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.
"API/proxy lifecycle workflow for API providers is quite good and one of Apigee's strongest features."
"It is easy to set up. It is on Google Platform, and there are multiple deployment models they support, which is great."
"Apigee gives you plenty of opportunities to set up your workspace depending on how you want to manage your APIs."
"It has all the features necessary to work in anything from a basic scenario to advanced applications."
"Apigee is a very lightweight solution."
"The central monitoring feature is the most valuable. It also provides security for the APIs and high availability for our use cases. Apigee is the best product in the industry in comparison to other API management solutions. It helps in fast development, which is a top point. It also supports a lot of industry standards and has excellent documentation."
"I like implementing different policies, for example, rate-limiting policy."
"It is scalable."
"I like all of the features in this product and it does what it's supposed to do."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable features for our business include the ability to monitor and log data transactions and handle multiple request at an enterprise level."
"The most valuable feature is the security appliance, it's very secure."
"The scalability of the solution is good."
"You don't have to have a separate DMC proxy because DataPower Gateway is an appliance and will take care of a lot of security features. These include data validations, encryption, as well as XML or any type of scripting or security threats that are present."
"Since it is a gateway, it provides a lot of security features."
"The performance is good. It's been very stable."
"I am still struggling to understand how we can use Apigee as a hybrid system. The pricing of this solution could also be improved as there are multiple new products coming onto the market at competitive price points."
"The developer portal's adoption of the OpenAPI standard needs to be improved. In the latest version of the developer portal, they have adopted the OpenAPI standard. This feature, however, can be improved by supporting more characteristics of the OpenAPI standard."
"Integration should be improved."
"The Apigee cloud admin UI could be more user-friendly by adding a few more features."
"Proxy versioning seems a bit confusing/buried in the publishing experience, especially for the URI-based versioning approach."
"It needs predictive analysis of consumption."
"I would like to see the support improved. I think the time frame should be shorter for responses when it comes to technical support. This is not the ideal situation you want to be in when you need support."
"Google isn't enthusiastic about supporting older versions. Google is now trying to move all of its clients to X within the cloud."
"For the workloads that are not too high, appliance is a little bit expensive."
"The two biggest issues of this solution are the complexity and the maintenance procedures."
"In the next release, I would like to see the product price reduced. It should be cheaper."
"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."
"IBM DataPower Gateway is quite big for smaller organizations, looking at different types of clients who are virtually assisted in this, I would say it's not really a good product for smaller firms."
"The programming language is only supported in XSLT and Gateway script."
"The components that they include in the product that are, in fact, a WTX, really need to be removed from the product because they tend to fail."
"The solution requires a lot of training manuals in order to get to know it better and to be able to use it effectively."
Apigee is ranked 2nd in API Management with 82 reviews while IBM DataPower Gateway is ranked 8th in API Management with 26 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 "Easy to use, plenty of functionality, but expensive". 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 Amazon API Gateway. 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.