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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)
13th
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)
6th
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 March 2026, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of OpenESB is 2.8%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Fuse is 6.1%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat Fuse6.1%
OpenESB2.8%
Other91.1%
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

"The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration."
"The core is very stable."
"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."
"Millions of people were connecting every month on the system and there were no issues."
"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."
"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."
"ESL Gaming used OpenESB for its scalability and processes 1 billion of messages daily with a large configuration deployed on a private cloud."
"The solution has more tooling and options."
"Any time we contact Red Hat for help we had got a satisficing response."
"The most valuable part of Fuse is the fact that it's based on Red Hat Apache Camel. It is really good that it already comes with so many different connectors. That makes it relatively easy to use. We use their XML definition to define the routes, making it really easy to define the routing."
"The most valuable feature is the software development environment."
"Red Hat Fuse is developer friendly; the solution has more tooling and options, and because it is based on existing platforms, it is easy to implement, as you don't need to relearn everything."
"With a premium, one can get support 24 hours."
"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, and because it is open source, Red Hat Fuse is the cheapest solution, providing almost every integration capability."
"The solution is stable. We have gone for months or years without any issue. There are no memory restarts, so from my point of view, it's very stable."
 

Cons

"Regarding its management, a web console being able to synchronize distributed instances would be great."
"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."
"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."
"The Studio is a good tool based on NetBeans, but some of its features have to be improved, liked local schemas management."
"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."
"The documentation needs to be better."
"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."
"While it's a good platform, the pricing is a bit high."
"What needs to be improved in Red Hat Fuse is on the development side because when you use it for development purposes, it lacks a user interface compared to what MuleSoft has, so it's a bit difficult for users."
"I would like to see more up-to-date documentation and examples from Red Hat Fuse."
"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 web tools need to be updated."
"What could be improved in Red Hat Fuse is the deployment process because it's still very heavy. It's containerized, but now with Spring Boot and other microservices-related containers, deployment is still very heavy. Red Hat Fuse still has room for improvement in terms of becoming more containerized and more oriented."
"The web tools need to be updated."
"The testing part, specifically when running it in the cloud, could be improved. It's a little bit complex, especially considering its cloud nature."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The Community Edition is a full product you can use in production, it does not have limitations like other alternatives."
"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."
"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."
"We use the standard license, but you need the container platform in order to run it."
"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."
"My company pays for the license of Red Hat Fuse yearly. At the end of the day, it's a low-cost solution, and its support licenses are still very decently priced versus bigger operators such as IBM, etc. Red Hat Fuse is much more affordable than other solutions. On a scale of one to five, with one being cheap and five being extremely expensive, I'm rating its pricing a one."
"We found other solutions were more costly."
"Pricing has been something that we have been working with Red Hat on, year over year. We have preferred pricing with the university because we are involved in education and research."
"The solution doesn't have independent licensing."
"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."
"Red Hat Fuse saved us money. It is a lot easier to license for cloud deployments."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

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

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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: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.