First of all, I should mention that I personally think Mulesoft is a fantastic enterprise development platform.
One of the great things about Mulesoft is that you can use it to build anything, because it is really just a different type of programming combined with a framework that is designed to facilitate building system integrations.
However, there is often a misconception that it’s a “low-code”, easy to use (“you just drag and drop and configure”) by (cheaper) “less technical staff”, to deliver business value quickly and easily.
That idea is however often far from reality, as customers who bought Mulesoft based on those concepts found out the hard way. (I’ve lost track of how many Mulesoft customers I’ve worked with, who didn’t even know about software engineering concepts like version control, CI/CD, etc.)
The consequences of this misconception are dire, as either the costs end up being much higher than the customer assumed (on top of very expensive licenses), or worse their implementation of Mulesoft ends up failing due to lack of necessary skill sets.
Buying Mulesoft is like buying a cargo plane. It’s great if that’s what you need and if the cost is worth it for you. However if what you thought you were buying was a van, then you’re in for a shock and likely pain.
Since our focus here at Syntek is to deliver success and maximize ROI, we started evaluating alternative technologies for customers for whom Mulesoft is overkill. That said, we’re very surprised and impressed with Workato.
Over the last several decades, I’ve worked with many products that promise easy integrations and automations using attractive drag-and-drop UIs instead of writing textual code. However, the reality has always been the same as we describe with MuleSoft.
However, with Workato, it’s the first time we feel that this product REALLY delivers on its promise while still being powerful and flexible enough to support a vast majority of use cases.
Not only that, but it’s clear that the designers really understand the realities of delivering automation and integration. For example, lack of statefullness in Mulesoft has been a constant source of pain. And while many would think “well, just set up a database and integrate, it’s easy.” The reality on the ground is that while such a thing SHOULD be easy, it very often isn’t. There might not be one available, or it might not be possible to set up a VPN to provide required connectivity. In addition, company’s often require all kinds of approvals and the bureaucracy might cause days or weeks of delays.
With Workato, pretty much everything you could possibly need or want is just there, queuing, streaming, long-lived databases, short-lives scoped databases, human task management with UI, and much more.
Workato is finally a product that allows us to deliver quickly and easily while providing a very high value to our customers.
First of all, it is important to understand that because of these differences between Mulesoft, fully automated one-click automations simply don’t exist and are very unlikely to ever exist. This does however provide an opportunity to make architecture changes and process improvements
In order to facilitate such migrations, we’ve developed a proprietary migration tool, which at this time provides several useful features to help migration from Mulesoft to Workato.
Our migration tool is a Mulesoft application that can be easily deployed in your Mulesoft infrastructure and when run, will do a complete analysis of your infrastructure, applications, and provide you with a report to assist with your migration.
The first set of information in this report is the list of your applications, information about those applications (total dataweave code, operations, endpoints, java code ), a size estimation based on those metrics, and a migration effort.
Our sizing rules and migration effort estimates have been kindly provided to us by Workato’s Professional Services, who will maintain those and update them over time as needed.
The second part of the report is the list of all Connectors being used for all applications, and if they have known equivalents in workato.
This will allow you to identify if there are equivalent connectors for all those you are using in your Mulesoft applications.
Last but not least, our Application Browser report, allows you to see in a single location, what logic the applications are implementing without having to review the code for each by opening them in Anypoint Studio.
We provide our migration tool free of charge, just CLICK HERE to request access to it.