."
"HAProxy is cheaper than NGINX."
"The price is the cost to contract support with a specialized company, usually during consulting hours.​"
"Compared to other similar solutions on the market, I think it's over-priced."
"The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500."
"I use the solution's community edition which is free of cost."
"NGINX Plus is an open-source solution with limited additional features. When you try to get additional features in the solution, then you need to pay an extra amount to NGINX Plus."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

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.
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...
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...
Which is better - IIS or NGINX Plus?
IIS is a flexible, secure, and manageable web server to host anything on the web. IIS’s scalable and open architecture can handle the most demanding tasks. From media streaming to web applications,...
What do you like most about NGINX Plus?
It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX Plus?
My use case involves using the free and open-source version of NGINX, making it cost-effective as I haven't incurred any costs.
 

Also Known As

WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower
NGINX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity
Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DataPower Gateway vs. NGINX Plus and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.