MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform vs. Microsoft BizTalk Server
Last Updated August 26, 2016: Have you ever wondered if you should choose Microsoft BizTalk or MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform? Below are 10 points to consider when deciding on the best integration solution for your organization:
1. Extensibility to Best of Breed
BizTalk Server promotes a tightly coupled model in which many of the services are bundled within the product. While this is great for compatibility, it limits the ability of companies to use 3rd party applications that may provide better functionality. MuleSoft has built Anypoint Platform to be open and extensible to best of breed services and applications.
Included with Anypoint Platform are 120+ Anypoint Connectors for the most popular applications on the market, including Salesforce.com. Our broad partnership with Salesforce helps us deliver a secure, reliable, comprehensive integration.
When you’re not using pre-built connectors, MuleSoft’s DevKit allows your developers to build quickly Mule extensions that integrate directly with Anypoint Studio, the single graphical design environment for Anypoint Platform. This broad connectivity solution enables you to deliver integrations in days or weeks, not months.
2. Support for SaaS and Hybrid Deployments
The Connected Company will be both on-premises and in the cloud. To help organizations move to the cloud at their pace, MuleSoft provides the industry-leading iPaaS (integration platform as a service) solution, CloudHub. With CloudHub you have complete feature symmetry with on-premises Mule ESB. Write your code once and pick your deployment environment, build hybrid applications, connect your SaaS services, and take all your data to the cloud on Anypoint Platform.
BizTalk Services (the cloud version of BizTalk Server) is an untested technology in the enterprise that does not allow for feature symmetry. BizTalk Services only supports SOAP – no REST with very few endpoints, making it tough to talk to SaaS applications.
3. Connectivity to Microsoft
MuleSoft has 11 adaptors/connectors supporting Microsoft technologies, which is more than BizTalk currently supports, and 120+ other best of breed connectors available out of the box. We continue to add to this portfolio on a regular basis. The Anypoint Connectors for Microsoft are:
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Coming soon: Service Bus, Dynamics AX, O365/Sharepoint Online, .NET RAML support, Visual Studio support
4. RESTful and SOAP APIs
At MuleSoft, we believe that APIs are the cornerstone of a Connected Company. This is why we have continued to push the RAML design language which, when combined with APIKit, makes building and maintaining API’s simple. We have also built out robust API management capabilities in our Anypoint API Manager. Manage policies, contracts and API analytics all from one easy to use portal. BizTalk Server still hasn’t addressed the needs of the modern enterprise to design seamlessly, build and manage SOAP or RESTful APIs on a unified platform.
5. Access to source code
MuleSoft provides the world’s leading open source ESB. The source code of our core technology is available for customers and prospects to view and troubleshoot. With BizTalk Server, this is not an option. Its commercial source code is considered proprietary software and accessing this would void the terms of your license agreement.
6. .NET and Java support
Too often, companies limit their ESB choices by making the development language, supported by the ESB, the primary concern. For example, many .NET teams constrain their search to only .NET-centric ESBs, leaving them few options. Mule ESB provides a language-agnostic platform that allows you to remove the language barriers when looking at new opportunities. To become a SOA organization, we must start thinking like a heterogeneous platform
MuleSoft is not a Java-only company; we are always building new components and connectors specifically addressing various coding languages, including robust .NET and C# connectivity. BizTalk yet to provide full support for Java based code. To connect to Java BizTalk requires a 3rd party bridging application, potentially adding thousands to licensing costs.
7. Developer Tooling
Customers that have switched from BizTalk Server to MuleSoft tell us that ease of use and productivity is one of the primary factors for changing vendors. AnyPoint Studio enables developers to design and debug solutions graphically or via XML and deploy applications on-premises or in the cloud in seconds. With BizTalk Server, advanced development skill and BizTalk certification is required just to properly setup and manage a BizTalk instance.
8. Pricing Model
On average, the total cost of ownership of Anypoint Platform is a fraction of the cost of traditional, commercial solutions. With Anypoint Platform, there’s no need to purchase a laundry list of products, deploy separate development or management tools or pay an additional fee for support. Furthermore, our annual subscription model means no large upfront cost to amortize over years or decades.
9. Support
Our award-winning support features 2 hour SLA’s for our top tier clients with access to our team of support specialists that sit next to the engineers and have a direct line to product management. BizTalk offers a 4 hour SLA and a complicated series of call centers before you get to an engineer.
10. Innovative Roadmap
MuleSoft is committed to keeping its customers informed of its new and exciting features. We continually provide updates via our open source community, blogs, and public and private product roadmap webinars to inform users and solicit feedback. Gartner has consistently recognized MuleSoft’s “completeness of vision” as tops amongst integration vendors. MuleSoft’s release cadence includes updates to the product every two months and major releases every six months. The integration roadmap for BizTalk has been publicly questioned by analysts, customers, and partners.
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform: A connectivity platform that fundamentally changes the way companies do business. MuleSoft’s unified Anypoint Platform, the world’s leading connectivity platform for SOA, SaaS, and APIs, helps you deliver a Connected Company. As a company focused on integration, we will continue to innovate to ensure your present and future integration needs are not just met, but exceeded.
