Apigee is a leading API management platform with its own set of benefits. This means it can be an excellent starting point for companies looking to integrate their application into various services or want more control over how they handle customers’ data.
However, your company might find some features lacking depending on the type of business model you’re trying to implement.
One of the major reasons companies search for Apigee alternatives is that it doesn’t offer any application lifecycle management capabilities.
This means, all the tasks related to building and managing applications have to be carried out manually by engineers and can take a significant amount of time.
This isn’t meant as a knock against Apigee since it’s still one of the best products out there; however, if it doesn’t fit what your company needs, then choosing from this list will provide all kinds of options when considering different platforms.
This article reviews eight of the best Apigee alternatives and how they compare to the original API management solution.
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Best Apigee Alternatives
1. Appian
Appian is an alternative application development platform that offers a set of APIs and infrastructure to build custom applications for your company.
Appian provides the ability to connect data from different sources through its open API framework, Appian connectors, or other third-party apps without having any technical knowledge required.
The API Layer enables you to create new services as well as extend existing ones in real-time using natural language (cognitive) rules with no need for programming skills.
It also has drag-and-drop tools that let you visually design forms and processes for business automation purposes including Business Process Modeling Notation diagrams.
Appian allows creating highly customizable social collaboration features such as document management, workflows, calendars, etc., along with monitoring dashboards for key performance indicators, business rules management, and user permissions.
In addition to that, it provides the ability to integrate with other services such as Box for file storage purposes.
Appian is a complete online solution providing multi-channel communication tools along with social collaboration features including document sharing capabilities.
What sets Appian apart from Apigee is that it is truly enterprise-grade. It is used by companies like Salesforce, Oracle, and Xero to address complex business challenges for their customers.
Furthermore, the company offers one of the richest APIs in the market today which makes building apps with Appian a breeze – whether you are building mobile or web applications on top of them.
The other aspect where Apigee lacks compared to Appian is its lack of scalability options as well as limited features around security policies when it comes to user access control rights (both internal and external).
Appian also allows you implementing custom workflows in order to automate your processes across people or apps without any coding skills necessary.
It uses natural language (cognitive) rules, drag-and-drop elements, or visual design tools on top of prebuilt connectors. This makes Appian an ideal choice if you are looking for an enterprise Apigee alternative.
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2. Akamai
Another obvious Apigee alternative is Akamai. It is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that provides edge servers throughout different points of presence (POPs).
A CDN acts as a proxy for your content so that when requests come into their system they send them out from POP closest to where the request originated.
This means Akamai customers have fewer latency issues since clients aren’t going further away than necessary before returning with cached data or even pulling new information down because of how much content is cached on their servers closer to the end-user.
The reason why you would choose Akamai over Apigee or other API management options for your CDN needs is because of how much control it gives those who are consuming data and also what types of tools for building applications that they provide.
It has a good amount of integrations with other commonly used services like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc., which makes using them as part of an overall infrastructure easier than trying to piecemeal different things together from separate providers.
The company itself also offers professional support plans so if something isn’t working correctly there’s someone available at any hour that can help get it up and running again quickly.
If these weren’t enough reasons for you to consider this Apigee alternative then understanding the pricing model may be what ultimately does it for you.
3. Akana
Akana is a scalable API platform that helps companies create and manage APIs to integrate apps, data, devices, and platforms securely for the digital experience.
The company works with enterprises like AOL, Pandora Radio, and Cablevision Systems Corporation on their digital transformation journey using Akana’s software-based product suite.
The company provides advanced analytics tools across its products in order to ensure the quality of service by ensuring minimal outages or downtime while also making sure SLAs are met within each customer’s environment.
In addition to this, it offers different security options such as authentication and authorization so customers can choose what method they want to use depending upon their needs.
Akana provides innovative solutions to complex technical problems that enterprises face on their digital transformation journey.
This helps them create deeper customer engagement as well as drive new business opportunities across channels like web and mobile devices by building high performance connected products.
This is achieved by using agile development methodologies at scale without compromising security or quality of service.
What makes Akana a suitable Apigee alternative is that besides providing their customers with a rich suite of APIs and SDKs, they also offer capabilities like API management, mobile backend integration platform, and application lifecycle management.
Akana offers complete API Lifecycle Management from design through implementation and testing as well as monitoring and maintaining your APIs on a daily basis.
This not only saves engineering resources, but it also reduces release cycle times significantly making them more agile than their competitors like Apigee who are still stuck in traditional development methods.
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4. Red Hat Fuse Gateway
Red Hat Fuse Gateway has a very strong focus on Java and Spring MVC, which allows it to provide the data you need quickly.
It also offers support for JMS messaging providers including RabbitMQ as well as an API call recorder that can be used in order to help with testing your APIs before rolling them out into production.
You will have access to all of this without needing any additional software since everything runs directly from the cloud or virtual machine (VM). However, if you do want something installed locally then there are options available.
With the Red Hat Fuse, you will be able to build microservices and APIs, however, it is not all rosy after that.
There is no tooling around metrics nor does it have a way of easily hosting your API documentation in order to ensure users can find what they need quickly when trying out your services for the first time or even returning after an extended period away from using them.
It also requires additional components like NGINX and Consul which are needed only because their operation has been separated into separate containers rather than being handled by one component (like Apigee Edge).
This means there is more work involved before everything gets set up so it isn’t quite as easy as simply signing up and deploying an instance.
If you’re hosting a single API then the setup will likely take around thirty minutes to get all components working together, but if there are multiple APIs it can quickly add on some extra time to that number due to having more steps involved in getting things working smoothly.
Despite these, Red Hat still makes for a suitable Apigee alternative.
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5. APIcast
APIcast is an Apigee alternative for APIs. It is a gateway API proxy that can be easily integrated with your existing backend services to expose them via the API Gateway pattern, as well as provide data transformation and content caching capabilities.
APIcast provides several advanced features: OAuth support (for both authentication/authorization), custom domains, multiple versions of each service you need to publish, request routing based on path or header values, etc.
It is an API proxy that can be used as a drop-in replacement of the Apigee Edge in several use cases. As such, it provides both features and performance benefits: improved request processing time (up to three times faster than with the standard version), reduced latency due to cached responses, simplified management via one single tool for all API traffic.
There are numerous additional functionalities available only when you choose their premium solution:
- Monitoring capabilities and fine-tuning options like IP filtering or caching TTL configuration
- Authentication source flexibility through the ability to configure multiple providers at once (Azure AD/Active Directory Federation Services, Google Apps SSO)
- Advanced logging and analytics tools based on Elasticsearch functionality
- Support for complex rate-limiting scenarios where it is required to limit the number of requests from a single IP address or user
- Support for API keys and access tokens
The list goes on with the advanced quality of service capabilities that allow defining clear priorities among various traffic types, including webhooks.
However, the most common advantage APIcast has over Apigee is its much lower pricing. APIcast is cheaper than Apigee.
There are a number of reasons why APIcast is more affordable for customers who need to create APIs and microservices with authentication involved.
One reason is that the pricing varies depending on the scale, complexity, and volume of requests being fulfilled by using APIcast – this aligns perfectly with how developers often work (i.e., starting small then adding functionality as required).
This means you can start off using APIcast without any up-front investment if it’s not used much or makes relatively few requests to other services.
Also unlike Apigee, there are no hidden fees; what you see in the free tier when signing up for a trial account is exactly what your bill will look like at the end.
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6. Oracle API Management
Oracle API Management is a cloud-based platform that provides companies with the ability to create, monitor, and manage APIs.
Oracle offers an extensive suite of products that can help improve existing business processes or even enable new digital transformation opportunities when used in conjunction with each other.
The Oracle API Management solution is used by many organizations as an alternative to Apigee. It can provide all of the same functionality, including:
- API Gateway with security and analytics capabilities for APIs in a secure multitenant container infrastructure
- Developer portal (self-service) that allows developers to interact directly with your services; this also provides support for mobile app development and integration with existing developer communities such as GitHub or Stack Overflow
- Virtualized resources are required by application tiers via on-demand provisioning of computing power, storage capacity, and network bandwidth. This helps reduce costs associated when deploying additional hardware resources
Oracle API Management offers many other benefits beyond those provided through Apigee’s because it includes so much more than just an API gateway.
Oracle Cloud offers some great advantages over traditional hardware-based solutions that make moving in easier than ever before.
Additionally, many companies choose Oracle over Apigee because they already use their database software and want to simplify integrations between APIs by consolidating them under one roof.
With the Oracle API Management platform, you can not only integrate APIs but applications as well. This provides a much more complete picture of what is happening with your connected systems and data.
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7. 3Scale API Gateway
3Scale API Gateway is an Apigee alternative for API management and is built on a scalable, enterprise-grade cloud platform.
It helps to increase the time to market for APIs by providing self-managed or fully managed services with an open architecture that can support any standard protocol such as OAuth.
Trusted by many large companies, such as Microsoft and Accenture, the solution is a good choice for organizations looking to quickly deploy APIs.
The best part about this API management platform is that it supports all existing security standards and protocols without any code changes.
One area where 3Scale is preferred over Apigee is its ability to support custom APIs.
Thanks to its open and extensible architecture, it can be easily integrated with other systems such as LDAP or any third-party tool.
Another great thing about this API management platform is that it provides users the freedom of choice when it comes to pricing plans and deployment models. There are different options for customers looking at either self-managed or fully managed services.
Unlike Apigee, 3Scale API Gateway does not provide any native support for DevOps collaboration. It may not be the right choice if you are looking at a solution that can help your business teams collaborate and automate processes in an agile way.’
However, 3Scalemakes up for this with a number of other features like the ability to create custom APIs, advanced API analytics, and a flexible pricing plan.
Other major scores for 3Scale API Gateway include an easy-to-use interface with a rich set of APIs and SDKs for various programming languages.
It is also built using open standards like OpenAPI (formerly known as Swagger) making it compatible across different platforms.
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8. Mashery’s API Platform
Mashery’s API Platform is an Apigee alternative for those who want an API platform to manage APIs, but don’t need the additional features that come with Apigee’s Marketing and Commerce tools.
Mashery also offers a free plan which is often suitable for small organizations.
A major reason to choose Mashery’s API Platform over Apigee is that the pricing model is much more straightforward – you pay per developer rather than based on API calls or bandwidth.
That means your cost goes up only when new developers are added to your team, not when they start building apps using any of their existing APIs.
Mashery has three plans: Free, Professional, and Enterprise. The first two are very similar in functionality—they differ mainly by price point; however, the Enterprise plan adds some extra capabilities like Salesforce integration and support from a dedicated account manager.
Mashery has an API console, SDK generation tools for most major languages and frameworks, a test console to try APIs before they go live, documentation hosting with Swagger support (and even more if you’re on the Enterprise plan).
It also offers analytics about your API usage and traffic patterns, and security testing of your APIs against known vulnerabilities in open source libraries used by your codebase.
They also provide some UI components so that developers can embed simple widgets like maps into their web or mobile applications without having to write any backend logic themselves.
Finally, Mashery provides all sorts of infrastructure services such as load balancing and caching layers between client apps and servers running those back-end API calls (either behind the firewall at corporate data centers or in third-party public clouds.
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Conclusion
There are many Apigee alternatives available today offering similar functionality but at different levels of pricing and/or complexity.
It is important to know exactly what you want and need in order for your company’s productivity or business process improvement.
With that being said, our top choice is Appian. It offers a great deal of flexibility along with many features helping individuals and teams alike within one single environment. It also has a reasonable price without any hidden costs involved like some other alternatives on the market today.
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