[[IsCamelanESB-IsCamelanESB]]
=== Is Camel an ESB?

Typically vendors claim practically everything is an ESB these days, so
the answer is probably yes :smile:

However our view is that an ESB is more of a container of integration
components, so we view http://servicemix.apache.org[Apache ServiceMix]
to be a true ESB based around OSGi (and optionally JBI) to provide a
standards based integration platform of components.

We view Camel as being a rule based routing & mediation engine which can
be used inside a full blown ESB, a message broker or a web services
smart client. Though if you want to, you could consider that Camel is a
small, lightweight embeddable ESB since it can provide many of the
common ESB services like smart routing, transformation, mediation,
monitoring, orchestration, etc.
