We performed a comparison between Apigee and IBM Datapower Gateway based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Apigee comes out on top in this comparison. Apigee is flexible and offers excellent customization options. Datapower is less user friendly and offers limited configuration capabilities.
"The most valuable feature is the API gateway."
"It is scalable."
"There is plenty of support documentation available."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"The following features are most valuable: API Management, Analytics, Quota, and the Developer Portal."
"The usability is one of the best aspects of the product."
"It accelerates development and deployment processes."
"Technical support has been decent."
"The solution is robust."
"I like all of the features in this product and it does what it's supposed to do."
"It is easy to use, easy to install, and it's resilient for high availability."
"The solution is stable."
"I like the tool's security. Also, all functionalities are integrated within on platform."
"The solution is scalable, our customers are mostly South African banks and they handle mostly transactions with this solution."
"Support for PCA and non-PCA services is valuable."
"The MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) is great because it allows you to easily expose services using various protocols – web services, REST (JSON), and others. This flexibility simplifies things."
"Unlike WSA, Apigee does not have a partnership model, something which makes it a bit easier for companies such as ours to go with the former solution."
"I would like to see SOAP services and socket-based connectivity developed."
"Google isn't enthusiastic about supporting older versions. Google is now trying to move all of its clients to X within the cloud."
"Apigee on premise is quite complex and it is always moving faster."
"What my clients don't like is that the on-premises solution is not being treated and maintained as well as the cloud solution."
"Access restrictions can be improved."
"In terms of the functionalities of a typical API gateway, Apigee is actually doing its job, but when it involves integration with backend applications, which some gateways have, I don't believe it has this functionality. You have to do Java or do some other low-level coding before you are able to do the integration. Apigee has a lot of components, which means that management will be a bit difficult. It probably has ten different components, and all of these components leverage open-source utilities, such as NGINX. When those open-source vendors upgrade their utility, Apigee usually lags behind because they need to do a lot of tests and any required development in their own platform. They need to do rigorous testing to make sure that nothing breaks. Because of that, it takes them a while to upgrade whatever components have been upgraded by the open-source vendor that owns the utility. We've been chasing them for a particular upgrade for well over a year and a half, and they have not done that upgrade. It is creating a security risk for us as an enterprise, but that upgrade has not been done, even though the open-source vendor, the owner of the utility, has upgraded it a long time ago."
"I see some lagging in regards to integration capacity"
"The two biggest issues of this solution are the complexity and the maintenance procedures."
"The programming language is only supported in XSLT and Gateway script."
"The product should be more adapted to the DevOps process."
"We are always looking for more features wherein it could be easily integrated with cloud applications. We are looking for either a cloud solution or a cloud integration option."
"One area that could be improved is the integration with Postgres and SQL databases. Currently, IBM DataPower Gateway only integrates with Oracle databases."
"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."
"Traceability could be improved, especially for business operations. The traceability of the transactions could be an improvement point for DataPower to work on. It would be better if they provided JSON support. JSON protocol data has changed format. It started performing internal transformation to JSONx. This might be an additional complexity."
"An area for improvement in IBM DataPower Gateway is its price point because it's a relatively expensive product. Sometimes, when the customer use case is just a very small subset of what's being offered in IBM DataPower Gateway, then the product can be expensive, making my company lose some of the opportunities because of the expensive pricing. A lower price point for IBM DataPower Gateway, even if that results in a less feature-rich version, would be appreciated. In terms of additional features that I'd like to see in the next release of IBM DataPower Gateway, nothing specific comes to mind because IBM constantly improves its standards and provides quarterly updates to the product, so it's quite fine."
Apigee is ranked 2nd in API Management with 82 reviews while IBM DataPower Gateway is ranked 7th in API Management with 27 reviews. Apigee is rated 8.2, while IBM DataPower Gateway is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Apigee writes "Has a robust community and outstanding performance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM DataPower Gateway writes "Security features meets compliance needs and offers MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) that simplifies integration efforts ". Apigee is most compared with Microsoft Azure API Management, IBM API Connect, Amazon API Gateway, WSO2 API Manager and Kong Gateway Enterprise, whereas IBM DataPower Gateway is most compared with IBM API Connect, Microsoft Azure API Management, Mule ESB, IBM Integration Bus and Kong Gateway Enterprise. See our Apigee vs. IBM DataPower Gateway report.
See our list of best API Management vendors.
We monitor all API Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
1) Let us start from the base that Google APIGEE is an API Management platform, so it offers more capabilities than a Gateway, therefore we must compare it against IBM API Connect which is the IBM API Management and whose gateways are Datapower machines.
2) An API Management platform consists mainly of three key components:
• Portal: where the catalog of available APIs is discovered.
• Management: where the life cycle of the APIs is managed.
• Gateway: Where the APIs are exposed.
At Management level: Google APIGEE and IBM API Connect
• Manage the life cycle of the API.
• Manage users roles and permissions.
• Manage security in APIs.
• Manage the consumption of APIs.
• Allows traffic policies to be applied.
• Allows you to configure, create and attach custom policies.
At Portal level: Google APIGEE and IBM API Connect
• Display the API documentation
• Test the exposed APIs.
• Register application developers.
• Customize corporate brand.
• Manage community.
• Self-management.
At Gateway level: Google APIGEE and IBM API Connect
• API deployment and execution
• Execution of security policies
• Integration with data sources
• Apply traffic policies.
• Different types of gateways:
• Google APIGEE
o Edge Enterprise Gateway.
o Microgateway (Limited features)
Does not support all OAuth2.0 flows
No Caching
No threat protecction
Basic monitoring.
• IBM API Connect
o Microgateway (Discontinued).
o Gateways:
Datapower Gateway (Compatible with API Connect version 5)
API Gateway (Focused on the 2018 version of API Connect)
At the Deployment level:
• Distributed:
o Google APIGEE:
Edge Enterprise Gateway:
• The complete instance must be taken to each cloud.
• The deployment of each instance requires a license.
Microgateway:
• They connect to the same instance, however, the limited policies of this component must be kept in mind.
• Can only be used by purchasing the full license of the API Management.
o IBM API Connect:
Datapower Gateway (7.6 or <):
• Compatible with version 5.0.8.x
API Gateway (7.7 or> = 2018.4.x):
• Compatible with version 5.0.8.x and 2018 of IBM API Connect.
Both Gateway:
• It is only necessary to deploy the Gateway in each cloud, not the full instance of the product.
• Manages licenses that charge for API Calls generated in the Gateway and includes the deployment of nodes of its components in any cloud.
Both APIGEE and API Connect offer good capabilities to accelerate the deployment of business capabilities such as services or APIs. The decision of which one is better will depend on the conditions of our business and purpose.