Apigee Edge vs. NGINX

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Apigee Edge
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Apigee Edge is an API management platform now owned and offered by Google, since Google acquired Apigee in 2016.N/A
NGINX
Score 9.0 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
Apigee EdgeNGINX
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apigee EdgeNGINX
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
Apigee EdgeNGINX
API Management
Comparison of API Management features of Product A and Product B
Apigee Edge
9.4
7 Ratings
14% above category average
NGINX
-
Ratings
API access control9.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Rate limits and usage policies9.07 Ratings00 Ratings
API usage data9.07 Ratings00 Ratings
API user onboarding9.97 Ratings00 Ratings
API versioning9.97 Ratings00 Ratings
Usage billing and payments9.06 Ratings00 Ratings
API monitoring and logging9.97 Ratings00 Ratings
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Apigee Edge
-
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
Apigee EdgeNGINX
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.8 out of 10
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User Ratings
Apigee EdgeNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(7 ratings)
8.9
(48 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
6.0
(1 ratings)
8.1
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apigee EdgeNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
Google
Few scenarios 1. For viewing API analytics, I think it is best in the market 2. For earning money via API monetization 3. Securing API 4. Onboarding legacy APIs to provide modern REST endpoints
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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
Google
  • Better exception handling with the Raise exception policies help to monitor the flow by setting up the flow conditions.
  • Easy development of a Proxy and APIs with much less tutoring and helps make getting started for new users easy.
  • Very good documentation and blog with details of most common failures and error handling.
  • A very very easy to use console.
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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)!
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Cons
Google
  • Only one user can be active in a proxy at a time
  • No version control
  • Prohibited from using JSON.stringify on Apigee objects (tokens)
  • Debugging is difficult
  • Unable to rename or delete policies without bumping revision
  • Why would anyone give a js policy one name, display name something else, and script a different name?
  • 'Trace' limited to only 20 transactions
  • UI allows users to add target servers, but users must utilize the api to turn on SSL.
  • I'm sure there's more, they just aren't coming to mind right now.
  • Apigee forgets (expires?) your password at random intervals without notice. Every few weeks, or days, sometimes even three times in one day, I'll attempt to login to Apigee and my password will be 'wrong'. I've reset my password and Apigee still claims it's wrong. I've had to reset my password three times before it finally let me log back in.
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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
Google
I am not the one deciding whether to use apigee or not really. But personally, I would recommend the use of it as developing APIs on it is easy. And as a mediator between backend servers, we could easily modify request and responses in it without touching any backend code while having a centralize gateway to access our backend APIs too.
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F5
Great value for the product
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Usability
Google
Support has helped us to resolved all the queries and community support was also good.
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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
Google
Quite hard to get support, at least on the coding side, when we encounter blockers. But general concerns, they would schedule a call to you for them to get a whole picture of your concern. Albeit in my experience, bad really as they haven't replied about the progress, but otherwise seems to have been fixed.
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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
Google
Apigee is the best in the market in terms of API Analytics Apigee is having wonderful Documentation with short videos Security is a major concern and Apigee provides an easily configurable policy to secure API Quota and rate-limit is again very easy to configure on every API basis It provides various policies to transform the response from one form to another form e.g. JSON to XML or XML to JSON
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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
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Return on Investment
Google
  • As a public entity it is hard to say how much ROI we can have. We have yet to create a billing and ROI plan. We are thinking of other ways to create ROI, possibly through data/service barter.
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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