MuleSoft Anypoint Platform Reviews

Mule Anypoint Platform is used for the integration of different services or customer databases with Microsoft solutions.

The most valuable feature of the solution is a huge list of available connectors for a lot of different platforms, which we can use very easily.

It would be better if we had a clearer view of the solution's future releases. Mule Anypoint Platform is migrating to a new JDK, and the old JDK won't be supported within a year. Currently, we do not have a calendar or scheduler about when all the connectors will support the new JDK 17.

I have been using Mule Anypoint Platform for about one year.

Mule Anypoint Platform is a pretty stable solution.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

For the moment, smaller clients would consider choosing MuleSoft as their integration platform. As a rule, the Mule Anypoint Platform is more suitable for middle or large clients.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability.

MuleSoft provides custom support for every client. You can list your account and have open tickets if you have any problems. We have pretty solid technical support from MuleSoft.

Positive

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup an eight out of ten.

With ready API, the solution can be deployed within a few minutes. If you don't have an API at all, a day will be enough to deploy a very simple but useful API from scratch.

Currently, MuleSoft is moving from the license type to the pay-as-you-go type. The solution's pricing, as per the old approach, is expensive. That is the main reason why we don't have a lot of small-sized customers. With MuleSoft's new approach, we will have new opportunities to integrate small businesses.

The solution's API Designer and API Manager have improved the management of our client's already established APIs. The most valuable features of the solution are Design Center and Runtime Manager. Mule Anypoint Platform provides some basic security approaches, including HTTPS protocol and secure configuration opportunities.

My recommendation to users is to use already described or already propagated best practices that help very much in development. The best advice for developers is to be part of the community. MuleSoft has a great community, including different channels or meetups that could help you a lot in certain cases. When you have some problems, you can address any developers, and they will be ready to talk to you.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is a middleware integration tool. It's a deployment part where you deploy your Mule applications and also use Anypoint Studio.

It's like other integration tools like TIBCO. 

Mule Anypoint Platform has a good feature for batch processes where the internal tool handles everything. You don't have to handle it by yourself. If you have a large amount of data that needs to be processed, then batch processing is a very helpful part of Mule.

The product is quick to deploy and pretty straightforward. 

It can scale. 

The pricing is pretty good. 

The stability could be better. That said, they are also getting stabilized as part of increasing the versions and working on that. Previously, Mule version 3 was, of course, very unstable. However, now, version four is pretty stable now.

There have not been very good resources to help us find solutions to issues. 

I've been using the solution for around two or three years.

The stability is getting better and continues to improve, however, previous versions were quite unstable. 

It's a scalable product. If you create an image, a docker image, then you can scale it automatically. There are no issues.

We have onsite people who can help with the technical support. They have access to Mule support. I have sent a couple of queries to them, and they have contacted Mule to resolve any issues. I personally have not contacted Mule support directly.

I'm familiar with TIBCO. TIBCO has a PW container edition, and they're similar. However, PW is using expert language for internal and external transformation. Mule is using the database transformation. That database transformation, it's a totally new language. If you want to use the Mule, then you should have experience in that first.

Mule is a very good competitor of TIBCO, and Salesforce has acquired Mule. So the market has also grown drastically for Mule. 

We may have also moved based on the price, of which Mule's is better.

If they used XPath, XML query language, instead of DataWeave, it would be ideal. That way, our users don't need to worry about knowing a different language.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

If you're deploying your cloud hub, then it takes time to deploy. That said, if you have that setup on your private crowd, then it takes a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes. It's very fast.

While I'm not sure of the exact cost, it is reasonable, and less than TIBCO.

We are a Mule partner. 

When working with customers, we use both cloud and on-premises deployments. 

I'd recommend Mule to others. It is good in web surveys, REST APIs, and is easy to use. Also, they need to be aware that with Mule, they will have to understand the  DataWeave expression language. If you use DataWeave expression language, then the processing time and performance also increase.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I've used the application heavily and taken projects to production. I know it well. 

Our company is working with a client to create standardization or uniformity across departments and domains. 

Every domain operated on a pilot approach with its own set of standards and technology. There were multiple point form connections and API discoverability for assets. 

We analyzed the environment and found there were issues with transferring master data from SAP to downstream systems. There was an iDOC on the SAP level which contained a batch master for new material and served as a point-to-point connector for downstream systems such as SAP to Salesforce, Informatica, or other systems. 

We recommended that material master data should be implemented in an observable or pub/sub approach. Upgrades or changes to the material master should be generated from the CP side and sent to the solution for dissemination to downstream systems. This eliminates bad jobs and is a real-time approach to point-to-point connections. 

There were also many APIs built in different technologies throughout the organization, with no standard API management capabilities or governance to enforce policies, security, or best practices. We recommended Universal API Management for API registrations because it allows any type of technology or platform and serves as a single point for discoverability, enforced policies, governance, and traffic. 

The exchange and API management features are the best in the market. 

The solution handles EDI-based integrations very well. 

The platform's data integration tools need improvement on the processing side. We move large amounts of data from databases to other source systems and the solution does not handle this well. 

It is difficult to become a partner with the solution because their standards are very high. 

I have been using the solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable and depends on your deployment model. With Cloud Orbit, it is very easy to scale or configure auto scaling. On-premises or private clouds require a bit of extra care but are still easy to do. 

Technical support for partners and customers is good and the community forum for developers is strong.

I rate support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The setup is very simple. 

The solution is the priciest in the market which is an issue for some clients. It is intended for use with enterprise or mid-level companies who have available resources. 

When comparing products, the solution wins every time for integration capabilities and API management but falls short for pricing. Demographics play an important role because clients in Asia cannot afford the solution but price is not an issue for clients in the US, Australia, Canada and Europe. The size of a company is also important as the solution is intended for the enterprise or mid-level range. 

The solution is more focused on EDI-based integrations and has a partner that offers an onboarding management tool because many legacy companies are migrating from Sterling Integrator. Perhaps the solution should be marketed more for EDI integrations. 

There are more valid tools for data integration such as Informatica, SSI, and Talend.

The solution is great for new developers who want to learn about integrations because it includes free or self-payer courses.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Our company's clients are all from different domains. We use the platform for integration and API management.

I have a background in Java and in the past, there were some issues whenever we had to integrate with the applications. You had to get the business logic and sometimes it took months to integrate the record. With Anypoint Platform, it is very easy to do that. You just need to do a small drag-drop and a small transformation which saves a lot of time.

The most valuable feature is the variety of characters Anypoint Platform has. It is very scalable and customizable.

In terms of improvement, the deployment time could be a little shorter. Other platforms such as Boomi or SnapLogic are much faster to develop. Anypoint Platform has added the option to generate flow online, but it still needs some improvement. It should give better control over account management. Mule Anypoint Platform includes an API Manager and it has a strong ESB. However, the API management capabilities of Apigee offer more advanced and dynamic features for managing APIs. 

Additionally, Mule should work on reducing the complexity of their platform and providing more flexibility for users. Those who are not well-versed in Java will have a hard time with the development of Anypoint Platform. While it offers connectors, the connectors have limitations. It should offer features that can be customized by users, allowing for greater adaptability, and offer customization options within these connectors, to make it easier for users to tailor them to specific needs. Platforms such as Dell Omni and SnapLogic already provide solutions for these problems and allow users to easily plug them in and start working.

I have been using Mule Anypoint Platform for eight years.

I would rate the stability of the platform a seven out of ten. There were situations where specific solutions or connectors were not available, and the support team suggested using workarounds. They advised me to create my own ideas and come up with a solution. This lack of immediate solutions can be a limitation of the platform.

I would rate the scalability of the platform an eight out of ten. There are approximately 300 users of Anypoint Platform at our company and we plan on expanding.

The technical support is good. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have previously used Apache Camel and Dell Boomi but I am also currently using Ab Initio due to client requirements and the need for a faster time-to-market for clients' projects or products. Using a team of ten members, it took around 24 months to complete the migration of approximately 2,000 APIs with Anypoint Platform. Ab Initio only required nine months to accomplish a similar task.

I would give a seven out of ten for the easiness of the initial setup. The deployment takes about two minutes which is acceptable. We handle deployment ourselves. We use tools such as Jenkins or Bamboo and it can be time-consuming since it initially involves scripting.

In terms of pricing, Anypoint Platform is on the expensive side. I would rate the costliness an eight out of ten.

I would definitely recommend Anypoint platform to anyone who is considering using it. Its main flaw is the costliness. Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform's most valuable features are its observability and stability.

MuleSoft Anypoint platform is a great integration platform. It's a bouquet of benefits. The solution's benefits, including observability and support, are brilliant.

The negative side of MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform is its cost. The solution's pricing model is very strange, and it will be really expensive if you use APIs a lot.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is a highly stable solution. I have worked for almost two years, and only twice did I see the platform go down for five to ten minutes.

I rate MuleSoft Anypoint Platform ten out of ten for stability.

I rate the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform ten out of ten for scalability because its features are amazing. You can keep adding, but you must have enough licenses to support the scalability.

The solution's initial setup is pretty straightforward. MuleSoft Anypoint Platform has a brilliant customer success team that helps you with everything.

The solution's deployment is pretty straightforward and doesn't take much time. The solution has a beautiful UI, and you can directly deploy from your IDE to your instances. Generally, it takes 15 to 20 minutes for one application to be deployed. They have some plugins available directly with which you can deploy them for both CloudHub and RTF.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform really needs to work on its pricing model because it's very complicated. CloudHub's pricing is pretty straightforward because they charge based on the number of codes you use. However, it's very tricky to calculate the cost of RTF. Moving from CloudHub to RTF creates a lot of challenges, including overshooting the license purchase. It was a nightmare for us to take down everything and change our infrastructure.

So while using RTF, we need to plan how to integrate things well in advance. If we do not use the reusability features within MuleSoft, we will add APIs which will cost more. So we have to find a way to reuse the APIs and be smart in making the integrations.

I was the central point of contact for MuleSoft. I was not an integration developer, but I managed the entire structure of MuleSoft.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is not just an API gateway platform but also an integration platform. Instead of using two tools or two applications, you can use one. Generally, your gateway will be separate, which is an exposure layer, and underneath, you will need to have your service desk established, where you write your integrations to connect to the back end. MuleSoft Anypoint Platform has got both into one. It's a good integration platform as a service tool recommended if you have a big budget.

We have to be really careful and cautious about how we will design our APIs. We have to keep an eye on the reusability of APIs, which is very critical while using the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform.

We never faced issues on the usage part. The solution's connections to third parties and ability to pull the data using APIs are brilliant. They have a bunch of platform APIs, and the data you see on the dashboard can be pulled out very easily using APIs. You can then push it to some BI tools or wherever you want.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is a brilliant tool. If you have small use cases and don't have a huge amount of traffic being transferred between the APIs, the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is the best-suited integration platform for you. You don't have to buy multiple applications and break your head to manage your observability and deployments because everything is integrated into one platform.

Overall, I rate MuleSoft Anypoint Platform a nine out of ten.

We're using Anypoint MQ for messaging, in different types: from SAP to third party systems, global third party systems, etc. There's a hundred of them.

It's extremely expensive to change things in Anypoint MQ, e.g. we have to go through either Accenture or IBM. IBM will do the changes, but the actual change we ask for costs huge amounts of money. I'm not sure why that is, or whether that's just a contract, but they always complain about multiple changes, regression testing, etc. It sounds like it's a very long winded task just to make a simple change. This is an area for improvement for Anypoint MQ.

Another problem we have with Anypoint MQ is that some of our end systems cannot cope with the throughput. If we put too many messages down to it, then there's a delay to send those messages onto the system that can't take them in as fast, and this means that the queue blows. We have either a 40 gigabyte or 40 megabyte queue space, but if we send 7,000 messages which need to be combined and sent out, the queue blows, because it just can't manage that throughput because the output is so slow. With the memory, we don't have a big enough queue to cope, so there's that problem.

If there was a way around that problem, we could send it. What we need to do is to be able to send 50,000 messages an hour or more, which we can do SAP to SAP, but we haven't found a solution on how to cope with sending it to Anypoint MQ because it blows up, so that's the big problem we have.

What we'd like to see in the next release of Anypoint MQ is for the issue of slow output of messages to be solved. Even if we wrote into disc, e.g. the disc space is cheap, so if you could write the messages to disc and then just feed them out and when the queue is caught up with itself, that would solve our problems. It means we could send MuleSoft all the messages in one go, and then it could drip feed them out.

The additional feature we'd like to see in Anypoint MQ is to be able to write the message queue to disc, to allow for ample queueing of messages, because currently, the output to a particular system is slow.

We've been dealing with Anypoint MQ for 20 years now.

Anypoint MQ has been stable, and it has not caused us any problems.

Anypoint MQ is a scalable solution.

We have not contacted the technical support team of Anypoint MQ, because we have our own internal third parties to deal with any issue that could arise from the solution.

What we've noticed in Anypoint MQ is that it's expensive to change things.

We evaluated Apache Kafka.

I thought we had a problem with our queuing software, and it turned out that it's not the software itself, it's the third party. We're passing the messages on to the third party, and they can only receive it at a certain rate, so we had to drop the Anypoint MQ software down, but it's not actually the MQ software, rather it's the actual third party application that was causing the problem.

As I'm working on the SAP side, I'm not sure if I'm the best person to discuss about the features I like most about the solution.

My advice to others looking into implementing the solution is to first look at what you're trying to achieve, because you've got Anypoint MQ as your queueing software, and then you've got the Apache Kafka software as well, and they do different things. I didn't realize this when I started looking, because I was looking at Kafka thinking that would be the answer to our problem, but it wasn't, because it looks great if you want instantaneous messaging and loads of bandwidth, but you need to do the interpretation of messages.

I'd say, look at what you want it for, because Anypoint MQ seems to be as good as the other options, to be fair. I'd also tell them about the problem I've had with it, and that's not just going to be a problem with Anypoint MQ alone, because I think other systems will have the same problem, e.g. the queuing problem. I'll tell others to really, really look at the application. Anypoint MQ seems to be a standard application, and it's acceptable.

My overall impression of Anypoint MQ in terms of rating it, is seven out of ten, but that's just based on my feeling. I don't have any quantifiable reasons on why I'm giving it that score.

We are an integrator for Anypoint MQ, based on Mule 4.3, with several active customers. The solution is typically delivered by cloud and there are differing kinds of use cases that we see.

If there is an event-driven architecture in place, then we will use Anypoint MQ to connect the different APIs together (such as the Experience APIs, Process API, and the System API) so as to enable a seamless process while minimizing data loss. That's the main use case seen in our work.

It's easy to use and comes as a bundle package with the Anypoint Platform, removing the need for any complex setup.

Anypoint MQ's capabilities are mainly used for messaging purposes, but it doesn't have typical use cases that extend as far as other Message Queue software.

For one, it would be helpful, from an additional features perspective, to see that it can handle large files of any type, whether image files, video files, etc. And if they would include an SFTP solution such as is available in AWS or Azure, this would be an added advantage for our clients.

Stability-wise, it's okay.

With regard to scalability, there can definitely be improvement. To make it more scalable, there needs to be a change in the upper limit of file sizes for messaging purposes. Currently, it can only handle messages up to 10 MB in size. If that could be addressed, I believe it would help those customers who have to handle large files.

From a technical support perspective, we mainly deal with product-related issues. We used to go back to MuleSoft and ask for support, and they provided if the customer had bought that particular piece of support. We needed to raise a ticket first, and based on that, they provided us the solutions.

But for any technical solutions needed, we would provide them, so we would only get support from the MuleSoft product team. In our company, it's our job as an integrator to provide the support.

It's easy to install, since it comes as a bundle package with the Anypoint Platform.

It is a good product, but for the reasons previously mentioned, there are a lot of opportunities to improve this particular piece of software.

I would rate Anypoint MQ a seven out of ten.

We transfer data between systems. We are to save the data to make the communication between systems synchronous. We use Anypoint MQ for making the communication synchronous. The source integration component will place the data into Anypoint MQ, and the target company will take it from there.

Because our customers are moving from on-premise to cloud, it's mostly costs that have been saved and nothing else.

The most valuable feature is the messaging system.

Anypoint MQ is not a pure messaging product. There are so many solutions like this, but this is not as mature as those products. The other MQ products have the capability of reprocessing and maintaining the persistence of the data. They can handle large volumes and large messages, but Anypoint MQ doesn't have those capabilities.

It can only handle a maximum size of 10 megabytes. The other MQ products have a larger capacity. IBM MQ can handle 100 megabytes of data or even solid gigabytes. This doesn't have that capability.

This solution has a lot of gaps. It's not a pure MQ product. We have sort of exposed this product with different protocols like TCP. Also, it has to evaluate these capabilities compared to the other market products.

I have been using this solution for four years. The solution is used on an iPaaS cloud provided by MuleSoft.

The stability of Anypoint is not as mature as other MQ products.

The scalability is under the hood. It is AWS, and it is reliable. It's not user-based. It is automation-based and IT products-based. We have deployed five or six individuals using Anypoint MQ.

This is not a pure provider. It is just a tactical solution cloud. In the long run, we want to go back to square one and use other MQ products like ActiveMQ or IBM MQ because of Anypoint's limitations. For instance, it can't handle more than 10 megabytes of data, and it can't hold more than 50 persistent messages.

Deployment and maintenance are automated. There is an initial automation that is required.

Technical support is good.

We previously used a stable solution. We moved to this product thinking that the cost would be reduced, but things are not working as expected. We plan to go back to using the old solution.

Initial setup was very straightforward. Deployment is a cakewalk.

You don't need an explicit skill set for deployment. Anyone can do it.

I can't give you a straightforward answer because sometimes it depends on the usage. If you're going to have fewer than 5 million messages, it is free of cost. If you're going to have more than 5 million messages, you will be charged $100 per month.

I would rate this solution 6 out of 10. 

We thought that this was a pure demo product. We moved from IBM to MuleSoft thinking that it would work like IBM, but that's not what happened.

My advice is to try to evaluate the product beforehand and see whether it fits your needs and requirements. Check if it covers all of your use cases. Otherwise, it won't work.

There are a lot of MQ products on the market, but this is suitable for small scale customers and not for large scale.

We haven't switched solutions yet, but the plan is to switch because of this product's limitations. It doesn't cover all the use cases.