TIBCO BusinessWorks Reviews

We currently have 500 or more than 1,000 applications of TIBCO BusinessWorks. Our primary use case for the solution is the apps leader operations batch. We have users all across the globe. We have business in Japan, Amsterdam, the US, and Korea, among other countries. Whenever we need to perform region-specific activities when a region is not there – like region-related calculations, for example, we use TIBCO BusinessWorks. Even if a region is around, there will be some midday activities that we need data from different systems. All the backend-related logic and business rules are there in TIBCO BusinessWorks.

Good TIBCO BusinessWorks features are the admin console and the ability to roll back to the previous version.

The biggest problem with TIBCO BusinessWorks is the licensing costs. It's too expensive. We are planning to migrate from TIBCO BusinessWorks to Camel. On the enterprise side, we will use Kafka and Pulsar.

It's not just the license that is expensive with TIBCO BusinessWorks. Scaling with the solution is costly because if we need to scale up, we have to buy more memory. That means more money. Solutions like Camel or Pulsar come with built-in options to scale horizontally, vertically, region-wide or country-wide. 

There are many other issues with TIBCO BusinessWorks, actually. For example, TIBCO BusinessWorks files can only be opened if you have TIBCO Designer. This is again more cost on top of what I mentioned above. Compiling or opening a file should not be an additional cost. If a person does not have TIBCO Designer on their machine and they receive a TIBCO BusinessWorks file, they will not be able to understand the logic or go through the source code. That's the biggest limitation. 

TIBCO BusinessWorks mentioned that we can directly inject or connect with Java, but that's not easy. I would say it has many limitations. They will expect us to follow their protocol in injecting Java or any third-party library.

In addition, when we deploy, you have to add a class part. It would be better if we were expected to add a class part only in some cases. This is not user-friendly.

Overall, TIBCO BusinessWorks has not evolved properly over time. So, right now, if you compare it to other solutions that have evolved drastically, TIBCO BusinessWorks will pale in comparison. It's an outdated product.  

I would say that they have to change their original design. The market is such these days that a solution needs to be able to handle live calculations and transactions – millions of transactions per second and billions of transactions per hour. 

For example, if you have a server in the US and you have business users in Japan. You will have an integration with Japan and so the network IO always plays a very critical role when it comes to millions or billions of transactions. What happens in such cases, with the latest technology and tools available in the market, you can add, put memory, or replicate the server per country or per region. You can't do this with TIBCO BusinessWorks. With TIBCO BusinessWorks you just have an option to deploy everything on one server and then access that server.

TIBCO BusinessWorks also needs to introduce multi-trading. It is definitely not there or if it is, it's expensive. 

I have been using TIBCO BusinessWorks for six to seven years now. 

TIBCO BusinessWorks is not stable. I have many complex, business-critical applications and we have run into sudden issues related to them in the past. When we traced the log, we found that the issues were not created by changes we implemented in our business logic. They were just random issues. Also, sometimes the memory usage spikes up. We face these issues frequently with TIBCO BusinessWorks.

Scalability with TIBCO BusinessWorks is problematic for us as it is expensive. It is also not possible to scale up TIBCO BusinessWorks drastically. You can scale up to a certain extent by adding memory, but that is way more expensive.

The TIBCO BusinessWorks tech support is not very responsive. It's not that great. The tech support staff is not very knowledgeable. You can get an immediate response if you start an email thread, but the investigation takes time. 

Whenever we contact support, I feel like we spend quite a bit of time going in circles. They will ask us for use case data, for example, and when we provide that, they will ask for more information. They should have a fixed template for support in certain domains for us to fill out when we reach out. They could even create a support page for us to investigate before reaching out to them. 

Neutral

When we started six or seven years ago, we could choose between TIBCO BusinessWorks or Office's Shell. The clear choice between the two was TIBCO BusinessWorks as it has more advantages.

But later on, as things improved in the IT world, Apache became a better solution as it is open source. At the same time, it's backed by Java. It has significantly more features compared to TIBCO BusinessWorks and, at the same time, its licensing cost is almost zero because it's open source.

The initial setup was complex. On a scale of one to five, with one being simple and five being complex, I would give the initial setup process a three and a half. 

The initial setup was done both in-house and with help from a third party. We hired an expert to onboard us. Then, when we were done with the knowledge transition, we created a team to manage the deployment and everything else. This is another reason why TIBCO BusinessWorks is problematic. You need separate expert teams for configurations, deployment, and everything else. A developer cannot do any of that.

We now have a maintenance team of 10 people for TIBCO BusinessWorks. The solution requires daily maintenance. This is because some of our applications are critical and sensitive and we do not want to run into any disruptions or have any negative impact on the business. We have people monitoring usage daily, 24/7. 

The solution is too expensive. It's one of the most expensive solutions out there, particularly because there are so many open-source competitors on the market. I don't know the exact numbers, however. 

On a scale of one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would give this solution a four for overall performance. 

TIBCO BusinessWorks is used for web services. I have a few processes with collecting data from a database and putting it somewhere. 

This solution is deployed on-premise. 

One of the most valuable features is that it's a simple development. It takes a short time to get services to work. 

TIBCO BusinessWorks could be improved with cloud support. 

I have been using TIBCO for more than 10 years. 

This solution is very stable, but I still work with Version 5. I know that it's now Version 6 or higher. With this version, I know that it's very common to have problems with migration components, stability, etc. 

This solution is easy to scale. I think it's easier than other solutions that I know, such as WSO2, or Java components, or IBM solutions. From my perspective, this solution is most suitable for large companies. 

I have never communicated with TIBCO's technical support directly. I only need to communicate sometimes with the vendor for maintenance. 

I also have some experience with WSO2. From my perspective, TIBCO is easier to develop and, with this solution, I can make more specific solutions from a technical perspective. From a user perspective and developer perspective, this tool is more important. 

The initial setup process was not simple. It's not simple for a production environment or for a developer station. Usually, the best is working on gear to our machines. It takes a shorter amount of time to set up the environment locally. This solution doesn't really require any maintenance. 

We implemented this solution through an in-house team. 

I don't have the prices of the products, but I know that TIBCO is not a cheap solution. I think that this solution is more suitable for large companies because I don't think that small- or medium-sized companies would have the money for this solution. WSO2 has the community version for free, so many of the smaller companies can use it. I'm not sure what the prices are for support, though, so I suppose the support for WSO2 is not cheap either. 

I rate TIBCO BusinessWorks a nine out of ten. I would advise those who are considering implementing this solution to maybe contact other companies that use the solution and learn from them—the developers, maintenance team, etc. 

Our primary use case of BusinessWorks is integration, to ensure that our various systems are communicating and integrated. Instead of doing point-to-point integration, we implemented this solution to ensure that system A can talk to system B via BusinessWorks. 

We started with on-premise, but have migrated to the cloud version, so we're using the latest update of BusinessWorks. We have a hybrid deployment—some services still run on-premise, but the latest services are running on our private cloud. We have a Kubernetes cluster set up within our VMs. 

One of the most valuable features is data transformation. We have some legacy systems which are in old technology, like SOAP, whereas the new ones are in REST. So we use BusinessWorks to transform data from one format to another, from SOAP to REST. BusinessWorks has many useful features. Every product we have is being used on a day-to-day basis. Some might have been retired, but we're at least using most of the basic BusinessWorks products. 

This solution's cloud could be improved. I don't know whether it was because we didn't have the internal expertise or if it was the product itself, but since they came later—I think only two or three years into the cloud—after many other iPaaS that had been in the cloud for longer, I feel that maybe they haven't matured in terms of the cloud. Even building cloud images is relatively huge compared to other iPaaS services, but I know it's something that is in progress since there are releases almost every day. 

For the on-premise deployment, the memory could be improved. It consumes a lot of memory, so we have to ask our infrastructure team to increase the memory every day. With BusinessWorks, the application or payload can be small, but it still uses a lot of memory. Memory utilization is my biggest worry, so maybe they can optimize on that. 

In the next update, I would like to see support around IoT, internet of things, because we are moving toward that now. We are going to have so many devices that need to connect and communicate. Also, maybe they can gather information and improve their monitoring. They have TIBCO Hawk, but it's not as powerful as other monitoring tools that we have, so we use third-party monitoring applications.

I have been using BusinessWorks for around five years now. 

This solution is stable. I don't have any other iPaaS to compare it to, but it performs well. I haven't had any issues with development.  

As far as maintenance, it's mostly just HotFix updates they share, maybe to fix a bug or maybe they don't support the latest security protocol, what we call SSL, so they have to fix it. I think they're trying to catch up with other technologies—for example, maybe you upgraded your security level or have secure applications—so they do their hot fixes just to catch up. I'm in development, but the operations team is the one who raises tickets to Safaricom and interacts with TIBCO on a day-to-day basis. They identify bugs and if there's something that needs to be fixed, they fix it on UAT and production. 

I'm not sure about scalability. When we test, it's only one or two users who are testing because we don't have the live traffic. Even if we're doing a load test, we don't do load tests on UAT, we do our load test on production. I have to confirm with our operations team because, as a developer, I'm focused more on the functional and maybe load testing. I've never had an issue with load testing, at least. 

Our DevOps team has around 35 people. 

There's a case that I raised some time back and it took almost two weeks, with them telling me they took it to the engineering team, the engineering team took it back to L2, and I felt like I was being bounced around. There are various product portfolios, so from L2, they take you from portfolio A to portfolio B, portfolio B will take you to the engineering team, the engineering team will just come back to you and tell you it's not a product issue. I don't feel that they're completely competent when it comes to just answering you and providing support. 

The initial setup was simple because it's what we call low-code/no-code. I think that as long as you come from a programming background, it's easy to understand and you can easily implement TIBCO BusinessWorks. It's more of a drag-and-drop, and then it generates codes in the background. I'll give credit to TIBCO at least on that front. It's easy for guys to come in and, within a month, they can start implementing without having prior knowledge of TIBCO. So it's easy to learn and start implementation. 

When I joined my company, I had a team that was already competent in TIBCO, in terms of development and support, so it was easy to be trained. Initially, I think they were using one of the system integrators to support them, but by the time I joined, we had enough competency within the team to support and develop it. 

We implemented through an in-house team. 

I think BusinessWorks is more expensive compared to other products. We have the ELA, so at least we have some sort of bargain or discount with that. But for a start-up, it's very expensive compared to other ESBs. 

This solution is more suited for large enterprises. For someone who's just starting up without enough CapEx or OpEx, it's going to be a bit expensive. 

We have another ESB, which is called WSO2, that I would recommend because it's very strong. The only factor I would maybe recommend TIBCO on, over WSO2, is the pricing.

I don't think I would recommend this solution to others. We have another ESB, which is called WSO2—I would rather recommend this one, since it was very strong. With TIBCO, they don't even have some kind of open source where you can just download and practice, so you have to procure the license in order to get the software. Other ESBs will at least give you the ID so you can do everything, but you have to pay and be locked in before you can start using TIBCO. Maybe it's number two or three, but it's not my top ESB. 

I rate TIBCO BusinessWorks a seven out of ten because it works. We have over 200 applications running on TIBCO, so I'll give it a seven. 

We use the solution for business integration.

The ability to link to different technologies is valuable to us. The graphical user interface is also valuable to us.

The initial setup is not easy.

I have been using the solution for the last ten years.

I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten. My organization has around 3000 users.

We contact the technical support team from time to time. The support personnel are usually good.

Positive

The initial setup has a technical learning curve. The product is deployed on the cloud. The deployment took less than half an hour. Everything is automated. However, It took us years to get to the automation.

We deployed the solution in-house.

We received an ROI within two years.

The product is not cheap. However, the pricing is reasonable.

I would definitely consider the solution for any integration as long as we can find skilled resources. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

I work mostly in telecommunications and use BusinessWork for job processes. It's primarily used for orchestration and transformation from one language to another, whether you're using HTML, XML, etc. 

I work in operations, so I value BusinessWorks' performance the most.

The communication protocols could be improved. 

I have nearly 10 years of experience with TIBCO products, including TIBCO BusinessWorks and TIBCO Enterprise Management Service. 

BusinessWorks is highly stable. 

BusinessWorks is scalable.

I think TIBCO's frontline support isn't good, but you can escalate the ticket to the second level if it is during their working hours. 

Setting up BusinessWorks is complex because we have multiple active-active sites for high availability and disaster recovery. Deployment takes about three days and involves two or three engineers. We register a domain and deploy messaging components like Huawei and EMS and finally, the CRM.

BusinessWorks is competitively priced. It's a good deal.

I rate TIBCO BusinessWorks eight out of 10. It's the middleware solution I recommend for any organization that needs one. 

Our primary use case for the solution is using the system interface exposing APIs using a tip code as a target button.

The most valuable feature is the low-code platform.

The solution is easy to troubleshoot and learn.

For the chip code container edition, it is recommended to reduce the image size to facilitate setup and accelerate our in-service. By making this change we can then use the optimal size for the best email of the container.

The cost of the solution has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for eight years.

I give the stability a nine out of ten.

This solution is scalable, but the file size of the best image has some limitations which restrict its ability to scale rapidly. If we adjust the TIP configurations, I believe it will improve the scalability.

I give the scalability a seven out of ten.

TIBCO technical support is quick. Whenever we have an issue the support team is quick to get on the phone and resolve the issue.

Positive

I previously used RedHat and the open-source Jave Spring framework. We switched to TIBCO BusinessWorks primarily for the features, the cost, and the scalability.

The initial setup is easy because TIBCO BusinessWorks is a cloud-native solution. The deployment takes between one and two hours.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment with TIBCO BusinessWorks.

Our organization has a three-year enterprise license agreement with TIBCO. The license is really costly.

I give the cost of the solution a four out of ten.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I recommend the solution to others.

The most valuable features are the extensive capabilities of adapters and the capabilities in the development environment.

Areas for improvement would be the cloud fitness of the product and the ease of migrating to newer versions. Its price could also be lower, and its licensing model would benefit from changing to pay-as-you-go to better fit the use of cloud services.

I've been working with this product for over ten years.

This product is pretty stable.

BusinessWorks is scalable, but I feel limited by the license.

The support team is good, they're really experienced.

The setup isn't very complex, but it does require some expertise.

The licensing is very rigid - it's perpetual licensing, which doesn't really support good scalability.

TIBCO can be really difficult to talk to commercially - they usually don't show much flexibility. I would give this product a rating of eight out of ten.

This solution is for enterprise application integration. Basically, it does the integration between the applications. If you want to integrate multiple systems, it lets you expose an API. For a business application that is running on, for example, AS/400 or COBOL system, if you want to expose some information pertaining to the system, TIBCO would also play a role there. It will get the information from the latest system and just transform it into a simple format and give it as a response to the operating system. We are currently using versions 5.14 and 6.5. 

It is very stable. It is a market leader, and it has connectors to many of the legacy systems. It also has enterprise cloud connectors.

Its price can be improved. For medium enterprises, it is a very expensive tool. In the market, you won't get many resources for this solution. You won't find many developers in the market very easily.

The latest version of TIBCO (6.4 or 6.x) is not very stable. It has got many issues. We have raised this with TIBCO, and they are taking a lot of time to come up with a fix, which is making us move away from this product. Some of the performance-tuning aspects are also missing in version 6. They should provide performance-related fixes, which will be helpful for the customers.

If you are migrating from the current version to the container-supported version, it is quite expensive. The product has evolved, but it is very pricey. That's one of the challenges. They have provided all the features that are there in other products, but this is a platform upgrade. The platform has completely been changed from 5.x to 6.x, and we can't use the same environment. We can't run both versions on the same server as VM. The development environment is entirely different. In version 5.x, there was a proprietary designer. Now, it has common plug-ins developed on top of Eclipse.

I have been using this solution for almost 12 years.

In the latest version, we are frequently facing issues, but version 5.14 was very stable.

Scalability is a challenge. Because we are using on-prem and it is not on the cloud, autoscaling is not happening. Autoscaling is not possible because we need to increase the cores and RAM in our virtual machine and bring the services up.

TIBCO has another version that supports the cloud, but we are not using that particular version because it is very expensive. We have raised some of the questions with them, and we got a quote from the TIBCO team about the cost of the cloud-supported version, but we would also like to evaluate other cloud-supported tools that are available in the market, such as MuleSoft and Fiorano. We would like to compare these tools and see which one is feasible and for which one, people are available for development activities.

We are also using TIBCO Enterprise Messaging Service (EMS).

It is simple. The deployment hardly takes five to eight minutes. but the internal implementation can take time depending on the business scenario. We have around 800 plus APIs as of now. 

We have vendors as well as an in-house team.

It requires basic maintenance. If APIs are taking more time, we need to fine-tune that. If they are not responding, we need to look into that. It depends on how it is implemented and deployed in the environment and whether we need to fine-tune the environment. We have a tool called TIBCO Hawk. It is a monitoring tool that gives us some kind of idea about whether the service is up or down. If it is down due to some reason, we can set a rule to autostart.

It is a bit expensive for medium-sized companies. If you are migrating from the current version to the container-supported version, it is quite expensive. The existing licensing will not work because the product platform itself is different.

I would recommend this solution for big companies. It is a stable product.

I would rate TIBCO BusinessWorks a seven out of ten. They should fix the outstanding issues in version 6.