Best API Management Tools in 2024

API management is a broad topic, and there are nearly as many providers as APIs needing management solutions. Below, we’ll look at ten of the best options currently in the market. This is not an exhaustive list, but they represent some of the best options for the widest range of users.

1. Apigee

Apigee is a cloud-native API management solution offered by Google as part of its Google Cloud platform. In addition to its cloud-first solutions for API Gateways, Analytics, Developer Portals, and Security Tooling, it offers a wide range of features for cataloging APIs, leveraging AI and LLM through the Gemini Code Assist implementation, and even promises to host and manage complex hybrid and multi-cloud deployments at scale.

Pros

Apigee is fully featured with a toolset that supports an incredibly diverse amount of tasks and environments.
This solution has specifically focused solutions for cloud-native implementations, which can help accelerate cloud development in APIs, unlocking significant benefits.

Cons

Apigee is currently a Google product, and while this comes with the funding and backing of Google, it also comes with the reality that Google products are known to disappear or be deprecated rapidly with little warning. For this reason, some developers may shy away from leveraging this tool simply due to its affiliation with Google.
Apigee prices itself using the Google Cloud pricing model, which can be a bit more complicated than some developers wish. While a pay-as-you-go model can minimize price, it can also lead to confusing cost estimates at scale.

2. AWS API Gateway

AWS API Gateway is a fully managed AWS API solution. It’s tightly integrated with AWS and supports both RESTful and WebSocket APIs. AWS API Gateway offers a ton of tools for creating, securing, maintaining, publishing, monitoring, and controlling APIs and their traffic flow.

Pros

This is a fully managed API service, which can be huge for some teams, especially startups that have rapidly grown to serve a larger user base. Its close integration with the AWS ecosystem makes for a strong value proposition.
AWS is core to Amazon’s business sector, so the AWS API Gateway is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Cons

This tool is principally focused on AWS users, so non-AWS developers might find it confusing or unnecessarily complex to integrate.
High usage can add up quickly, leading to smaller teams leveraging the solution for ease of management running into excessively high costs early on.

3. Microsoft Azure API Management

Microsoft Azure API Management is a hybrid cloud and on-premises API management solution offering various tools, from compliance and security to developer portals and gateways. It integrates with the Azure ecosystem quite tightly, offering a one-stop shop for any Azure API to integrate with the holistic management toolset.

Pros

This is tightly coupled with the Azure ecosystem. If you’re running an API using Azure resources, you would be hard-pressed to find a better alternative.
Microsoft’s toolset with Azure API Management is decently feature-rich but very focused on security and access control, making it a solid offering for secure APIs.

Cons

As with Google and Amazon, this tool works best if you’re on Azure. If you’re not, this can be a considerable blocker in terms of efficacy and usability.
For non-Azure users, this solution can come with a steep learning curve.

4. Postman

Postman is an API platform designed to manage and simplify work and output at every stage of the API lifecycle. Its comprehensive toolset offers solutions for mocking, testing, deployment, documentation, and discovery, and its strong governance and workspace management tools create a controlled and consistent collaborative environment.

Pros

Postman is very user-friendly and gets users up to speed quite quickly, especially compared to other solutions, which might bring a steeper learning curve.
The collaborative features of Postman are a standout offering, allowing for seamless collaboration that is hemmed in by policies and governance in a way that is seldom as seamless in other solutions.

Cons

Postman is very good at what it does, but it is not as fully featured as other offerings, which can limit its usability in more complex or advanced API environments.
The Postman suite can be somewhat memory-heavy, so if it is run locally, it can certainly eat into resources.

5. Swagger

Swagger is a management tool that supports API specifications, including AsyncAPI, OpenAPI, and JSON Schema. It integrates these specifications through a toolset of open-source solutions. SwaggerHub is a management layer built on top of the core Swagger offering to support collaboration, development, discoverability, and integration at scale.

Pros

Swagger is very easy to get started with and has a large user base that has helped it develop and grow over time.
Swagger is well-documented and offers documentation generation as one of its core features, leading to a high level of context and understanding of itself and the tools that use it.

Cons

Swagger can be costly for enterprise implementations, negating some of its benefits against similarly costly but more mature developments like Azure or AWS management tools.
For APIs without structured documentation or specifications, it can be difficult to get started with Swagger, making it difficult to buy into its API management toolsets.

6. IBM API Connect

IBM API Connect is a full-lifecycle API management solution. It is built to cover everything from creation through monetization and sunsetting to delivering tools, including gateways, managers, testing systems, developer portals, and more. It integrates tightly with the IBM Cloud offering and offers IBM’s substantial backing and expertise.

Pros

This solution offers a high amount of expertise and quality, as expected from IBM, resulting in a product backed by a strong understanding of APIs and tech.
Its close integration with IBM Cloud makes it a strong way to enter the cloud space with a feature-complete toolset.

Cons

IBM’s solution can be costly. The quality certainly has a price tag, and smaller teams may be unable to stomach this cost at scale.
IBM also introduces a learning curve. While the tools are powerful, they are still very “traditional” in their form and function, which can drag some teams down.

7. Kong Gateway

Kong Gateway is an API platform offering a modular feature-rich toolset. This is a huge benefit for many teams. It’s often the case that a fully featured solution is just too heavy and costly for users to adopt for just a single tool that is needed. Kong makes it easy to use only what you want to use, improving the integration experience and driving down cost and complexity.

Pros

Highly modular tools allow developers to use only what they need, preventing vendor lock-in and frustration.
Kong is high-performance and highly scalable, utilizing a flexible plugin system and contributions from the open-source community to make it better than the sum of its parts.

Cons

Kong does require some technical know-how to set up. Other solutions offer no-code or low-code integration methods, and while Kong has similar features for some tools, it can be heavy to integrate.

8. WSO2 API Manager

The WSO2 API Manager is another popular complete lifecycle API management solution. Intended to cover every stage of the API lifecycle for cloud, hybrid, and on-premises APIs, its open-source nature has attracted much admiration and attention. It is widely used throughout the industry due to its interoperability with open standards like GraphQL and REST, and its highly developed integration offerings mean you can implement it basically anywhere.

Pros

WSO2 API Manager is easy to get started with, and its open-source nature means providers and developers can examine the source code to ensure their secure APIs can tolerate the integration.
Configuration is quite simple, allowing for high customization and control at scale.

Cons

WSO2 API Manager is easy to use, but it requires a lot of intentional use, meaning that even simple functions and processes require a certain intentionality and attention. There’s very little in the way of automation on offer here in the way that Swagger or others may deploy it.
You need to have a certain level of technical ability to utilize this solution, and when intentional use is required, this can lead to some teams feeling siloed or cut out of the pattern.

9. Gravitee.io

Gravitee.io positions itself as a sort of shim for other API tools. In essence, Gravitee promises that you can use any gateway or event broker with their system, tying in additional tools and processes with existing solutions and systems to make something better than the sum of its parts. In addition to the unifying system, it offers authentication, authorization, and management solutions, offering a good amount of freedom and support.

Pros

Gravitee offers a ton of flexibility and support, a balance that is often hard to get exactly right. This lets you develop exactly how you want to and use tools without vendor lock-in.
The open source and user community is strong for this product, so there’s a lot of consistent support for error prevention and rapid development.

Cons

Since it assumes you already have some preferred tools, this solution only offers some basic tooling. While this is perfect for APIs in this situation, those needing more complex systems and tools may find this artificially limiting.
Because of the system’s complex nature, substantial technological knowledge is needed to connect it all. Even in the best-case scenario, this does introduce additional points of failure, which can be a concern.

10. MuleSoft Anypoint Platform

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is a full-service API management platform focused on serving a universal base of APIs. Its advertising notes that you can bring “Anypoint Platform benefits to every API — regardless of origin, architecture or environment.” By leveraging a wide range of integration layers and solutions, Anypoint is attempting to provide a truly universal platform—and this is as promising as it is difficult to get right.

Pros

MuleSoft’s solution offers wide integration, with a very small list of items that don’t natively work with the implementation. This wide support makes it a nearly universal tool for users.
The comprehensive toolset offered by MuleSoft makes for a strong value proposition in most use cases.

Cons

This universal support comes with added complexity, which can create many headaches for more simple APIs trying to manage a small set of functions or endpoints.
The aforementioned complexity also comes with cost. Anypoint can be somewhat expensive depending on what you’re doing, and this could be a blocker to adoption.