Enterprise Service Bus ComparisonA comparison of the top Free & Open Source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) software solutions

by Daniel St-LouisAugust 13, 2012

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Introduction• This document provides a high-level comparison of all the major

vendors that have a free open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) offering. It is not meant to point out the best product for any given requirement, but simply to provide information and guidance to help you make a more educated decision when choosing an ESB solution.

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What is an Enterprise Service Bus?• The enterprise service bus (ESB) represents the piece of software that lives

between the business applications and enables communication among them. Ideally, the ESB should be able to replace all direct contact with the applications on the bus, so that all communication takes place via the ESB. To achieve this objective, the ESB must encapsulate the functionality offered by its component applications in a meaningful way. This typically occurs through the use of an enterprise message model. The message model defines a standard set of messages that the ESB will both transmit and receive. When the ESB receives a message, it routes the message to the appropriate application. Often, because that application evolved without the same message-model as another application, the ESB will have to transform the message into a format that the application can interpret. A software “adapter” fulfills the task of realizing these transformations.

• ESBs rely on accurately connecting the enterprise message model and the functionality offered by applications. If the message model does not completely encapsulate the applications’ functionality, then other applications that desire that functionality may have to bypass the bus, and invoke the mismatched applications directly. Doing so violates all of the principles outlined above, and negates many of the advantages of using an ESB.

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What does an ESB do?• Invocation –sync/async transport,

service mapping, registry • Routing –addressability, CBR, RBR,

PBR • Mediation –adapters, protocol

transformation, enrichment • Messaging –processing, transform,

enrichment • Service orchestration –top-down

coordination of services • Process choreography

–input/output-oriented svc

coordination • Complex event processing –

interpret, correlate, pattern matching

• Quality of service –encryption, signing, reliable delivery, txmgmt

• Management –monitoring, logging, metering, audit, admin console, BAM

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Key benefits & disadvantages of an ESBBenefits• Increased flexibility; easier to change

as requirements change.• Scales from point-solutions to

enterprise-wide deployment (distributed bus).

• More configuration rather than integration coding.

• No central rules-engine, no central broker.

• Incremental patching with zero down-time; enterprise becomes "refactorable".

Disadvantages• Increase overhead, slow down

communication speed; especially for those already compatible services.

• Proprietary software, open source ESBs all have their own unique ways of configuring and managing services.

• ESB becomes a single point of failure.

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ESBs don’t promote good SOA• An ESB does not encourage good service-oriented architecture (SOA)

behavior. ESBs are essentially integration systems, not SOA systems. SOA is about tearing down application silos, but integration systems reinforce those silos.

• The main downside I see to using an ESB is that you're building your enterprise around proprietary software. Even the open source ESBs all have their own unique ways of configuring and managing services. The net effect is that you're locked into a particular service bus and will find it increasingly difficult to break free over time.

Lock-in is a fact of life. As soon as you implement anything, you're locking yourself into a product. It's better to lock yourself into a single product for configuration and management than to deal with dozens of different tools and procedures for configuration and management. That's the primary reason that I recommend using a SOA management system to implement endpoint policy enforcement points rather than using the inherent capabilities of a service platform, this is the main differentiating factor between a free ESB product and a more mature SOA centric offering with ESB capabilities.

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ESB Vendor Landscape (Q3 - 2012)

Vendor Product Type

Apache ServiceMix Free / Open Source

TIBCO Tibco Enterprise Messaging Service (EMS) Commercial

IBM Websphere Enterprise Service Bus, Websphere Message Broker, Websphere Datapower Commercial

Oracle Oracle ESB Commercial

Fiorano Software Fiorano ESB Commercial

Microsoft Biztalk Server Commercial

Neudesic Neuron ESB Commercial

Progress Software

Progress Sonic ESB Commercial

Red Hat JBoss ESB Community Edition (Not recommended for production use as per Red Hat) Free / Open Source

WSO2 WSO2 ESB Free / Open Source

FuseSource Fuse ESB Free / Open Source

AdroitLogic UltraESB Free / Open Source

OW2 Petals ESB Free / Open Source

Talend Talend ESB Standard Edition Free / Open Source

Software AG Webmethods ESB Platform Commercial

Mule Soft Mule ESB Free / Open Source

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Contenders• From the ESB vendor landscape, the 8 non-commercial (Free / Open

Source) product offerings were selected for comparison:

1. Apache ServiceMix2. MuleSoft Mule ESB3. Red Hat Jboss ESB Community Edition4. WSO2 ESB5. FuseSource Fuse ESB6. AdroitLogic UltraESB7. Talend ESB Standard Edition8. OW2 Petals ESB

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Apache ServiceMix ESB • Apache ServiceMix is an enterprise-class open-source

distributed enterprise service bus (ESB) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) toolkit [disambiguation needed]. It was built from the ground up on the semantics and APIs of the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification JSR 208 and released under the Apache License. ServiceMix 4 also fully supports OSGi. ServiceMix is lightweight and easily embeddable, has integrated Spring support and can be run at the edge of the network (inside a client or server), as a standalone ESB provider or as a service within another ESB. You can use ServiceMix in Java SE or a Java EE application server. ServiceMix uses ActiveMQ to provide remoting, clustering, reliability and distributed failover. The basic frameworks used by ServiceMix are Spring and XBean.

• http://servicemix.apache.org/download.htmlAugust 13, 2012

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Mule ESB Community Edition• Mule is a lightweight enterprise service bus (ESB) and

integration framework. It can handle services and applications using disparate transport and messaging technologies. The platform is Java-based, but can broker interactions between other platforms such as .NET using web services or sockets.

• The architecture is a scalable, highly-distributable object broker that can seamlessly handle interactions across legacy systems, in-house applications, and almost all modern transports and protocols.

• http://www.mulesoft.org/download-mule-esb-community-edition

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JBoss ESB • The JBoss Enterprise Service Bus (JBossESB, or JBoss ESB)

software is part of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. The software is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) or business integration software. In general, enterprise service bus (ESB) software is used to map the Service-Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts onto a concrete implementation.

• http://www.jboss.org/jbossesb/

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WSO2 ESB • The WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a simple, lightweight and high performance

enterprise service bus (ESB), based on the Apache Synapse enterprise service bus, providing enhanced management and development/configuration support and SOA Governance capabilities.[neutrality is disputed] Ebay uses WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus as one of the key elements in its transaction software.

• The WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus supports the creation of Proxy Services graphically, which allows users to easily create virtual services on the ESB layer to front existing services. Existing services are SOAP, Plain Old XML (POX)/REST services over HTTP/S, as well as SOAP or legacy services over JMS, Apache VFS file systems (e.g. s/ftp, file, zip/tar/gz, webdav, and cifs), Mail systems (such as Post Office Protocol (POP3), Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)), Financial Information eXchange (FIX), Hessian, and Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP).

• The WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus takes advantage of the non-blocking https transport implementation built by Apache Synapse ESB over the Apache HttpComponents/NIO module, to handle thousands of concurrent requests using very little resources and threads. The implementation is capable of connection throttling to control the rate at which large messages are read and processed, and thus can handle heavy concurrent loads of large messages using constant memory.

• http://wso2.org/downloads/esb

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Fuse ESB Enterprise • Fuse ESB is an open source integration platform that is certified,

productized and fully supported by the people who wrote the code. Fuse ESB has a pluggable architecture that allows organizations to use their preferred service solutions in their SOA. Any standard JBI or OSGi-compliant service engine or binding component – including BPEL, XSLT or JMX engines – may be deployed to a Fuse ESB container, and Fuse ESB components may be deployed to other ESBs.

• http://fusesource.com/products/enterprise-servicemix/

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AdroitLogic UltraESB• The UltraESB is the Free and Open Source ESB from AdroitLogic, and is the only

ESB that supports Zero-Copy proxying for extreme levels of performance utilizing Direct Memory Access (DMA) and the ‘sendfile’ system call, along with Non-Blocking IO. The UltraESB supports multiple communication protocols, message formats and technologies and is also the underlying ESB powering the recently launched Free Cloud based AS2/EDI Trading gateway AS2Gateway.org for B2B integration.

• UltraESB is not only focused on the aspects of an ESB rather it is an AS2 switch, JSON/Data Services and Mock Service container, Security gateway and many more in addition to being a typical ESB in SOA, designed to be better in performance, features and ease of use.

• http://www.adroitlogic.org/download.html

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Talend ESB SE• Talend ESB Standard Edition (SE) is a versatile and flexible, enterprise

service bus (ESB) that allows organizations to address any integration challenge – from simple departmental projects to complex, heterogeneous IT environments. Powered by the Apache CXF, Apache Camel, Apache Karaf and Apache ActiveMQ open source integration projects, Talend ESB makes enterprise-class integration accessible by delivering a cost-effective and easy-to-use way to integrate and expand systems and applications.

• Talend ESB SE is a standards-based connectivity layer used to integrate distributed systems across functional, enterprise, and geographic boundaries. Capabilities include messaging, Web services, intelligent routing, and data transformation. Its modular, pluggable architecture allows it to be easily expanded to suit most enterprise requirements, and it is available under the open source Apache license.

• http://www.talend.com/products/esb-standard-edition.phpAugust 13, 2012

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Petals ESB• Petals ESB is an open-source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provided by the OW2

Middleware Consortium. More concretely, Petals ESB is a Java platform based on SOA principles to interconnect heterogeneous systems, applications and services. It acts as a mediation and a communication layer in Information Systems. Its architecture and supported standards make it a valuable solution for both integration and SOA projects.

• One of the key features of Petals ESB is its distributed aspect, which can be seen as an alternative to cluster solutions. Several physical Petals servers can constitute virtually a single bus. Coupled to SOA principles, this gives a lot of flexibility in the architectures that can be implemented with Petals (high availibility, fail-over, mirroring…). Communications between systems are resolved as message exchanges between service providers and service consumers, their relation being controlled by a contract. Mapping applications and systems with service providers and consumers improves the system modularity and leverages loose coupling between applications.

• Petals ESB supports several communication protocol (SOAP over HTTP/S, Mail, FTP, SFTP…). It also supports several standards, including web services, WS-Security, XSLT, XML Schema… Petals ESB comes with tools for various users and project stages, from development to administration and monitoring tools.

• http://petals.ow2.org/

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Compared Apache ServiceMix ESB

MuleSoft ESB

Jboss ESB Community Edition

WSO2 ESB FuseSource Fuse ESB

Adroit Logic UltraESB

Talend ESB SE

Petals ESB

Supports Ent. Integration Patterns (EIP) Delivers all required ESB features Offers a complete and cohesive SOA Platform SOA Governance Market presence Graphical ESB Development Workbench iPaaS offering Cloud Connectors and Legacy Adapters Security & Identity Management Documentation Quality Message Persistence BPEL Rules Engine (Drools) Support ODBC / JDBC JDBC only Failover and Load Balancing License (Open Source) Commercial Version Available

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= Yes = Partial = No

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By carefully considering your requirements, constraints, and technology strategy, you can build an evaluation based on product similarities and strategic differences.  A comprehensive, weighted evaluation criteria set will ensure the ESB meets your needs today and in the future.  An evaluation framework mindmap is shown on the right:

ESB Evaluation Framework

August 13, 2012