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OpenESB vs Red Hat Fuse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 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

OpenESB
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat Fuse
Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of OpenESB is 2.8%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Fuse is 5.0%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat Fuse5.0%
OpenESB2.8%
Other92.2%
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
 

Featured Reviews

PP
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…
Nilay Rathod - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"ESL Gaming used OpenESB for its scalability and processes 1 billion of messages daily with a large configuration deployed on a private cloud."
"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."
"One of our clients is a signature company and developed on a classic Java enterprise application using OpenESB, and in one year they saved £20,000,000 on development and maintenance."
"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 core is very stable."
"Millions of people were connecting every month on the system and there were no issues."
"The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration."
"The installation is quite okay. We don't really change much in the configuration. Most of the time, most of the settings remain with the default and we are able to handle our needs using the default setting."
"Any time we contact Red Hat for help we had got a satisficing response."
"This solution's adaptability to our use case has helped us integrate our systems seamlessly."
"Red Hat Fuse's best features are that it's very easy to set up and maintain."
"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."
"Overall, this is a very good solution."
"Honestly, it fulfills the needs we have at the moment."
"Because we have been doing Red Hat Fuse projects for three years, and over time we have matured, we can employ similar use cases and make use of accelerators or templates. It gives us an edge when we deliver these services or APIs quickly."
 

Cons

"The documentation needs to be better."
"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 — maybe they could add more accurate tutorials."
"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."
"The Studio is a good tool based on NetBeans, but some of its features have to be improved, liked local schemas management."
"The user interface is not good, and it is a very technical tool."
"The solution will be discontinued in 2024."
"From the JBOS end, the product was very frequently changed from Red Hat, and it was difficult for our clients to keep investing money in every upgrade."
"The commercial that you normally get earlier in the time when you sign up is not the commercial that is going to stick around for a long time."
"The web tools need to be updated."
"There is definitely a bit of a learning curve."
"Containerization is one key area where the product can improve"
"Red Hat is not easy to learn. You can learn it but you sometimes need external expertise to implement solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The Community Edition is a full product you can use in production, it does not have limitations like other alternatives."
"Red Hat Fuse is an expensive tool, though I cannot answer how much it costs as that's confidential."
"Red Hat Fuse saved us money. It is a lot easier to license for cloud deployments."
"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."
"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."
"We are paying around $24 million across five years."
"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."
"In terms of pricing, Red Hat Fuse is a bit expensive because nowadays, if I'm just comparing it with OpenShift with Kubernetes, so Kubernetes and OpenShift, are similar, and Kubernetes is open source, so Red Hat Fuse is quite expensive in terms of support, but Red Hat Fuse provides value for money because it provides good support. If you want to get something, you need to pay for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Red Hat Fuse?
When considering pricing for Red Hat Fuse, this is a pretty interesting question. When you consider cost, it is not just the cost of the software, but also the cost of development, cost of usage, a...
What needs improvement with Red Hat Fuse?
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 activel...
What is your primary use case for Red Hat Fuse?
Red Hat Fuse serves as our enterprise integration platform. We do use some of the message bus features as well, but it is not the enterprise message bus.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Fuse ESB, FuseSource
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Avianca, American Product Distributors (APD), Kings College Hospital, AMD, CenturyLink, AECOM, E*TRADE
Find out what your peers are saying about OpenESB vs. Red Hat Fuse and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.