We performed a comparison between IBM API Connect and WSO2 API Manager 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."It acts as a central gateway for both external APIs and underlying systems. It's basically a central middleware for hosting APIs to the internet and consuming APIs from internal systems. It provides central governance for any APIs going outside the network, ensuring security and a common contract for API definitions."
"Policy configurations are pretty easy."
"This solution is ready to scale and already supports our agile CICD."
"The capabilities are very good."
"It has all of the tools that are needed for the specific mission."
"The most valuable feature is the security we get from this solution. I know of a bank that uses it to ensure that everything is secure. The second feature I like is the retail environment, where we actually want to be able to provide as many suppliers and consumers with APIs as possible. If you are well-trained in the writing of RESTful API's, you can actually publish an API in a matter of minutes, test it, and publish it."
"The most valuable feature for me is the ability to distribute work among our API developers, so we don't have to do all the work as IBM API Connect administrators and IBM DataPower administrators."
"The most valuable feature of IBM API Connect is the security of the protocol."
"Helped us to quickly publish our Microservice APIs and enforcing different policies against them, it comes up with features like Security, Throttling policy and it provides complete access to customize API's which actually saves development effort and time."
"Yes WSO2 API Manager is scalable"
"I think the best part about WSO2 API Manager is that it's highly customizable because it's open-source. The partnership model is quite lucrative for us, it helps us to go and pitch to our customers. You can build a lot of business models yourself that you want to use. You are able to do a lot of the solutions."
"The main feature — the publication of the API, the management section — is great in general."
"The solution is open source and easy to configure."
"Based on the information I have, the solution's most valuable feature is its capability of implementing custom solutions."
"One of the great things about WSO2 API Manager is that it is so easy to adopt. And because it's an open source solution, we're able to extend the implementation any time to suit our company needs better."
"As far as I am aware this solution is the first API Publisher that allows you to create and publish API and to manage the API lifecycle."
"Different versions of the same thing can mean unnecessary duplication."
"I would like to see support for non-Java based services. We struggle a bit to be able to deploy and connect our .NET services because of things like data types. We had to map a couple of things. For one solution provider, we had to move them to .NET Core before we could use it properly. I would like to see more agnostic tool service platforms rather than moving it more towards Java or open source."
"In terms of what needs improvement, some of the product documentation could be better."
"The integration of cloud-based services is where we're looking for improvement in this platform."
"It should be cheaper."
"While Azure API Management offers configurable scalability, IBM API Connect relies on Kubernetes clusters. This might seem manual and require defining cluster instances upfront, but it's completely customizable and not on-the-fly scaling. It's completely custom-driven, not on-the-fly scaling, which some may consider cumbersome."
"We ran it on top of the Kubernetes cluster, so it wasn't a standalone service. In the worst-case scenario, API Connect couldn't stay online if all the containers went down. We had to restart all the services. We shut down all the containers automatically one by one."
"It's based on a little bit dated architecture. A lot of evolution has happened after that. It's an evolving field. Kong is a Kubernetes-based platform. Kong runs on Kubernetes, but all the other ones are in microservices. So, there's a lot of improvement that can be done."
"I would like it to be a more stable solution. Maybe in the last version that is approved. For me it would be good if they had a community established version."
"Lacks some new features and updated functionalities."
"I can say that user management is not really flexible. So, if I want to create 1,000 store users, I can't do it as a publisher. You have to register as a store user using the store URL."
"I would like it to be a more convenient development platform with the ability to write orchestrations and so on. Our problem with this product is that in my country, we are the only enterprise that has been using this product. We're missing a lot of knowledge from colleagues to consult with, and we also aren't able to recruit people with relevant skills. It is a big problem. The small team that is maintaining this product is the only team that can actually relate to any technical issue. The support that we're getting from the company is not great. There is also a cultural gap there because they're from Sri Lanka, and it is not easy. They're putting in a lot of effort, but they are not meeting our expectations."
"We had some problems with the reverse proxy not being able to invoke fully qualified domain names, so we have to build some custom scripts to solve this issue."
"The technical support must be improved."
"WSO2 API Manager can be improved a lot relating to usability"
"They don't have different URLs for administrators."
IBM API Connect is ranked 5th in API Management with 73 reviews while WSO2 API Manager is ranked 7th in API Management with 33 reviews. IBM API Connect is rated 8.0, while WSO2 API Manager is rated 8.0. 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 WSO2 API Manager writes "Reliable with good capabilities and good support". IBM API Connect is most compared with Apigee, IBM DataPower Gateway, Microsoft Azure API Management, MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager and TIBCO Cloud API Management, whereas WSO2 API Manager is most compared with Apigee, Kong Gateway Enterprise, Amazon API Gateway, Microsoft Azure API Management and Tyk. See our IBM API Connect vs. WSO2 API Manager report.
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