API management is a broad topic, and there are nearly as many providers as APIs needing management solutions. Below, we’ll look at ten of the best options currently in the market. This is not an exhaustive list, but they represent some of the best options for the widest range of users.
1. ApigeeApigee is a cloud-native API management solution offered by Google as part of its Google Cloud platform. In addition to its cloud-first solutions for API Gateways, Analytics, Developer Portals, and Security Tooling, it offers a wide range of features for cataloging APIs, leveraging AI and LLM through the Gemini Code Assist implementation, and even promises to host and manage complex hybrid and multi-cloud deployments at scale.
ProsAWS API Gateway is a fully managed AWS API solution. It’s tightly integrated with AWS and supports both RESTful and WebSocket APIs. AWS API Gateway offers a ton of tools for creating, securing, maintaining, publishing, monitoring, and controlling APIs and their traffic flow.
ProsMicrosoft Azure API Management is a hybrid cloud and on-premises API management solution offering various tools, from compliance and security to developer portals and gateways. It integrates with the Azure ecosystem quite tightly, offering a one-stop shop for any Azure API to integrate with the holistic management toolset.
ProsPostman is an API platform designed to manage and simplify work and output at every stage of the API lifecycle. Its comprehensive toolset offers solutions for mocking, testing, deployment, documentation, and discovery, and its strong governance and workspace management tools create a controlled and consistent collaborative environment.
ProsSwagger is a management tool that supports API specifications, including AsyncAPI, OpenAPI, and JSON Schema. It integrates these specifications through a toolset of open-source solutions. SwaggerHub is a management layer built on top of the core Swagger offering to support collaboration, development, discoverability, and integration at scale.
ProsIBM API Connect is a full-lifecycle API management solution. It is built to cover everything from creation through monetization and sunsetting to delivering tools, including gateways, managers, testing systems, developer portals, and more. It integrates tightly with the IBM Cloud offering and offers IBM’s substantial backing and expertise.
ProsKong Gateway is an API platform offering a modular feature-rich toolset. This is a huge benefit for many teams. It’s often the case that a fully featured solution is just too heavy and costly for users to adopt for just a single tool that is needed. Kong makes it easy to use only what you want to use, improving the integration experience and driving down cost and complexity.
ProsThe WSO2 API Manager is another popular complete lifecycle API management solution. Intended to cover every stage of the API lifecycle for cloud, hybrid, and on-premises APIs, its open-source nature has attracted much admiration and attention. It is widely used throughout the industry due to its interoperability with open standards like GraphQL and REST, and its highly developed integration offerings mean you can implement it basically anywhere.
ProsGravitee.io positions itself as a sort of shim for other API tools. In essence, Gravitee promises that you can use any gateway or event broker with their system, tying in additional tools and processes with existing solutions and systems to make something better than the sum of its parts. In addition to the unifying system, it offers authentication, authorization, and management solutions, offering a good amount of freedom and support.
ProsMuleSoft Anypoint Platform is a full-service API management platform focused on serving a universal base of APIs. Its advertising notes that you can bring “Anypoint Platform benefits to every API — regardless of origin, architecture or environment.” By leveraging a wide range of integration layers and solutions, Anypoint is attempting to provide a truly universal platform—and this is as promising as it is difficult to get right.
ProsThese ten options represent a wide applicability of management solutions for most API users, but there are an incredible number of options currently available for integration. Other powerful API management platforms include Axway, Treblle, Tyk, Zuplo, and countless others. There are plenty of API management tools that specifically support GraphQL, are more cost-effective, or use open-source components. Others cater to specific goals, like SDK or documentation generation. Are there any others you’d like us to cover or include in a future list? Let us know in the comments below!
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