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Without the right tools, unlocking actionable insights from large volumes of data can be a complex and protracted process for enterprises. TIBCO and MuleSoft are tools that help users build and maintain their data pipelines.

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What is TIBCO?

TIBCO provides a broad portfolio of solutions, including data integration products, visual data science workflow platforms, and model operationalization software, to help customers unlock the value of real-time data. Its data science solution in particular accelerates enterprises’ return on investment on their data science initiatives through a collaborative analytic workflow builder. This workflow builder uses big data environments such as Hadoop to transform data into insight.

What is MuleSoft?

MuleSoft is a tool that unifies data to grant a unified view of customers, create connected experiences and automate business processes. Through its AnyPoint platform, MuleSoft delivers a lightweight, open-source platform to simplify data integration.

The data integration tools make it simple for enterprises to share, migrate, synchronize and manage their data. It uses API-led connectivity to lead enterprises to their business transformation goals.

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TIBCO vs. MuleSoft: Feature comparison

FeatureTIBCOMuleSoft
SaaS sourcesHundredsApprox 70
Database replicationIncremental and full tableIncremental
Data sharing abilityYes, plus data virtualizationYes
Connection to data warehousesYesYes
Customer ability to add new data sourcesYesYes

Head-to-head comparison: TIBCO vs. MuleSoft

Analytics, machine learning and API management

TIBCO provides a wide range of advanced data analytics features, including predictive analytics, machine learning and full-spectrum analytics. TIBCO has an exhaustive collection of data mining and machine learning algorithms that enable businesses to model, manipulate and leverage big data for their use cases. TIBCO has a code-free interface that takes advantage of automation to guide users through data exploration, data transformation and predictive modeling and evaluation.

Enterprises can empower their workforces with thousands of algorithms and functions like regression, decision trees, clustering, forecasting, multivariate statistics, neural networks, graph/network analysis, text analytics, design of experiments and statistical process control (SPC) that can be simply accessed through built-in nodes. TIBCO also allows users to embed predictive models, text analytics and business rules into business processes. More of TIBCO’s data science capabilities are detailed in this datasheet.

TIBCO also offers analytics and reporting capabilities through the TIBCO Cloud API Management platform. Its Operational Analytics suite provides prebuilt AI-powered prescriptive insights into the health and performance of API services, while the Business Analytics suite presents interactive drill-down reporting and prescriptive insights into API programs, products and general value generated by the API platform.

MuleSoft shows users real-time insights into the performance of their APIs using pre-built charts. This allows users to monitor performance, errors, compliance and latency easily. The resultant metrics allow developers to constantly observe and improve API quality. MuleSoft also allows enterprises to analyze their customer behavior through tracking key usage metrics spanning APIs, status codes, methods and more. API analytics provides three types of analytics: API viewing analytics, API events analytics and charted metrics.

Additionally, MuleSoft carries out data mapping using machine learning. It carries out machine learning on the data mappings from the application network graph to generate automatic data mapping recommendations. By suggesting transformations and providing users with the ability to customize them to their business processes, these recommendations expedite development for enterprises.

Data management

TIBCO’s master data management tools enable its users to create one place for assets, locations, products, customers, suppliers, reference data and more. TIBCO offers multiple methods to integrate and distribute master and reference data. Reference data management helps users manage and link public and private reference data such as country and postal codes as well as financial hierarchies. Anything 360 provides flexible and trusted views of data.

TIBCO has agile and model-driven data modeling. It uses semantic models to capture attributes, objects and relationships. TIBCO provides data quality dashboards, validation rules for on-demand or real-time control and a matching engine with survivorship and stewardship. Its stewardship features a self-service UI for authoring and searching, digital asset management and graph visualization. And, it has data lifecycle features to manage future, present and past master data versions.

MuleSoft offers enterprises numerous products to connect heterogeneous cloud, mobile, SaaS applications and on-premises systems. Mule Enterprise Service Bus is a MuleSoft product that future-proofs data integration for cloud and on-premises data management.

MuleSoft also provides dataloader.io to ease data management with an intuitive data loading tool to import, export and delete data in and out of Box and Salesforce.

Through the DataWeave module, MuleSoft gives a fully native framework to query and transform data. Users can handle integration in batch or real-time. They can also take a template-driven approach to codify the most routine integration patterns.

Collaboration features

TIBCO provides a collaborative platform to involve both IT and business stakeholders in data science operations. The platform is engineered to assist business owners to determine their analytics goals in a manner that can be translated into machine learning models. Business users have real-time visibility all through their projects without having to use multiple tools or solely receive status reports from various teams.

Its collaboration features assist enterprises to organize business end-users, application developers, data scientists and more alongside processes to successfully deploy data science solutions. Cross-team collaboration is augmented by extensible tools that support automation and reusable analytics pipelines.

MuleSoft’s collaboration features are characterized by user grouping mechanisms enabling collaboration and reuse. MuleSoft combines organizational users and business groups to provide flexible access management regardless of business structure. Aside from the ability to manage users and permissions across various business groups and set global permissions, users can share connectors, templates, APIs and more assets from the MuleSoft ecosystem with a specific group of users.

Choosing between TIBCO and MuleSoft

Comparing their data science capabilities, TIBCO proves to be not only a much more extensive solution but also offers a unified data science suite. MuleSoft’s data science capabilities are distributed across products such as DataWeave and CloudHub.

For users who would prefer a unified data science suite, TIBCO is the obvious choice. However, even though MuleSoft does not offer a focused data science suite, it is worth considering if its integrated solutions with data science features align with your data integration needs.

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