We performed a comparison between IBM API Connect and Layer7 API Management based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two API Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."API Connect's most valuable feature is its ability to act as a gateway. It's very easy to configure security and everything else in it. You don't have to kill yourself implementing custom configurations."
"It is a complete all-in-one solution."
"The interface is very nice. It makes the solution easy to use and navigate."
"It allows enterprises to expose some of their tech to outside stakeholders."
"WSRR is a powerful component for getting the endpoints."
"We are able to share those APIs instantly within the organization; even if we want to share it outside publicly, then we can have those capabilities."
"Policy configurations are pretty easy."
"The product gathers data to measure API performance."
"We are able to go to market very quickly and deploy our functionalities very quickly."
"Every API that we get from external or from internal goes through this layer first, and it should not be a bottleneck. That was the problem we had before. Now it's no longer a bottleneck. It's more like a throughput, this process is less than 10 milliseconds for any particular API."
"The solution fills our two most important concerns in seeking an API solution by providing a reliable gateway and security options."
"We definitely get good responses from the technical team and they are quite responsive."
"Key features include: lightweight mediation, transformation from JSON to XML and XML to JSON, API portal and API key management, the Developer Portal, and Circuit Breaker is a cool feature, too."
"It has its own language, which make it possible to design and implement the complete flow using existing services and databases, and to create and aggregate fine-and coarse-grained APIs."
"A big win for CA was the expertise of the local country support plus having support staff on site in a matter of hours, if required."
"The level of technical support is good."
"Due to bugs in integration, we have to look for workaround on fixing and using DataPower as gateway."
"The integration of an API gateway that implements the sidecar pattern, which can be deployed in cloud applications, and expose the microservices directly in each pod, this can be more decentralized components."
"Like any typical IBM infrastructure setup, you need to learn to set it up yourself. It's not one of those simple zip files or an archive unzip and you're up and running in some few minutes. Knowledge to set it up is key."
"Different versions of the same thing can mean unnecessary duplication."
"The platform’s integration with the payment gateway needs enhancement. The setup process and support services could be improved."
"It would be helpful to have access monitoring."
"The design time setup has a lot of customizable fields, but we need certain standard fields to be added, such as what all of the consuming systems are. This needs to be very clearly articulated during the design time."
"It is expensive within this class of products."
"The Portal lacks maturity. Since the move from Portal 3.x to 4.x, a lot of features were removed. It is slowly coming back. I can see a lot of changes are done in the "background" to decouple components and make it more flexible. Those changes are just not getting to the UI side quick enough."
"We have experienced technical difficulties with the product in the past."
"I feel there is a lot to improve in terms of providing plug-and-play functionalities, as at the moment it requires a lot of coding in their specific language for implementing a medium-complexity use case."
"They need a multifactor authentication solution for the API layer and the other layers, as well."
"There is still room for improvement for the CA API Developer Portal. It is still not on par with what the competencies are."
"As well as the SOA Gateway - that is, the API Gateway; we call it the SOA Gateway - we also are now deploying the developer portal component of the SOA Gateway. That has limitations."
"feel like Apigee's API product is more interactive. You can drag and drop with those, but it's a little more difficult in Layer7. It's less user-friendly compared to that Apigee product."
"The setup was not as straightforward as it should have been. Support should be improved."
IBM API Connect is ranked 5th in API Management with 73 reviews while Layer7 API Management is ranked 10th in API Management with 109 reviews. IBM API Connect is rated 8.0, while Layer7 API Management is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM API Connect writes "Good speed and performance, but it's based on a bit dated architecture". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Layer7 API Management writes "Has great drag-and-drop features and it requires minimal coding ". IBM API Connect is most compared with Apigee, IBM DataPower Gateway, Microsoft Azure API Management, MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager and IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, whereas Layer7 API Management is most compared with Apigee, Kong Gateway Enterprise, Amazon API Gateway, MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager and IBM DataPower Gateway. See our IBM API Connect vs. Layer7 API Management report.
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