Table of Contents
Introduction to Apigee
Apigee is a full-stack API management platform from Google. Apigee enables enterprises to build, deploy, and scale API programs with ease, along with robust features covering the entire API life cycle and API governance capabilities.
Apigee includes an API management suite along with monitoring and testing modules. It supports AI-powered API diagnostics to predict the behavior of APIs for automatically detecting anomalies in real-time.
Browse some of the top API Management Platforms.
Apigee Feature Analysis
| Protocol Support (List of protocols supported by Apigee) | Apigee supports REST, SOAP, and GraphQL. |
| API Management & Governance (Brief description of the various features related to API management and governance) | Apigee supports advanced management and governance features for API access policies, API packaging, and subscription management, along with security, rate limiting, quotas, analytics, and more. |
| API Testing (Brief description of the various features related to API testing) | Apigee provides a platform called Apigee Edge, which is used for API development and testing. It supports configurable options for testing APIs. |
| Reporting and Monitoring (Brief description of various reporting and monitoring features) | Apigee supports a developer portal for detailed analytics with custom dashboards, reports, traffic and response time analysis, risk analysis, and developer engagement metrics. |
| Hosting Options (Specify whether Apigee is cloud-hosted or desktop software or any other options available) | Apigee has flexible hosting options ranging from cloud, hybrid, and on-premises. |
| Integrations (Specify whether Apigee allows APIs or webhooks for triggering operations or helps in external integrations) | Apigee supports service integrations with external APIs and microservices and provides an abstraction facade for bridging legacy applications. |
| CI/CD Support (Brief description of Apigee’s supports CI/CD for API deployment) | Apigee supports integrations with CI/CD pipelines through popular tools like Jenkins with multiple API environments. |
| API Monetization Support (Brief description of the API monetization options supported by Apigee) | Apigee supports monetization with a developer portal along with a CMS for customized content and API support forums. |
| Alerts (Alerting mechanisms supported by Apigee) | Apigee provides alerts for traffic, expiry, and anomaly detection caused by API parameters with alert destination settings for emails and a few popular services such as Slack and PagerDuty. |
| Pricing Model (Brief description of pricing model supported by Apigee) | Apigee offers a free, 60-day evaluation of the platform. Actual pricing beyond the evaluation period is not available on the official website. |
Top Alternatives to Apigee
1. RapidAPI Enterprise Hub
RapidAPI Enterprise Hub is a next-generation API management platform. Along with the standard API management and governance features, it also features an API marketplace. This component enables companies to provide a marketplace for customers and partners that want to find and connect to their APIs. RapidAPI’s public API marketplace is the largest API marketplace globally, with over 2 million developers accessing more than 20,000 APIs.
Besides API management and marketplace, RapidAPI also has an API testing product called RapidAPI Testing. It is an entirely cloud-based testing platform for functional and performance testing of API along with advanced monitoring and reporting tools.
Pros
- RapidAPI Enterprise Hub offers seamless integration between internally hosted APIs along with external, third-party APIs.
- RapidAPI Enterprise Hub supports an easy interface to design and publish APIs based on the OpenAPI specifications.
- RapidAPI Enterprise Hub has an in-built, white-labeled marketplace, enabling companies to build API portals with custom themes for monetizing their APIs.
Cons
- Some of the products, such as RapidAPI Testing, are newly launched, so adoption is less.
2. Kong Konnect
Kong Konnect is a managed platform for API and microservices. It offers a suite of products for hosting API backends and services for applications, with a global service catalog to simplify discovery, re-use, and governance of enterprise services. Kong Mesh is one of Kong’s differentiated offerings that enables companies to deploy an enterprise-grade service mesh for multi-cloud and multi-cluster environments on both Kubernetes and VMs.
Insomnia is Kong’s API testing solution. It allows developers and testers to quickly adopt a spec-driven development to create, test and deploy APIs using GitOps and team-based collaboration.
Pros
- Kong offers KongMesh, a control plane component for deploying service mesh architecture that leverages cross-platform, cross-application services and fosters better collaboration and utilization of backend services.
- Knog also includes a runtime manager that spawns Kong Gateway across hybrid and multi-cloud, Kubernetes, and self-hosted infrastructures with simplified and automated day-2 automation.
- Kong supports open-source tools like Insomnia, an API testing and debugging tool with support for REST and GraphQL APIs, and Kuma, a service mesh for distributed service connectivity.
Cons
- Kong’s plugin development is based on Lua, which is not a very popular programming language.
3. Postman Enterprise
Postman is a collaborative API development platform. Although not primarily suited for API management, Postman’s tools integrate well with other platforms to provide a complete API design and lifecycle toolchain.
Postman also supports API testing with Postman collection that organizes API requests and enables testers to run and automate them using the Newman tool.
Pros
- Postman offers standardized tools for API design and development that are fully compliant with OpenAPI specifications.
- Postman has an easy and intuitive UI for functional API testing.
- Postman is well suited for test automation of REST APIs in a semi-autonomous environment.
Cons
- Postman does not support full-fledged API management and governance features.
- The automation framework is not granular enough to support highly complex test scenarios.
4. Tyk Enterprise
Tyk is an API management platform with a focus on API platform development and microservices-based deployment. It also has an API gateway for rolling out APIs with service hosting and flexible deployment configurations for on-the-fly transforms, virtual endpoints, API sharding, and more.
Tyk also provides advanced analytics and reporting for API traffic, usage logs, and error scenarios. Although it does not have built-in API testing features, it supports integration with well-known API testing tools such as SoapUI and Assertable.
Pros:
- Tyk is engineered for building API platforms and is well suited for applications whose backend follows the API-as-a-Product approach.
- Tyk follows a no-code way for building APIs with GraphQL, using the concept of a universal data graph that can pull data from multiple sources.
- Tyk’s support is best in class, and they have an excellent reputation for their proactive technical support touchpoints.
Cons:
- Tyk does not provide an API marketplace.
- Tyk does not feature a built-in API testing suite.
Summary: Apigee vs. RapidAPI Enterprise Hub vs. Kong Konnect vs. Postman vs. Tyk Enterprise
| Apigee | RapidAPI Enterprise Hub | Kong Konnect | Postman Enterprise | Tyk Enterprise | |
| Protocol Support | GraphQL, REST, SOAP | GraphQL, REST, SOAP | GraphQL, REST, gRPC | GraphQL, REST, SOAP | GraphQL, REST |
| Level of Support for API Management & Governance | High | High | High | Low | High |
| Support for API Testing suite | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Level of Reporting and Monitoring | High | High | High | Medium | High |
| Hosting Options | Cloud & On-premises | Cloud & On-premises | Cloud & On-premises | Cloud and Desktop | Cloud & On-premises |
| Level of Supported Integrations | High | High | Medium | Medium | High |
| CI/CD Support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| API Marketplace Support | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
| Supported Alerting Mechanisms | Email / Custom | Email / SMS | Email / Custom | ||
| Pricing Model | Apigee offers a 60-day evaluation followed by enterprise plans | RapidAPI Testing Basic plan is free, and paid plans start from $59/month | Not Available | Postman Enterprise plan starts at $69 | Tyk offers a 14-day license, giving full-access to run a Proof of Concept. |
What is Apigee?
Apigee is an API management platform. Founded initially as Sonoa Systems, it was later rebranded as Apigee and then acquired by Google in 2016. Currently, Apigee is part of Google Cloud's offerings. Apigee is a full-stack API management solution for companies who want to build and scale API programs with full API life cycle capabilities. Apigee supports flexible API deployment options to boost consumption and provides API portal applications to provision, administer, secure and test APIs.
What are the main features of Apigee?
The main features of Apigee include robust API lifecycle and governance policies, advanced API usage reports, traffic analytics, and AI-enabled API monitoring. It also offers flexible deployment options for cloud-native and hybrid configurations.
What are the alternatives to Apigee?
If you are looking for a next-generation API management solution that offers better collaboration and monetization opportunities, you can also consider RapidAPI Enterprise Hub. With this platform, companies can build internal API marketplaces for internal collaboration on APIs. Additionally, you have the option to deploy an external marketplace for customers and partners that want to find and connect to APIs. Enterprise Hub delivers many features that enable the monitoring and management of APIs and their consumption with enhanced visibility and control.
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