Apache Camel Reviews & Insights

Score6.3 out of 10

34 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Apache Camel are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Easy Learning Curve: Several users have found Apache Camel to have an easy learning curve, allowing them to quickly grasp the concepts and start using it efficiently.

Extensive Integration Support: Many reviewers have praised Apache Camel for its extensive support for integration with diverse software platforms. With over 150 components available, users can seamlessly integrate Camel with various frameworks and middleware products such as Spring, Apache Karaf, and Servicemix.

Robustness and Reliability: Numerous users have highlighted the robustness of Apache Camel in handling various information transfer protocols out-of-the-box. They appreciate that it is a reliable solution for their integration needs, making it suitable for creating microservices and handling complex business logic.

Apache Camel Reviews

7 Reviews

Engineering

Apache Camel - Integrate lots of things together with custom complex business logic on top

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

July 25, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We had some workloads where we need to integrate multiple sources & sinks of data, with different formats & protocols, while doing some pretty complex logic on top of that. Apache Camel was a natural choice for it since there are tons of built-in components that allow making easy connections to all the sources & sinks that we need. On the other hand, the Java-native nature of Apache Camel means writing & testing whatever logic we need is just business-as-usual for the engineers.

Pros

Easy & reliable integration with lots of types of source or sink of data.
Complex business logic could be written in Java.
Excellent unit testing support with Java.

Cons

Documentation could be improved
Support for complex & advance integration options could be better
Navigating the Java code base requires learning curve

Likelihood to Recommend

There are tons of integration technologies available, the point is to pick the one most suited for your use case. Apache Camel offers easy connections to lots of types of sources or sinks of data while supporting custom complex business logic, all testable. However, it means configuring using Java source code, which is a hurdle when all your logic need is very simple. There are many other GUI-based integration technologies that get those types of logic-lite work done faster.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

Camel is awesome!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 13, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I've used Apache Camel as a great alternative integration framework compared to heavier middleware solutions from companies like IBM. It serves that purpose wonderfully, and is a total pleasure to use. Great plugins for almost any connector you could need, and they all work as expected.

Pros

Open source, which is vitally important
Great integration with Java frameworks such as Spring Boot, allowing it to be deployed however you need to deploy it
Wonderful testing tools as part of the framework

Cons

Documentation could use some work, sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error to figure out how to do something.

Likelihood to Recommend

Message brokering across different systems, with transactionality and the ability to have fine tuned control over what happens using Java (or other languages), instead of a heavy, proprietary languages.

One situation that it doesn't fit very well (as far as I have experienced) is when your workflow requires significant data mapping. While possible when using Java tooling, some other visual data mapping tools in other integration frameworks are easier to work with.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Financial Services company, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

EIP using Camel

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 3, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it as the processing backbone/Enterprise Integration Pattern (EIP) framework for several products that we develop. It is used to provide components for message ingest, orchestration and export. By orchestration, I mean the determination and execution of the path of any single message through the application. It also is our primary error handling mechanism as it provides out-of-the-box error retry, waiting and exponential backoff.

Pros

The Java DSP is one of the primary reasons we chose Camel over Spring Integration's XML-based route definitions. It provides compile-time checking of syntax with auto-complete in an IDE (Eclipse, etc).
The component documentation on the website is phenomenal.
Error handling mechanisms are robust and easy to use and set up. Default settings are great and intuitive.
The ability to define distinct contexts within the same application and define context-wide, context-specific error handling is great as well.

Cons

I find the "seda" endpoint to be less obvious that it is doing multi-threading than Spring Integration's executor mechanism.
Integration with Spring Beans is pretty good, but I believe SI's is a bit better (for obvious reasons, both being Spring products).
SI's use support is probably a bit better/faster and I believe the user base is larger so that there are most questions/answers for SI on StackOverflow

Likelihood to Recommend

Message processing, especially with high throughput, is an excellent use case. File system monitoring, JMS ingest, etc., is really great. I would most consider it for automated processing scenarios. Although it provides components to support REST endpoints, I would choose frameworks such as Jersey or Spring REST for that. Although it supports a response mechanism, I don't think I would choose to use it in systems where I need fine-tuned control of responses.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Defense & Space company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Apache Camel Review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 29, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Apache Camel is being used for multiple projects in different organizations that I have worked at. It is being leveraged for EIP as well as writing event based code.

I worked for an organization that used Camel with Karaf (OSGi) and other organizations where Camel was used just as an open source framework.

Pros

EIP - enterprise integration patterns. Read events from queue, route to different processes and work on the messages.
REST APIs- Apache CXF is used and Camel could be used to provide endpoints.
Batches - Camel could be used to trigger batches and do large scale processing, using its throttling. It provides lots of connectors to work with.

Cons

I feel that Apache Camel is lacking a Spring XD like framework integration with big data capabilities.
Apache Camel seems to be very dependent on Spring.

Likelihood to Recommend

Camel is very suited where ever you want to use enterprise integration patterns like endpoint integration, routers, aggregators, splitters etc. Also Camel can be used for REST endpoints, designing event driven systems and integration with queues and it provides whole lot of connectors for integration with social etc.

Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering (Financial Services company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

best lightweight integration solution

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 28, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

When we switched from a monolithic architecture to a service oriented one we were researching on all the enterprise integration technologies. We chose Apache Camel because it was lightweight, was easy to get started with, had a groovy DSL and because it was an implementation of existing integration patterns. Over the last few years, Apache Camel became the glue that binds all our micro services. We use publish-subscribe pattern the most i.e consuming from and producing to AWS SQS queues. A lot of our quartz jobs are heavily depended on Apache Camel as well. I would highly recommend Apache Camel as a lightweight yet formidable enterprise integration solution.

Pros

Producing to and consuming from any messaging system
Message type conversion
Large support library

Cons

Documentation could use some more detail
Hot deployment

Likelihood to Recommend

For basic publish subscribe use cases, Apache Camel is the clear winner.

Akmal Muqeeth

Lead Software Engineer in Engineering at Brighter (Internet, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

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Apache Camel: ways you're wasting developer time if you aren't using it

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 12, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I worked on a product development team creating an enterprise cybersecurity product. The core event processing mechanism of the product used Apache Camel in many places, mainly to handle interactions over JMS between the various modules of the product. Apache Camel especially makes the process of sending a POJO from one method to another across two separate application components, handling the marshaling and unmarshaling via JAXB, and the sending and receiving via JMS. It achieves all this routing via a simple XML configuration that is part of the application's spring context (although it can also be configured procedurally).

Pros

Configuration of information routing via XML in a Sprint Context.
Robustness. Apache Camel is capable of handling many different information transfer protocols out-of-the-box.
Extensibility. Apache Camel also allows for custom routing handlers where needed.

Cons

Some of the documentation is a little sparse. In particular, its TCP-based routes use an underlying Netty server, and the interactions between Netty's decoder capabilities and Apache Camel's routing/handler capabilities can be a little muddy at times. In general it is clear which routes and endpoints are the more frequently used and which haven't been given as much attention.

Likelihood to Recommend

In my experience, Apache Camel was very useful for the main use case that we leveraged it for, i.e. wiring up JMS messaging. I found the less-frequently-used handlers and endpoints to be either less reliable, maintainable, or easy to work with than just rolling my own data transfer logic. I would stick to straightforward use cases where the XML configuration conveys the intent in a very clear manner, and avoid using Apache Camel to do large portions of moving data around that involve business logic or custom intermediaries.

David McCann

Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Fast Orientation (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

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Apache camel review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 12, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I used it when I worked at Verizon Wireless. We used apache Camel on a couple projects as an integration layer between the UI and backend services and databases. We used Apache Camel's REST component. We used it as xml and java dsl [solution].

Pros

It uses URIs to directly integrate with various back-end components.
It has a very easy to use REST component.
Easy to track the execution flow while coding by using routers.
Helps keep different components separate.

Cons

To be able to hot deploy

Likelihood to Recommend

If you want to integrate several applications with different protocols and technologies you should use Apache Camel. The good thing about it is that you have to follow same steps for every integration. If you want to have a container you need to use something else.

Verified User

Employee in Engineering (Computer Software company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

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Apache Camel: ways you're wasting developer time if you aren't using it

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 12, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Configuration of information routing via XML in a Sprint Context.
Robustness. Apache Camel is capable of handling many different information transfer protocols out-of-the-box.
Extensibility. Apache Camel also allows for custom routing handlers where needed.

Cons

Some of the documentation is a little sparse. In particular, its TCP-based routes use an underlying Netty server, and the interactions between Netty's decoder capabilities and Apache Camel's routing/handler capabilities can be a little muddy at times. In general it is clear which routes and endpoints are the more frequently used and which haven't been given as much attention.

Likelihood to Recommend

David McCann

Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Fast Orientation (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

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