How does Camel compare to Mule?

This FAQ entry was written when Mule 1.x and 2.x existed. It doesn’t cater for how Mule may go in Mule 3.x.

I guess from 30,000 feet they’re kinda similar beasts; they’re both kinds of routing/mediation engines. The main differences are as follows:

  • Camel uses a Java Domain Specific Language in addition to Spring XML for configuring the routing rules and providing Enterprise Integration Patterns

  • Camel’s API is smaller & cleaner (IMHO) and is closely aligned with the APIs of JBI, CXF and JMS; based around message exchanges (with in and optional out messages) which more closely maps to REST, WS, WSDL & JBI than the UMO model Mule is based on

  • Camel allows the underlying transport details to be easily exposed (e.g. the JmsExchange, JbiExchange, HttpExchange objects expose all the underlying transport information & behaviour if its required). See How does the Camel API compare to

  • Camel supports an implicit Type Converter in the core API to make it simpler to connect components together requiring different types of payload & headers

  • Camel uses the Apache 2 License rather than Mule’s more restrictive commercial license

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