MuleSoft API Manager Reviews

Our primary use case is API connectivity when integrating different systems or applications with the help of the API. There is a very robust API architecture that helps in directing different applications. In the B2B space, they have come up with a new offering, which is a partner manager, that helps to have the B2B integration with any EDI, X12, or any other B2B transactions. 

I believe the API connectivity within the cloud marketplace is most valuable. There are a lot of services available in the form of services or microservices, which are exposed via the API. Currently, API connectivity has become a mainstream integration. When you go to the B2B space where they have the partner ecosystem, there are a lot of suppliers and vendors there. Integrating them seamlessly for your supply chain or for your inventory management creates an efficient team of partners.

I think that they can bring some transparency in reference to the terms of the microservices architecture. It is already there, but it is not obvious. 

I have been working with Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager for the past seven to eight years.

We have not seen many tickets which tells us it is very stable.

Everything is on the cloud and it is very scalable. We have around one thousand five hundred users onboard.

I think that technical support is good. They are coming out with a community edition as well as an enterprise edition. If you have full enterprise support, they are pretty responsive. 

The setup was great. Depending upon the size of the program, and the number of integrations that you are having, you will keep on adding the people based on the business requirement.

If you have a strong engineering background and capability, then you can setup everything into automation where you can have three processes. When the pipeline is setup, then the deployment can be easy. They call a C4E Center for Enablement, which helps in terms of setting up the right practices, platform, governance, and best practices.

I think that it is pretty expensive. It is very innovative in terms of multiple licensing options out there. So, depending upon the need of the organization, they can offer different kinds of licensing. 

I would rate Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager a nine out of ten.

We could employ it for tasks like access control and other minor functions like controlling licenses using an API gateway alongside SS rules.

It is a good management tool for controlling purposes.

Since most components are situated in the cloud, there's one particular hosted in the cloud. This presents a considerable challenge. While all other components are implemented on-premises, this specific one isn't permitted to be hosted in the cloud as per customer requirements. Shifting this component to an on-premises environment requires a significant effort. 

I have been using MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager for more than two years.

It is a stable product. 

Regarding scalability, I have some uncertainty. During our interaction with the vendor, they introduced us to the possibility of running MuleSoft within a Kubernetes environment. If we can leverage this approach, it could potentially enhance scalability. However, during the testing phase, I found that the implementation process was rather complex.

I would rate the scalability seven out of ten.

The support is satisfactory.

Neutral

It is complicated. I would rate it three out of ten. We collaborated with professional service experts based in Hong Kong. When delving into the architectural aspects, it became apparent that the setup was intricate. Consequently, we relied on their assistance for both the installation process and the architectural design. The project itself extended over a considerable duration, not solely due to its length but also because it involved multiple components.

It is extremely high, and I would rate it one out of ten.

Personally, I find this to be a satisfactory option. I would rate the product seven out of ten.

Our primary use case for the solution is managing all the new APIs, and we deploy the solution on cloud.

We were trying to integrate, and we were trying to expose ourselves to external B2B scenarios. So we exposed our APIs overall and new API management. We found it easy to configure partners. It also allows us to create a new client secret, providing access limits, rate limits and more by splitting it into multiple tiers of services.

The integration of API management with security features is valuable. For example, communication security is very strong, and it automatically decrypts your images and encrypts your messages during communication. In addition, it provides different kinds of policies you can apply, which is just a plug-and-play configurable, which is very easy.

Monetization and cataloging can be improved. So we are looking for monetization to understand how well we can catalogue.

We have been using the solution for approximately four years and are currently using the latest version.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. Currently, all our developers use API Manager.

We have had a good experience with customer service and support. I rate them ten out of ten.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We implemented the solution with an in-house team.

We have seen a return on investment.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. I advise new users to ensure they are configuring security as it is the most important key to success.

The entire offering and suite of tools that this solution provides have been very valuable. We are able to manage APIs on runtime on a cloud basis which has been very useful. 

The log management for this solution needs improvement. We would also like to have the capability to monitor usage metrics within the system. Currently, it is available, but only on a case-to-case basis. We would like to have an admin page where we could view and track all our usage metrics. 

We have been using this solution for more than six years. 

The scalability of this solution depends on how you configure it. When you design the implementation of the solution, you need to factor in multiple sets of requirements and configure the size of the APIs accordingly.

There is the standard SLA defined depending on the type of subscription or license. The support we have received has been good. 

Positive

I have previously used Oracle. 

The initial setup can be a bit challenging but usage of the solution after that is straightforward. 

When it comes to determining price, the pre-sales team interacts with the customer's primary integration team and the price is negotiated based on the specific usage of the system. 

If your organization wants to build reusable functionality using APIs and you are a cloud-first organization, I would recommend MuleSoft. I would not recommend this solution for tactical integrations but rather for strategic investments. You need to have a long-term vision as to what you are building, where you are building, and how best you can reuse what you build across the enterprise.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for our APIs. We are moving from monoliths to API architecture and we have approximately 10,000 to 12,000 APIs across banks, which are hosted on this product. It also provides us a gateway service to ingress the traffic as well as whole policy management where stuff is taken care of from the PC Any Point. It also has some API-level runtime policy management, which we use.

The gateway service to ingress the traffic is great. 

The whole policy management has been great. 

It has some API-level runtime policy management, which is useful for us.

The solution is extremely mature.

You can scale the solution.

The only drawback is that, due to the fact that we are going into a completely API structured way of working, it is very tightly coupled with the vendor solutions. For example, the run times. What happens is when you have to do a change or you have to do anything, you have to rip off all the APIs and rebuild it.

If you see the features, they are really good in one sense, however, they have a certain drawback when you get into the operational way of working. We definitely need APIs to have policies at runtime. They provide a feature where there's a lot of policy on authorizations, however, the only problem is the runtime. 

When the runtime upgrades, we have to basically publish a new build pack and then do all the rebundling. When we were 2000, 3000 APIs, it was okay. However, when you start going up to 10,000 to 12,000 APIs, it was too much.

The whole cost is an issue. Deploying to production is not a very easy job in that bank as we go through the whole change process. The whole tight coupling of the product is a problem. 

As a bank, we didn't want to take any risk of getting so much tightly coupled with any vendor product. It should be replaceable as required. That's the only reason we are now changing products.

The upgrade is a very messy process. Mule 3.X to 4 or 4.2 requires you have to rewrite the APIs. It is not just upgrading the build pack with a runtime. That is something that gets us scared a lot. They came back and told us when we move to four run times we had to upgrade. You had to rewrite the APIs. The APIs cannot just work in a straightforward manner. There is a lot of change and we have approximately 5% Mule APIs and then the rest are boot APIs. While, now, that means 5,000 APIs need rewiring, after two years, we might have 20,000 APIs. They should have a proper way of having backward compatibility.

The initial setup is complex. 

If they are going with that control pane in a cloud, which is a very good feature and it is a managed service, they should give it 24/7, 100% uptime. They should also spin it across multiple regions. Currently, they are just the US and the EU is coming up. However, they should add, for example, China or Asia, et cetera. We operate in more than nearly 40 countries. Every country has a lot of its own governance and compliance and regulatory checks or some, where we cannot host to the cloud.

We have used the solution for three and a half to four years at this point.

We have a massive set up and definitely, there are sometimes a few issues, which come here and there, however, we manage to build a resiliency inside that.

We have scaled from a few hundred APIs to 10,000 APIs. Just on the retail part, the gateway service runs more than 125 million transactions per day. It's a huge setup we have. 

The only drawback back again is that their gateways are pretty heavy on hardware. Therefore, we spend a lot of money on the hardware. If you compare with Kong, Kong actually can just replace everything with two VMs. We have 500 VMs running for us as gateways. It has scalability, however, it will cost you, which is a problem.

Technical support has been helpful. There were also people embedded in my team.

We are migrating from Mule to Kong now. We just have signed the contracts and we are basically getting the thing set up. It is a big project and it is going to take maybe another three to four months to roll it out to non-production and maybe another five months into production as we need to get everything in compliance and clear.

The initial setup, if you go back three or three and a half years, definitely, for us, was complex. As a bank, we run through a lot of securities. Since then, they have matured the process. They worked with us, to do some upgrades. Kong also will have to do a few things for us, once we migrate. Currently, we are already finding some issues, which Kong is trying to help us and fix it. However, Mule took a bit of time to set up. If we were to do it now, it would be easy. 

They have come up with API management and cloud hub, which is the manual service. We have not used it much, however, there are some use cases from a different part of the bank that tried it out. It's a good option as you get rid of the whole operational management side of the whole control pane. The control pane we are running is a PC 1.7.3 or something, which is old and coming up on the end of support.

The cloud hub may solve the problem of the control pane, even though they have some issues with the maintenance windows and stuff. Due to the fact that the policies are cast in the control pane, and run times can struggle, if the control pane goes down or needs maintenance because we need a hundred percent of availability in some way or other, it needs to be resilient also. The maintenance windows can cause trouble for us in banking.

We originally signed a three-year licensing agreement.

There's room for improvement on the licensing. They could do better.

I'm not sure I would recommend the solution to everyone. The approach we have taken is, we have moved out completely from the Mule APIs to Spring Boot APIs. We will decouple the whole vendor locking and stuff. However, it depends on the use case for each company. There is no good and bad product. These guys are both very mature products. Depending upon the use case, you will have to consider how you will handle scaling, for example, or other challenges. 

Everything has a drawback and plus and minus, so pros and cons. Even Kong is a new product. It may be a good performer, and very lightweight, with low infrastructure needs. We don't know. 

Our cyber is very strong. Like us, people will have to evaluate, depending upon their use cases, all the pros and cons of security and see how it fits. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We're using MuleSoft API Manager to integrate with an endpoint in our backend system to import much information into Salesforce. Other tools didn't allow for as many API calls, so we used it to create a new endpoint.

The tool needs to improve customization and interface. 

I have been using the product for a year. 

I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten. 

The technical support has been very responsive. I've opened three cases, and the previous ones were solved quickly.

Positive

I'm currently deploying MuleSoft API Manager, but it's not fully deployed. There have been some challenges, mainly related to IP restrictions, which I believe are on our side. The testing phase took about two months due to people being on holiday. I'm hoping the actual deployment will go quickly, but I'm unsure how long it might take as technical issues could arise.

I can't say definitively about cost savings since we're still in the testing phase. MuleSoft uses separate testing and production environments, with more resources allocated to production. So far, in testing, it works fine and does everything it needs to, but I'm not sure how performance will compare in production.

We faced IP restriction challenges, which we resolved by changing the authentication method from an API key. This solved the issue for now, but we'll need to verify it again in production.

Based on my 2-3 years of experience with MuleSoft products, I'd rate MuleSoft API Manager eight out of ten.

I have dealt with a few use cases involving MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager, but I am unsure whether its features are useful in my company. The tool is useful for the governance of APIs that I have created with some policies, like SLA-based policies or rate-limiting policies. In general, it is an advanced product.

The main reason for using MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager is that the company's external systems inside the customers' ecosystem need to be publicly called APIs by providing the paid version of API so that anyone can access the endpoints from the internet. In our company, we need some tools to configure who can or can't call you while being able to control the amount of calls, irrespective of how many they are. In our company, the tool becomes useful to make five calls per minute with our current license.

The most valuable features of the solution for securing APIs stem from the tool's ability to allow users to deploy policies.

The tool already can solve the problems for which it was designed, and it is really hard to have any thoughts over what can be improved in the product, as it is a very niche task.

The product's price should be available for public review since it is not currently available for others to see, making it one of the areas where the product has certain shortcomings. The product's price is revealed only when you contact MuleSoft Anypoint.

I have experience with MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager for a year.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My company deals with clients having small and medium businesses.

I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I rate the product's initial setup phase a nine out of ten.

Experienced developers can deploy the product in a day.

The product is expensive.

Speaking about how MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager helps in the area of API lifecycle management, I would say that API Manager can be considered the last step after you have established all your systems in your environment. It is useful to configure some small details in areas like rate limiting.

The monitoring part of the tool is not needed for simple solutions. The monitoring part of the tool is required when you have a large ecosystem of different software applications. The tool helps monitor when your systems slow down. I don't have experience with the tool's monitoring part.

The benefit of the policy management feature in MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager ensures that your APIs are secured. The tool also provides our company with very flexible control when it comes to the usage by our clients.

I rate MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager's support for my organization's digital transformation efforts a ten out of ten.

I have no special recommendations for those who plan to use the product. The tool is used by technical developers for development purposes.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

The use cases are regarding telecommunication provisioning. Another aspect involves managing logistics, which includes connecting suppliers and the company's partners.

MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager is initially complex to utilize, but it provides extensive control over various capabilities. This means it can create high-cost solutions, allowing for a great deal of customization to make it well-suited for specific needs.   

When discussing potential enhancements overall, it primarily involves making it more user-friendly and lowering the pricing. There are several aspects that could benefit from improvement, or perhaps a few other areas to consider.

I have been using MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager for the past five years.

It is stable and has no problems. 

It is scalable and appropriate for every enterprise.

I have no experience with tech support.

The ease of maintenance depends on how you design your solution. You should consider having a team, typically consisting of four or five members for maintenance.

Comparing Mulesoft with Microsoft, MuleSoft has an advantage in the sense that it offers an all-in-one solution, while with Microsoft, it's more like dealing with numerous separate components. So, you have to figure out which specific components you need and how to connect them, almost like a toolkit that provides options to connect and integrate different things. It can be a bit challenging to determine which one is the most suitable for your needs in Microsoft's case. While you can build nearly anything with it, there's always a search for better methods to achieve your goals.

When considering the adoption of MuleSoft, it's important to take into account the expenses, including the licensing costs and the time and costs associated with training to become proficient in using it. On the other hand, starting with Azure might offer a more straightforward path to expansion and growth.