How does OIE compare to the other Mirth Connect™ forks?

Since NextGen Healthcare stopped supporting Mirth Connect™ 4.5.2 and moved to a commercial license starting with version 4.6, the open source community has carried the codebase forward into two forks. If you run Mirth Connect™ today, that leaves you three viable options: OIE, BridgeLink, or commercial Mirth Connect™.

All three share the same channel architecture, so any of them will run your existing channels. Where they differ is how open each one is, and who maintains and governs it.

Where OIE is different

OIE builds on the open source foundation Mirth Connect™ established, and takes that openness further. Every OIE plugin is free and licensed under MPL 2.0, with nothing held back for a paid tier. Capabilities that cost extra elsewhere are open in OIE: the TLS Manager Plugin handles certificate management comparable to NextGen's paid SSL Manager extension, and Role Based Access Control provides user permissions comparable to NextGen's paid User Authorization extension. Both are free and maintained by the community.

BridgeLink open-sources its engine under MPL 2.0, but ships its web administrator under the Business Source License, which by its own terms is not an open source license and may not be used with any integration engine other than BridgeLink. OIE has a web-based administrator as well, and like every OIE plugin it's fully open under MPL 2.0, reusable without restrictions.

OIE also has the most active open development and community of the three. The work happens in public on GitHub, and an active Discord is where many experienced Mirth Connect™ practitioners now help each other day to day.

Built to stay independent

OIE is governed by its community. No single vendor controls it. To protect that independence for the long term, the project joined the Eclipse Foundation, a vendor-neutral home for open source software. The name and marks are now held by the Foundation, so no one company can take OIE private, change its license, or put it behind a paywall.

Where NovaMap fits

We're one of several vendors that support OIE, so you're never locked to us. We contribute to the project, we built and donated the open source TLS Manager Plugin, and we offer product support contracts. For teams that want the engine run for them, there's Managed OIE: high availability and monitoring, with a team to call. You get the confidence of enterprise support and the freedom of open source.

New to OIE? Spin up a free dev instance from the portal, or download OIE and run it today. Ready for production? Get started now →

This is independent, third-party work, not affiliated with NextGen Healthcare or Mirth Connect™. Mirth® and Mirth Connect® are registered trademarks of NXGN Management, LLC (NextGen Healthcare). BridgeLink is a trademark of Innovar Healthcare.