Top 10 API Gateways in 2025

As enterprises and developers build increasingly complex API ecosystems, choosing the right API gateway has become a critical architectural decision that can determine the efficacy and utility of the end result. The market is rich with both mature solutions and innovative newcomers, offering product differentiation across security, business functions, and AI integrations.

Today, we’ll compare ten of the leading API gateways, exploring what makes them good options and how they differ from one another.

1. Kong Gateway

• Summary: An open-source, cloud-native API gateway built for scalability and extensibility.
• Core offering: Kong excels with its plugin architecture, deep Kubernetes integrations, and native service mesh (Kong Mesh). Kong Konnect, its SaaS control plane, makes hybrid/multi-cloud management seamless.
• Use case: Organizations needing flexibility, high performance, and multi-cloud deployments.

The Kong Gateway is designed to be highly scalable and extensible. Kong’s main selling point is its plugin architecture — accordingly, you can make the gateway behave however you want it to. If you can’t get to where you want with the default settings and systems, there’s a good chance you can modify your stack until it works to your specifications.

2. Zuplo

• Summary: A newer, developer-friendly API gateway designed for rapid deployment.
• Core offering: Zuplo is built with developer experience in mind, offering a code-first approach with native GitOps, automatic OpenAPI validation, and integrated rate limiting.
• Use case: Startups and fast-moving teams prioritizing simplicity and DevOps alignment.

Zuplo is a newer offering in the industry, but it offers significant product differentiation across both its gateway and general product line. Zuplo calls itself the “most programmable API gateway,” noting that it has “unlimited extensibility.” This flexibility has made it attractive for teams, especially startups, who want to have full control over a simple product that can scale almost infinitely to their specific needs.

3. Tyk API Management Platform & API Gateway

• Summary: An open-source gateway with both self-managed and cloud-hosted options.
• Core Offering: Tyk offers a lightweight footprint, a strong open-source community, and out-of-the-box GraphQL support. Its additional tooling through the API developer portal makes it attractive for teams looking to integrate features in a one-stop shop model.
• Use Case: Enterprise teams looking for open-source flexibility without sacrificing features.

Tyk is another product offering that leans on being a “platform of everything,” and for this reason, it’s often seen as a good first stop for teams looking for a range of features. Since it’s open source, it allows a good amount of control, and the real-time traffic shaping and governance systems allow for more ample gateway applications than many other offerings in the space.

4. Gravitee

• Summary: An event-native API gateway that supports both REST and asynchronous APIs.
• Core offering: Gravitee is differentiated by strong support for event-driven architectures and protocols like MQTT and Kafka.
• Use case: Companies combining REST APIs with event streaming or IoT.

Gravitee‘s offering is unique in that it supports both REST and asynchronous APIs. Asynchronous APIs are becoming increasingly common, but they’re not always as fully supported by most tools as standard REST APIs. Gravitee provides a wide range of support across multiple asynchronous protocols and offers additional feature integrations across access control, monetization, and security.

5. MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager

• Summary: This gateway solution is part of MuleSoft’s broader Anypoint Platform, which offers broader API management and product-centric offerings.
• Core offering: MuleSoft provides deep integrations and reusable assets through its Anypoint Exchange. However, its complexity and cost can be high.
• Use case: Large enterprises needing full-stack integration between APIs, data, and applications.

MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager offers an API gateway as one of its central components, allowing providers to funnel everything through a central gateway. This gateway has quite a bit of functionality, including routing, rate limiting, authentication/authorization, and more. It’s also relatively powerful in orchestration use cases and has seen good adoption across containerized microservices. However, it’s important to note that MuleSoft may be overkill for a single API gateway or a non-MuleSoft adopting team due to how big of a solution it actually is. In some cases, this can feel a bit like taking a chainsaw to a paper cutout.

6. Axway Amplify API Management

• Summary: A hybrid and multi-cloud API management solution with a policy-based security gateway.
• Core offering: An API solution unifying APIs across legacy systems, microservices, and SaaS environments.
• Use case: Enterprises developing and modernizing legacy systems that don’t want to overhaul their architecture.

Axway provides a powerful policy-based solution, offering rate-limiting, quota-driven limiting, and policy governance systems in a hybrid and multi-cloud solution. Because Axway is so flexible, it has become a solid contender for organizations trying to unify APIs across legacy and modern systems, especially when they have different development paradigms or modalities. That said, Axway is a bit opinionated — as it offers proprietary formats and a very structured approach, it can feel like buying into the Axway way of doing things.

7. Sensedia API Platform

• Summary: A comprehensive API management suite with a powerful gateway integration focused on AI providers.
• Core offering: The AI gateway is a novel method for connecting with integrated AI providers, though it is challenged by standard solutions like MCP.
• Use case: Financial services and open banking implementations requiring adaptive governance.

Sensedia is a relatively popular API management suite, offering many solutions for different use cases. As of late, their API platform has a significant gateway product offering, with notable AI-specific implementation and integration, ensuring high cost control, data protection, observability, and secure implementation governance.

8. Azure API Management (APIM)

• Summary: A fully managed API gateway and management solution from Microsoft’s Azure offering with tight native integrations.
• Core offering: Full and easy integration with the Azure ecosystem unlocks high control and flexibility.
• Use case: Best for teams already integrated or invested in the Azure cloud platform.

Microsoft’s Azure API Management offering is incredibly popular, offering functionality for API development, management, and governance. Azure API Management has an API Management Gateway, a component-based implementation that serves routing, key validation, quota control, rate limiting, and more complex functions such as caching and transformation. It offers both a managed and hosted solution, both feature-rich, though with different levels of control and cost.

9. WSO2 API Gateway

• Summary: A runtime and backend API gateway that offers integrated services across the WSO2 line, integrating monitoring, analytics, and more. WSO2 offers extensive customization across a variety of implementations.
• Core offering: Extensively customizable solution with strong identity management, REST and SOAP support, and open-source licensing.
• Use case: Teams looking for a highly customizable solution that is open source.

The WSO2 API Gateway has a runtime and backend component, offering significant security, management, and flow control over API requests and policy enforcement modalities. Since this is simply a component of the larger WSO2 API Manager offering suite, you can then take this data and the analytics generated by it and port it to more complex functionality and transformation processes.

10. IBM API Connect

• Summary: IBM API Connect is a suite of tools, and one of those tools — API Gateway — offers powerful and secure gateway functionality.
• Core offering: API Connect’s API Gateway focuses on tying into the larger IBM API Connect solution set, offering high security and control over your data flows.
• Use case: Best used for highly regulated industries such as finance or healthcare, which require robust compliance controls and security features.

IBM is well known for its enterprise-grade API solutions, and its gateway is no different. IBM API Connect’s DataPower Gateway is specifically targeted towards the enterprise, with its components focused on high security and data controls. It offers built-in logging and reporting targeted towards business metrics, allowing for substantial business value.

Honorable Mentions

In addition to the gateways covered above, many other API management solutions and open-source proxies can serve similar purposes, depending on your architecture and needs. Below are a few more notable options:

Honorable Mentions

In addition to the gateways covered above, many other API management solutions and open-source proxies can serve similar purposes, depending on your architecture and needs. Below are a few more notable options:

• Ambassador Labs (Edge Stack): A Kubernetes-native API gateway built on Envoy, offering integrations tailored for cloud-native app developers and strong support for self-service workflows.
• Traefik API Gateway: Based on the Traefik Proxy, this open-source option focuses on simplicity and GitOps compatibility, making it a good choice for dynamic, containerized environments.
• AWS API Gateway: A fully managed service from Amazon that enables developers to create, publish, and monitor APIs at scale within the AWS ecosystem.
• Solo.io (Gloo Gateway): A high-performance gateway built on Envoy and Kubernetes, designed for advanced use cases like GraphQL federation, API security, and service mesh integration.

Final Thoughts

The reality is that there’s no one-size-fits-all API gateway. Your choice of solution will depend largely on a few key metrics:

• Deployment model: What is your deployment model? Are you deploying cloud-native, hybrid, on-premises, or in combination across a federated system?
• Protocol requirements: Your particular protocol needs — REST vs. GraphQL vs. EDA — will determine your target gateways. While most on this list can be used across different protocols, it’s best to use the most appropriate solutions where possible.
• Ecosystem integration: If you’ve already adopted a specific solution — such as Kubernetes or Azure — you may already have a gateway offering that would be easier and quicker to integrate.
• Governance and compliance concerns: Some gateways are more concerned with data privacy or compliance, and in cases where this is important, the calculus needed to find the right solution will be somewhat obvious.

In 2025, API gateways are not just routers — they’re control planes for security, observability, and developer experience. As microservices, AI agents, and zero-trust architectures continue to evolve, choosing a gateway that aligns with both current and future needs has never been more important.