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.
"They capture the details of all the incoming and outgoing traffic of your APIs. Based on 300+ default dimensions you can generate beautiful and insightful reports on usage and consumption of APIs."
"Apigee is an easy-to-use solution."
"The most valuable features are low-code play, quick packaging, and production."
"The developer portal is very useful to customers."
"Its flexibility allows seamless management of different products, showcasing scalability to handle extensive solutions."
"The analytics feature is quite good."
"It's easy to use and the security features are valuable."
"A special feature is configuring target servers, proxy config, and Cert related security, which regularizes incoming traffic from cloud users or external applications to internal applications in a secured manner."
"It's high-speed and it can be remotely administered via an API."
"Support for PCA and non-PCA services is valuable."
"I like all of the features in this product and it does what it's supposed to do."
"The most valuable feature is the security appliance, it's very secure."
"The solution is robust."
"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."
"The product is stable...The product is scalable."
"The performance is good. It's been very stable."
"Apigee is not a solution compatible with public clouds, making it one of its shortcomings where improvements are required."
"We are experiencing some performance issues."
"Apigee is more of an entry level solution that does basic things pretty well, but if you want to go more customizable, you want to really look for another solution."
"Apigee could do more to make users aware of what is available in the add-ons."
"It is an expensive solution."
"We need better performance monitoring."
"Development IDE, especially for Architect Review."
"I'd like this solution to improve on releasing new features; I'd like it to be more frequent."
"In the next release, I would like to see the product price reduced. It should be cheaper."
"The two biggest issues of this solution are the complexity and the maintenance procedures."
"The user interface or the application development perspective and customization of the tool could be a little better."
"I would like the tool to improve its training."
"For the workloads that are not too high, appliance is a little bit expensive."
"It is a costly product."
"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."
"Making it more user-friendly would be an improvement."
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.