Enterprise

Service Bus
Comparison
A comparison of the top Free &
Open Source Enterprise
Service Bus (ESB) software
solutions
by Daniel St-Louis
August 13, 2012

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.

August 13, 2012

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.
August 13, 2012

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

August 13, 2012

Key benefits & disadvantages of

an ESB
Benefits

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.

August 13, 2012

ESBs dont 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.
August 13, 2012

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

August 13, 2012

Contenders

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

Source) product offerings were selected for comparison:

1.

Apache ServiceMix

2.

MuleSoft Mule ESB

3.

Red Hat Jboss ESB Community Edition

4.

WSO2 ESB

5.

FuseSource Fuse ESB

6.

AdroitLogic UltraESB

7.

Talend ESB Standard Edition

8.

OW2 Petals ESB

August 13, 2012

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.html

August 13, 2012

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.php
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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)

= Yes
Commercial
= PartialVersion Available
= No

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ESB Evaluation
Framework
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:

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