Mule ESB vs OpenESB comparison

Salesforce and OpenESB are both solutions in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category. Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.0, while OpenESB is ranked #13. Salesforce holds a 18.7% mindshare in E, compared to OpenESB’s 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Salesforce users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of OpenESB users who would recommend it.

Mule ESB

Read 52 Mule ESB reviews

4,192 Views
3,102 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

OpenESB

Read 4 OpenESB reviews

405 Views
405 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Mule ESB

OpenESB

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 2025

Mule ESB and OpenESB are integration platforms competing in the enterprise environment. Mule ESB has the upper hand with its comprehensive features and robust customer support, while OpenESB offers advantages in simplicity and quick deployment.

Features: Mule ESB provides robust connectivity with seamless integration to cloud services, APIs, and complex applications. It supports various protocols and features sophisticated data mapping and transformation capabilities. OpenESB emphasizes lightweight integration with efficient business process automation and service orchestration, offering a modular architecture suitable for smaller deployments without compromising on flexibility.

Ease Of Deployment and Customer Service: Mule ESB offers extensive documentation and a supportive community which enhances customer service and facilitates a smoother deployment process. Its rich ecosystem aids quick setup but can introduce complexity. OpenESB's simpler architecture allows for faster initial deployment in basic scenarios and demands more technical knowledge for complex setups. Mule ESB provides better customer support compared to OpenESB.

Pricing and ROI: Mule ESB involves higher upfront costs with licensing and subscription models but offers long-term ROI through scalable features. OpenESB, being open-source, is cost-effective with lower initial costs appealing to budget-conscious buyers, yet might incur hidden maintenance costs. Mule ESB's larger initial investment is often justified by its scalability, whereas OpenESB offers rapid ROI for basic needs.

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

Buyer's Guide

Mule ESB vs. OpenESB

July 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

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

OpenESB

Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

13th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

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 Mule ESB is 18.7%, down from 22.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenESB is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Featured Reviews

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.

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PaulPerez

Integration Architect at Pymma consulting

Easily define choreography and orchestration with this process-oriented solution

We provide contracted services for our customers that include coordinating with providers and implementing the solution. A current project includes using the solution to deploy 200 microservices. The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration. This feature…

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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

"The product is very stable."

"For complex cases, we employ the SSLi engine, whereas for simpler ones like healthcare or response data, such as EDI 270 or 271. We prefer to use an external XRT engine instead of handling it within the ESB for ease of management."

"The most beneficial features of Mule ESB are the control plane and runtime plane."

"I like that it's user-friendly. Compared to other ESBs, I find it easier to use. I like it better than other ESBs. I like the connectors, which make calling the APIs through the routers easier."

"The most valuable feature of Mule ESB is data transformation, i.e. our interacting with different systems and orchestrating for our business needs."

"The transformation and the data format are the features that I like the most."

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

"The most valuable features of Mule ESB are its ease of use, documentation, ease to adapt to newer security and vulnerabilities, and a lot of help available. Additionally, there is a lot of flexibility, many patches available, and they provide APIs. They are a market standard."

More Mule ESB pros

"The core is very stable."

"One of the most valuable features is being able to implement business processes while keeping track of the design from BPMN to a BPEL Implementation."

"OpenESB pushes the organization to clearly define service boundaries and interfaces. So it motives the business and the development teams to clearly define their business services and processes they want to implement. OpenESB supports fine and coarse-grain granularity for the services and supports top-down and bottom-up approaches for the services, processes definition, and composition."

"The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration."

Cons

"I would like to see support for BPM in the next release of this solution."

"One area that could be improved is the way that policies are propagated when APIs are moved from one environment to another. It's an issue, but when you develop and test the rest APIs in a lower environment and need to move them, there's a propagation process. This process moves certain aspects of the APIs, like the basic features. But when we move them, the policies don't always move with them. The policies should be able to move so we don't have to redo them manually. There are some APIs we use, but it's a bit tedious."

"It's not easy to troubleshoot and we still can't make it work."

"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."

"The solution isn't as stable as we'd like it to be. There are some ongoing issues and therefore Mule has to provide frequent patches. Mule's core IP should be more stable overall."

"Lacking some connectors that could be included."

"It would be beneficial if users could navigate the UI easily without extensive training or learning curves."

"I cannot say that installation with Kubernetes needs to be improved to be less tricky, but more information is needed from MuleSoft. They do not help much with Kubernetes, so we should have a person who is well-versed in Kubernetes to handle this."

More Mule ESB cons

"Regarding its management, a web console being able to synchronize distributed instances would be great."

"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."

"The documentation needs to be better."

"The documentation of the product must be improved. It could be tricky to find the right documentation on a topic since the documentation is spread in many places. I advise the new joiner to contact the community to get entry points and additional documentation. Tutorial and Video must be present to take up the product."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing must be improved."

"You will not get any support from Mule ESB's team for the tool's community edition...You can get support with the licensed version of Mule ESB."

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

"Regarding licensing and pricing, I find it somewhat flexible. They are more flexible with larger customers compared to small and medium ones, as their licensing model depends on ports and other factors. Large customers benefit from more flexibility in implementation and renewal compared to smaller ones."

"The licensing is yearly, and there are additional fees for services."

"The solution is expensive."

"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."

"Plan your licensing model (cloud or on-premises or hybrid) that will allow seamless integration with new partners."

More Mule ESB pricing and cost advice

"The Community Edition is a full product you can use in production, it does not have limitations like other alternatives."

"There are two versions. The first is the community version, which is free and contains the last part of the feature, but if you want to get the Enterprise version, you'll have to pay €60,000 which covers support and two instances on production."

"The cost for the prediction instrument is high because it is charged per instances based on prediction, but the rest of the solution is free."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Hospitality Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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 ...

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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...

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What do you like most about Mule ESB?

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

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Comparisons

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

Oracle SOA Suite vs Mule ESB

Compared 2% of the time

More Mule ESB Competitors

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator vs OpenESB

Compared 31% of the time

Oracle Service Bus vs OpenESB

Compared 25% of the time

More OpenESB Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Mule ESB

August 2025

Download Mule ESB product report

Buyer's Guide

OpenESB

August 2025

Download OpenESB product report

Overview

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

OpenESB is a Java-based open-source enterprise service bus. It can be used as a platform for both enterprise application integration and service-oriented architecture. OpenESB allows you to integrate legacy systems, external and internal partners and new development in your Business Process.

OpenESB

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Mule ESB vs. OpenESB

July 2025

Free Report: Mule ESB vs. OpenESB

Find out what your peers are saying about Mule ESB vs. OpenESB and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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