As APIs scale and organizations structure complex systems, it’s almost inevitable that some enterprises are going to end up with more than one API gateway. Sometimes this is intentional — especially when those gateways represent different environments, segmented data services across regions, or different teams and thus different focuses. More often, however, this is just a simple fact of running complex services in the corporate world — different merged companies, legacy systems hopping from platform to platform, and business units with different focuses can result in a complex web of gateways.

This ultimately results in a complex multi-gateway reality that demands policy governance, documentation unification, and gateway management at scale. But not every multi-gateway solution is equal. In many cases, it boils down to what each gateway management solution offers, its feature set, and what particular elements it emphasizes.

Today, we’re going to look at eight excellent multi-gateway API management implementations, ranging from the enterprise to the lean microservice space. We’ll review what each API gateway management solution offers and what gateways it supports.

Axway (Amplify)

Axway’s Amplify platform has positioned itself as a federated API management and governance layer, one designed to sit above multiple gateways and integration technologies.

Supported gateways: V7/Envoy-based gateways, AWS, Apigee Edge, Azure, Kong, MuleSoft, and others.

Characteristics

• Axway is built with enterprise management in mind, so it offers strong policy consistency via centralized governance definitions and a really strong solution for legacy systems.
• This implementation has a strong unified API discovery service, allowing you to build cross-gateway and integration catalogues with ease.
• Axway focuses on APIs as enterprise assets across heterogeneous gateways, meaning that it’s not a perfect fit for multi-gateway API systems that aren’t implemented across legacy systems or integrated enterprise platforms.
• While the enterprise focus is great for the enterprise, especially for on-premise situations, it may not be a fit for non-enterprise developers.

Gravitee

Gravitee is very much focused on API federation, and for that reason, it naturally supports multi-gateway API implementations. Their focus is largely governance within an API ecosystem via a unified API gateway leveraging federation. Although they offer more than just this, this does seem to be a heavy focus of their internal governance approach.

Supported gateways: AWS, Solace, Kong, Boomi, and others.

Characteristics

• Gravitee is fantastic for federated APIs and provides a great support layer for event-driven architectures, in particular, especially when spread across multiple sites or systems.
• This solution offers a great unified developer portal and API catalogue solution, allowing you to unify experiences across your entire multi-API stack.
• Unlike others on this list, Gravitee is halfway in the enterprise space and halfway out, meaning non-enterprise consumers will still have a ton of functional benefits from adoption.
• Gravitee’s licensing system means that its most advanced governance features — and the ones that enterprise or complex environments are most likely to care about — are locked behind enterprise licensing costs.
• Lifecycle workflow management is improving, but it’s still a maturing product.

WSO2 API Manager

WSO2 API Manager is an open source platform designed for multiple environments, gateways, and complex stacks. Its focus is primarily on flexibility and extensibility, allowing teams to standardize their governance while ensuring that they can support diverse deployments and gateway models.

Supported gateways: WSO2-native options (Universal Gateway and Immutable Gateway) and Kubernetes Gateway.

Characteristics

• Highly flexible solution focused on strong policy consistency, reusable and extensible policies, and unified discovery and documentation systems.
• Being open-source in its approach and structure means that vendor lock-in is a reduced risk.
• WSO2 is relatively mature, and thus has a mature product offering compared to newer vendors.
• Because of how WSO2 came together and is currently managed, it has a less polished UI and UX than its commercial peers.
• Some might find the governance model underpinning WSO2 to be complex without strong standards or planning.

DigitalAPI

DigitalAPI is designed as a system of record for multi-gateway implementations, offering a singular platform for discovery, governance, and observability. It’s designed to be gateway agnostic, and this comes with benefits and some possible drawbacks.

Supported gateways: KrakenD, APISIX, Zuplo, SAP API Management, and others.

Characteristics

• DigitalAPI is somewhat of a discovery and coordination system by default. It’s good at normalizing governance and standards across gateways and deployments.
• This also means that it’s great for establishing clear ownership and lifecycle management responsibilities.
• Being gateway-agnostic by default means that it’s a jack-of-all-trades.
• This offering is the only one on this list without a solid gateway of its own, and being gateway agnostic in this way could be a negative depending on your use case.
• DigitalAPI requires significant integration across gateways, making it feel like a gateway of gateways rather than a layer of control abstraction.
• This solution does not have native runtime policy enforcement, and although you can implement a solution that attempts to implement this using some complicated API calls, this ultimately adds additional complexity.

Tyk

Tyk is all about gateways — and its core offering is centered around managing multiple gateway instances and environments in complex environments. Notably, Tyk has prioritized flexibility and speed, resulting in a solution that is very popular with lean development and novel startup environments.

Supported styles: REST, GraphQL, TCP-based services, and gRPC.

Characteristics

• This offering is very developer-friendly and is centered around open-core processes.
• It has excellent performance and is super lightweight in runtime, making it ideal for IoT or lean microservice systems.
• It manages excellently across distributed gateways and complex deployments.
• Lifecycle governance is less prescriptive than other platforms.
• Discovery and catalog features are functional but basic, as they principally rely on integrating with external tools to offer more complex features.
• Multi-gateway governance depth depends on platform maturity.

IBM API Connect

IBM API Connect is an API management suite built for legacy-heavy enterprise use cases where clients are integrating diverse services across middleware, Kubernetes, and other blended systems. This makes it uniquely well-suited for a particular kind of organization, especially one that is moving from monolith to microservice and trying to make sense of this inherent complexity.

Supported gateway: DataPower Gateway Family.

Characteristics

• API Connect is specifically concerned with policy enforcement and standardization, and as such, it does this very well.
• This solution is a very good fit for regulated compliance-heavy industries, as it’s very robust in its cataloging and policy alignment.
• API Connect has a fully-featured formal lifecycle governance system allowing for better control and alignment across approvals, reviews, sunsetting, and retirement.
• While this is a fully-featured offering, it comes with a relatively steep learning curve and a complex operational model.
• This is one of the more heavyweight implementations, and the UI and developer experience can feel a bit dated compared to other solutions.

Red Hat 3scale API Management

3scale is specifically a central governance layer that leverages and enforces policies across multiple gateways. In this way, it’s more of a governance management solution rather than a single unified multi-gateway management solution — that being said, it supports some specific use cases, which makes it worth consideration, notably OpenShift and Envoy-specific deployments.

Supported gateways: Envoy and NGINX-based proxies, integrated support using APIcast.

Characteristics

• 3scale supports heterogeneous gateways like Envoy and NGINX, which is not as common in other solutions.
• It offers strong centralized policy definition and enforcement, as well as the creation of unified developer portals and API catalogues.
• 3scale aligns really well with GitOps and OpenShift-based workflows, which positions it really well for lean developers.
• 3scale assumes a relatively mature platform, meaning you need to have done a lot of legwork (such as architectural design, user modeling, and persona to role mapping) before leveraging the solution at scale.
• Since it’s a Red Hat project, it’s entirely dependent on the Red Hat ecosystem development priorities, which may not always align with this particular niche use case.
• 3scale has less opinionated lifecycle management and governance out of the box, so you’ll need to do a lot of work to get granular and specific. This work is going to be determined largely by figuring out and planning your own policies, which does add a good deal of work to the initial investment.

Layer7 from Broadcom

Layer7 is an interesting solution in that it is a long-standing API management platform that has started to evolve into more novel use cases. This means that the tool is halfway between the large enterprise solution it currently is and the future potential bridge to more novel multi-gateway implementations, especially in multi-environment orchestration-heavy scenarios.

Supported gateways: Layer7 Gateways via AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or via Docker.

Characteristics

• Being an enterprise-centered solution, Layer7 offers excellent support for policy templating and reuse across gateways.
• It also excels in centralized API discovery.
• One of the best side benefits of this particular approach is native high-quality developer portals that can help make multi-gateway management much easier and more effective.
• This platform reflects a more traditional multi-gateway management model, which can feel less streamlined than newer SaaS-first offerings.
• While it supports cloud deployments, its architecture is less cloud-native than platforms designed primarily for cloud-first environments.

Choosing Your Multi-Gateway Management Solution

Ultimately, your platform choice is going to be dictated by the environment that your multi-gateway reality exists in. Whether your services are contained within legacy systems or are part of an intentional effort to segment services matters, and as such, will be a huge consideration as you move towards a management offering.