IBM WebSphere Message Broker vs Red Hat Fuse comparison

IBM and Red Hat are both solutions in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category. IBM is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.0, while Red Hat is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.0. IBM holds a 4.8% mindshare in E, compared to Red Hat’s 6.7% mindshare. Additionally, 84% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

IBM WebSphere Message Broker

Read 13 IBM WebSphere Message Broker reviews

971 Views
689 Comparison Views

84% willing to recommend

Red Hat Fuse

Read 26 Red Hat Fuse reviews

1,370 Views
1,315 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM WebSphere Message Broker

Red Hat Fuse

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 2025

IBM WebSphere Message Broker and Red Hat Fuse compete in integration software. IBM WebSphere Message Broker holds an advantage in complex enterprise-level integrations, while Red Hat Fuse offers open-source flexibility and cost-efficiency.

Features: IBM WebSphere Message Broker supports a wide range of protocols and has advanced transformation capabilities, making it ideal for complex enterprise environments. Red Hat Fuse integrates seamlessly with Java, supports microservices architecture, and offers strong containerization features.

Room for Improvement: IBM WebSphere Message Broker could simplify its setup process and reduce the need for expert handling. It might also benefit from more intuitive interfaces and enhanced documentation for users. Red Hat Fuse can improve its customer support, optimize performance for high-demand operations, and enhance its user-friendly documentation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM WebSphere Message Broker's comprehensive capabilities come with a more complex setup that may require expert intervention. In contrast, Red Hat Fuse provides a simpler deployment experience and a lean learning curve, backed by developer-friendly interfaces. IBM offers extensive customer support, while Red Hat leverages community support with professional services available for subscribers.

Pricing and ROI: IBM WebSphere Message Broker has higher initial setup costs but delivers a robust ROI for large-scale enterprise operations through reliability and performance. Red Hat Fuse presents a cost-effective alternative, with lower setup costs and attractive ROI due to its open-source nature and reduced total cost of ownership.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM WebSphere Message Broker vs. Red Hat Fuse Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM WebSphere Message Broker vs. Red Hat Fuse

December 2025

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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 WebSphere Message Broker

Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

9th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Infrastructure (17th)

Red Hat Fuse

Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of IBM WebSphere Message Broker is 4.8%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Fuse is 6.7%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Red Hat Fuse	6.7%
IBM WebSphere Message Broker	4.8%
Other	88.5%

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Featured Reviews

BrajendraKumar

Technical Architect at HCL Technologies

Offers large-sized business information processing with a time-saving setup and impressive stability

I primarily use two previews of the product for Dev and two for QA as part of the production process. Whatever tools our company is using, the cost of a license in IBM WebSphere Message Broker is about 80% of all these software or tools. The message routing capabilities satisfy workflow efficiency. The product supports message formats of XML, JSON, and SSID, which are around 24 KB to 50 KB in size. The solution supports communication protocols like STTP and TCP. Features like DataGraph need to be introduced in IBM WebSphere Message Broker. Some of the clients of our organization are using an outdated version of IBM WebSphere Message Broker for which the vendor doesn't provide direct support anymore. For the aforementioned version, our company professionals can solve the queries on their own without seeking support from IBM. During the installation of a prior version of IBM WebSphere Message Broker, sometimes I have to configure the failovers through the cluster, where issues arise, and I often seek help from the support team. The solution is being used by some medicine companies in our organization that receive sales orders from the EDR or JDE. I would not recommend the product to others as its becoming obsolete and they can rather choose a middleware solution from Amazon or Azure. But I would overall rate the product a nine out of ten.

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Nilay Rathod

Chapter Area Lead/GM Group Architecture & IT at Spark New Zealand

Microservices have transformed our integrations and now highlight room to improve AI-driven tooling

There are areas in Red Hat Fuse that have room for improvement. We were recently having a discussion with Red Hat team building agentic AI, which we call AI SDLC. Something that the team is actively working on, but I have not really seen any production-level version of it is MCP. For us to use Red Hat Fuse with AI models, we need MCP so that we can be very confident that it can deliver us a really solid outcome when developers are using it, whether it is any of the integration patterns or messaging bus patterns. I have not seen that yet. Even though Red Hat has an alternative to that, such as a plugin, it is not as advanced as some of the MCPs that we see around.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We only use the basic features, but the most valuable one for us is the Publish-subscribe pattern."

"The transactions and message queuing are the most valuable features of the solution."

"It is a scalable solution...The setup is easy."

"Straightforward development and deployment."

"Message Broker is valuable because most of the applications are using MQ. Even in my current engagement, the few applications which I audit to onboard the bank are using MQ."

"The documentation, performance, stability and scalability of the tool are valuable."

"The most valuable feature of IBM WebSphere Message Broker is the ability to facilitate communication with legacy systems, offering a multitude of great capabilities. For example, if there is a mainframe system in place with a web service serving as the front end. In that case, the solution enables efficient protocol transformations to convert all request payloads into a format that the legacy systems can accept, rendering the integration and transformation processes seamless and highly effective."

"It's reliable for our day-to-day operations, ensuring fast and secure data integration across different systems."

More IBM WebSphere Message Broker pros

"The solution has more tooling and options."

"The initial setup process is quite straightforward."

"I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. We are an enterprise business."

"One of the features I found most valuable in Red Hat Fuse is that it has a lot of containers so you won't have to worry about load balancing. In the past, there was a cut-off, but nowadays, Red Hat Fuse is moving off of that, so my team is utilizing it the most for load balancing, particularly running goal applications and three to five containers. There's automatic load balancing so you won't have to worry too much. I also found that component-wise, you don't have to do much coding in Red Hat Fuse because everything is configurable, for example, XML-based coding. Coding isn't that difficult. Performance-wise, I also found the solution to be quite good and its processing is quite fast. My team is processing a huge amount of data with the help of Red Hat Fuse."

"We usually had used PowerCenter for master data integration (by replication). But in some cases, it was better to use Fuse for providing the master data online. It doesn't make it necessary to replicate data."

"With a premium, one can get support 24 hours."

"Regarding the efficiency gains from Red Hat Fuse's distributed development capabilities, when we flipped from the previous enterprise integration application to Red Hat Fuse, the TCO benefit was about 40 percent."

"Red Hat Fuse's best features are that it's very easy to set up and maintain."

More Red Hat Fuse pros

Cons

"It is currently a weighty product."

"Today I probably wouldn't go for Message Broker because of the cost structure, support, and the whole ecosystem around IBM."

"There is some lag in the GUI. There have been some performance issues and maybe it's because of the application data."

"The images and size of the containers are too big and I think that they should be more lightweight."

"As our business requirements evolve, we require more dynamic capabilities to adapt and scale our services accordingly."

"The installation configuration is quite difficult."

"I know that Message Broker was a very tightly copied product with another IBM product, that is, IBM MQ. I would like to have a little bit more decoupling from the IBM MQ because it should not be a prerequisite for IBM WebSphere Message Broker usage."

"Stability and pricing are areas with shortcomings that need improvement."

More IBM WebSphere Message Broker cons

"The testing part, specifically when running it in the cloud, could be improved. It's a little bit complex, especially considering its cloud nature."

"Red Hat is not easy to learn. You can learn it but you sometimes need external expertise to implement solutions."

"The monitoring experience should be better."

"As its learning curve is quite steep, developer dependency will always be there in the case of a Red Hat Fuse development. This should be improved for developers. There should be some built-in connectors so the grind of the developer can be reduced."

"Containerization is one key area where the product can improve"

"For improvement, they can consider the way we collaborate with other applications...Right now, in Red Hat Fuse, everything is not available under one umbrella."

"Our clients would like to see the user interface improved so that it is more user-friendly."

"It might help if, in the documentation, there were a comments section or some kind of community input. I might read a page of documentation and not fully understand everything, or it might not quite answer the question I had. If there were a section associated with it where people could discuss the same topic, that might be helpful because somebody else might have already asked the question that I had."

More Red Hat Fuse cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is very high and it's the main reason that we are searching for alternatives."

"This product is more expensive than competing products."

"The solution is expensive."

"IBM products are generally more stable and have more features, but also come at a greater cost."

"IBM software can be costly, but having a contract has helped manage and potentially lower costs over time."

"The licensing cost of IBM WebSphere Message Broker needs to be reduced"

"I feel with IBM, when you want certain functions or features, you have to continuously purchase add-ons. There are always additional fees."

"The solution is expensive."

"The solution doesn't have independent licensing."

"This is an expensive product. It costs a lot and although it's worth the money, the explanations that we need to give to our top executives are highly complicated."

"After doing some Googling and comparisons, the main standouts were MuleSoft and Red Hat Fuse. One of the big factors in our decision to go with Fuse was the licensing cost. It was cheaper to go with Fuse."

"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."

"The most important feature of Fuse is the cost. It is open source and a cheap option for an ESB. So, most of the clients in the Middle East and Asian countries prefer this ESB. Other ESBs, like MuleSoft and IBM API Connect, are pretty expensive. Because it is open source, Red Hat Fuse is the cheapest solution, providing almost every integration capability."

"Our license for Red Hat Fuse is around $27,000 per year, which is very expensive."

"Red Hat Fuse saved us money. It is a lot easier to license for cloud deployments."

"We are paying around $24 million across five years."

More Red Hat Fuse pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

11%

Insurance Company

Transportation Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	13

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM WebSphere Message Broker?

IBM software can be costly, but having a contract has helped manage and potentially lower costs over time.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM WebSphere Message Broker?

There could be greater flexibility and agility in service creation for the product. As our business requirements evolve, we require more dynamic capabilities to adapt and scale our services accordi...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for IBM WebSphere Message Broker?

We use the product for exposing services at the application level, integrating with various architectures like WebSphere, and handling static service creation.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Red Hat Fuse?

I think the pricing for Red Hat Fuse is okay; it's not expensive, and the support is good.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Red Hat Fuse?

The downsides of Red Hat Fuse that I encountered were related to the Java virtual machine I worked with, which was Oracle, as the client did not create good services. In the integration, they had m...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Red Hat Fuse?

My use cases for Red Hat Fuse include using Drools to create a bunch of rules for the Finance Ministry in Chile many years ago. I worked with another enterprise named Aguas Andinas, which is a very...

See all answers

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 26% of the time

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Compared 17% of the time

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Compared 14% of the time

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator vs Red Hat Fuse

Compared 12% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM WebSphere Message Broker

January 2026

Download IBM WebSphere Message Broker product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Fuse

January 2026

Download Red Hat Fuse product report

Also Known As

WebSphere Message Broker

Fuse ESB, FuseSource

Overview

WebSphere Message Broker is an enterprise service bus (ESB) providing connectivity and universal data transformation for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and non-SOA environments. It allows businesses of any size to eliminate point-to-point connections and batch processing regardless of platform, protocol or data format.

IBM

Red Hat JBoss Fuse is a lightweight, flexible integration platform that enables rapid integration across the extended enterprise - on-premise or in the cloud. JBoss Fuse includes modular integration capabilities, an enterprise service bus (ESB), to unlock information.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

WestJet, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Sharp Corporation, Michelin Tire

Avianca, American Product Distributors (APD), Kings College Hospital, AMD, CenturyLink, AECOM, E*TRADE

Buyer's Guide

IBM WebSphere Message Broker vs. Red Hat Fuse

December 2025

Free Report: IBM WebSphere Message Broker vs. Red Hat Fuse

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