What are some viable alternatives to BizTalk Server? [closed]

Answer 1

We evaluated BizTalk at our company and were really disappointed.

We are using IBM WebSphere Transformation Extender (which has lots of (other) problems, too) and the mapping tool of BizTalk is a joke in comparison to WTX.

The graphical tool is not really usable for complex mappings (we have schemas with a few hundred fields in repeating groups) and if you do more than the usual "concat first name and last name to name" mappings, you will be tired of the graphical approach (for example the arguments of the functoids in the graphical mapper are not labeled and the order in which you connect fields to these arguments is important).

The XSLT-Mapper was usable but not really convincing, and even the microsoft rep told us to use a tool like XMLSpy for XSLT and load the resulting XSL file into BizTalk.

A third approach to mapping is to use C#-Code for the mapping, which was not acceptable for us as a general approach (we don't want to teach everyone C#).

In addition to the mapping tool we did not like the deployment in BizTalk. In order to deploy your process, you need to make lots of settings in different tools and places. We had hoped to find a mechanism like a WAR file for Java Web Applications in BizTalk, so that you can give one archive for your whole process solution to your administrator and he can deploy it.

Answer 2

As a BizTalk consultant I have to agree at least partly with Eric Z Beard, there are a lot of edge cases that take up alot of time. But quite a few scenarios are handled extremly smooth as well, so it all depends IMO. But when you (Eric) call BizTalk bloated I have to disagree! We've found that the performance and reliability is excellent, it's flexible and comes with a lot of good adapters out of the box.

Answer 3

My experience with BizTalk and doing B2B integrations is that most organizations do not truly do schema first design or fully understand xml standards for that matter. Most tend to weave objects and hope they materialize into meaninful schemas. In an enterprise environment, this is backwards.

BizTalk does have a learning curve, but once you get it you are rewarded with durability, performance, true scalability, and extensibility. Like most have said though, it best to make sure it meets your needs and contort your needs to BizTalk.

In the past I have worked with BizTalk 2004 through 2009, and another product called webMethods.

Answer 4

I have no direct experience with JitterBit, but I have heard very good things from coworkers.

Answer 5

There is always Sun's (now Oracle) OpenESB framework. Its generally speaking a smaller, lighter version of Biztalk but with roughly all the same features.

You do get to write more code with it, though.

Its Open Source as well.

Answer 6

BizTalk needs to be used correctly, I am a BizTalk developer and my experience with BizTalk is quite good. Its reliable, performant, scalable, contains a lot of built in architectural patterns and build in components to make integration easy and fast, you get security, retries, secondary transports, validation, transformation etc... and what ever you dont have build in with BizTalk you can easily customized with .NET code, its basically a hard earned integration system and you get all this in one box. BUT you need to know how to implement BizTalk correctly, not once I came across solutions that where implemented and often also architected incorrectly.

but the real benefit of BizTalk is that you can implement small solutions and scale up whilst most other integration systems from big vendors will only sell a whole integration pack which can cost much more.

BizTalk is considered the most complicated server from the house of Microsoft.

So any body saying BizTalk is not good dosent know BizTalk period.