Difference between BPEL and ESB

This is again a very common question being asked by every one

Both BPEL and ESB are used to design the business process then what is the need to two components.

First of all ESB is a very light weight product in comparison to BPEL.By light weight i mean the space taken by BPEL is much more than the space taken by ESB.Space mean if the BPEL installation wizard takes 500mb of space then ESB takes only 270mb of space.

Again processing speed of ESB is much faster than BPEL.

For a simple process where we are just assigning an input variable to output variable the BPEL might take .300 seconds and esb will take only .175 seconds.


BPEL is very good for orchestration and ESB is mainly used for routing and transformation.

If we are using adapters then it is preferred to use ESB for calling third party adapters because just for copying the input to output file in a file adapter in bpel you will need to add assign activity making it a big process however in esb it can be done easily thorugh transformation.Again using filters the information can be routed to the right destination.


BPEL has lot of features which esb doesn't have.Like workflow ,email notification can be used only with BPEL.SO the bottom line is ESB should be used for transformation and routing.

Again its quite a valid point that why just for routing and transformation we should have a separate components.This was not a good design approach.

From SOA Suite 11g there is not BPEL esb separate console.

There is only one console em console from which you can see everything.

ESb has been replaced by another component called mediator which is embedded as a part of 11g.

Now in a single composite you can have your whole process.

Unlike 10g we now don't have to create separate bpel and esb process and then have to join them explicitly.

So overall 11g is going to be the next thing.

A lot of feature like EDN(Event Driven network)and other features have been added in 11g making it as a complete integration product.

Will be covering the properties of 11g sometimes later.