Amazon API Gateway vs. NGINX

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon API Gateway
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
AWS offers the Amazon API Gateway supports the creation and publication of an API for web applications, as well as its monitoring and maintenance. The Amazon API Gateway is able to support thousands of API calls concurrently and provides traffic management, as well as monitoring and access control.
$0.90
Per Million
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
Pricing
Amazon API GatewayNGINX
Editions & Modules
Past 300 Million
$0.90
Per Million
First 300 Million
$1.00
Per Million
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon API GatewayNGINX
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon API GatewayNGINX
Considered Both Products
Amazon API Gateway
Chose Amazon API Gateway
Nginx is a powerful tool but configuring, running and maintaining but Nginx will never be a competitive advantage for our business. API Gateway is powerful because it is managed and does what we need out-of-the-box. Nginx is used more widely in the community; it may be easier …
NGINX

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon API GatewayNGINX
API Management
Comparison of API Management features of Product A and Product B
Amazon API Gateway
7.8
13 Ratings
5% below category average
NGINX
-
Ratings
API access control6.612 Ratings00 Ratings
Rate limits and usage policies7.012 Ratings00 Ratings
API usage data8.312 Ratings00 Ratings
API user onboarding8.212 Ratings00 Ratings
API versioning9.312 Ratings00 Ratings
Usage billing and payments7.811 Ratings00 Ratings
API monitoring and logging7.613 Ratings00 Ratings
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Amazon API Gateway
-
Ratings
NGINX
8.2
21 Ratings
3% above category average
IDE support00 Ratings7.310 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.018 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.018 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings8.618 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings9.418 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings7.916 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon API GatewayNGINX
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon API GatewayNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(13 ratings)
8.9
(48 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.1
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon API GatewayNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Experienced a lack of available programming languages while working on a minor project. I had to halt the project and wait for it to be added later. It took ages and had a hit on our productivity. It has a centralized management system which helps and an easy interface which helps to manage multiple tasks in case of large-scale operations and projects.
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F5
[NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • API Gateway integrates well with AWS Lambda. This allows us to build a web server in the language and framework of our choice, deploy it as a Lambda function, and expose it through API Gateway.
  • API Gateway manages API keys. Building rate limiting and request quota features are not trivial (or interesting).
  • API Gateway's pricing can be very attractive for services that are accessed infrequently.
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F5
  • Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
  • Great at serving static content.
  • Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
  • Open-Source (no cost)!
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Client certificates are troublesome when trying to attach them to API GW stages.
  • Debugging across several services can be difficult when API GW is integrated with Route 53 and another service like Lambda or EC2/ELB.
  • Creating internal/private APIs, particularly with custom domains, can be unintuitive.
Read full review
F5
  • Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
  • I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
  • It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
  • It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
  • I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
F5
Great value for the product
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
F5
Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
We always had a great experience with the AWS support team. They were always on time and very dependable. It was a good partnership while we worked to resolve our issues.
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F5
Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
When we tested Azure API Management at the time, it had serious connectivity issues, it was very unstable, and it needed to do a lot using the command line. Comparing with the AWS solution, which was more mature, and the fact that we have services in use on AWS, we ended up choosing to continue using AWS products. This so as not to run the risk of increasing latency in accesses, and of some functionality not working, due to being developed yet.
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F5
We have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because
  • we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them
  • we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load
  • individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • ROI is negative, you need either to hire them to work with you or spend days/weeks to figure out issues.
  • For some of the projects in the end it is not worth it, it is just a "buzz" to use serverless but not practical.
  • Service is easy to set up authorization and it is easy to manage.
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F5
  • Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache.
  • Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy").
  • Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly.
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration