Open-source MuleSoft alternatives

Kong, also called Kong Gateway, is a cloud-native and platform-agnostic API gateway that has expanded to cover LLM and MCP traffic. It is written in Lua, released under the Apache-2.0 license, and extended through plugins. It proxies, routes, load balances and health checks traffic and handles authentication, sitting as a central layer in front of microservices or conventional APIs.

For AI workloads it adds multi-LLM support, semantic security, and security and analytics for MCP traffic. Kong runs natively on Kubernetes through its official Ingress Controller. The quickstart uses docker-compose, adds authentication to an API in a few minutes, and a Docker procedure covers a DB-less mode, with other distributions listed on the official installation page.

You can run Kong on your own infrastructure, in the cloud, on bare metal or in containers, or sign up for a free trial of the cloud-hosted Kong Konnect. It suits platform and API teams managing many services who need a gateway with a plugin ecosystem and an upgrade path to AI traffic management.

Mirth Connect, from NextGen Healthcare, is an integration engine for healthcare data. The README likens it to an interpreter: when a foreign system sends a message, Connect translates the message standard into the one your own system understands. Project topics point to HL7 and interoperability, and the software is written in Java.

Its message processing steps include filtering, which reads message parameters and decides whether a message continues to transformation, transformation, which converts one standard to another such as HL7 to XML, extraction, which can pull data from and push data to a database, and routing to the appropriate destination systems. These steps let organizations connect applications that use different formats.

The README covers useful links to downloads, a user guide, a wiki with an FAQ, forums and a Slack channel, followed by sections on installation, upgrading, starting the server and running on Java 9 or later. It includes a Java licensing note and a license section. The latest release listed is 4.5.2, and NextGen frames the product as supporting everything from small practices to large health information exchanges.

Zato is an open-source platform written in Python for integration, automation and orchestration. It lets organizations connect business systems, APIs, workflows and even hardware assets, and is described as an enterprise service bus and API platform for service-oriented architectures.

The project lists industries such as airports, defense, health care, telecommunications, financial services and government, and its topics mention API gateway, FHIR, HL7 interoperability, low-code and iPaaS. The README is short and points to the project website for downloads, screenshots and programming examples.

Zato is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and is installed on your own infrastructure. The homepage could not be retrieved when this entry was prepared, so detailed deployment and pricing information should be checked on the project site. It suits integration engineers who prefer to write integration logic in Python.

Apache Camel Karavan is a low-code data integration platform that simplifies the Apache Camel experience by letting teams design integration microservices visually and deploy them quickly. It aims to give the full power of Apache Camel through a visual tool, from low-code use cases to pro-code projects, drawing on more than ten years of community experience.

The designer supports Enterprise Integration Patterns, over 300 integration components, a REST API designer with an OpenAPI to REST DSL generator, YAML for integrations with Java for custom code, a route designer and a topology view. The deployer provides shell scripts for building and deploying and predefined customizable configurations for different platforms, and a developer dashboard offers hot reload, live logs and tracing of exchange data. Architecturally, the Karavan app manages projects, a build container packages and runs integrations, a Git repository stores project files as the source of truth, and an image registry holds built container images.

A VS Code extension provides a local developer experience for designing and running integrations on a laptop and deploying to Kubernetes or OpenShift. The platform can be installed on Docker, Kubernetes or OpenShift, is part of the Apache Software Foundation and is licensed under Apache-2.0.

Titanoboa is a workflow orchestration platform that runs on the JVM and is designed to be distributed, scalable and fault tolerant. Workflows can be built with low-code tooling and extended with Java, Kotlin or Clojure, with Python support described as coming. It can run on-premises or in the cloud, on bare metal, virtual machines, Docker or Kubernetes.

The engine supports sequential and parallel steps, configurable retries with custom error handling, branching, conditional flow and even cyclic workflow graphs. Splitter and aggregator patterns allow larger data sets to be processed, steps are transactional so they complete even through a failover, and new workflows can be developed and deployed at runtime. Clustering can scale to many nodes, with no central master server or database.

The README lists use cases including big data and data pipeline automation, orchestrating microservices, acting as an iPaaS or integration platform, ETL, IT automation, an enterprise service bus and batch processing. Titanoboa is released under AGPL-3.0, and its design draws on immutability and functional programming principles. A wiki and predefined workflow steps are available.