Azure API Management vs. Integrately

APIM is useful for the standard scenarios:

1) Securing your back-end APIs - If you have a legacy back-end web service that has a basic authentication scheme, you can add some additional security by placing APIM in front, and requiring subscription keys. Leverage your existing firewall to ensure only your APIM instance can communicate with your back-end API, and you've basically added a layer of protection.

2) Lift and shift - there are always going to be clients that don't want to update their clients to use a newer API; in some cases you can make a newer API look like an older one by implementing some complex policies in APIM. You can also do the opposite, making older APIs look new, such as making an XML back-end accept both JSON and XML.

3) Centralizing your APIs - if you've acquired another company and want to make their API set look as if it's a part of the larger whole, APIM is an easy way to provide a consistent front-end interface for developers.

Incentivized

Integrately boasts a long list of products that it works with, but I feel that the actual implementation is clunky hit-or-miss. In my experience, the UI to create automations is miserably terrible. It shows way too many fields and is constantly resetting collapsed steps, so there is an absolutely dreadful amount of scrolling and searching involved. The order of fields often seems extremely random, which further makes the process for me extremely painful. There seem to be relatively few products that they truly integrate with, and most rely on JSON publishing. Testing is very difficult in my experience as it would only look for the most recent JSON data. It is not possible to test the automations with historical data. The actual success rate of automations is extremely spotty and it is nearly impossible to troubleshoot given the terrible UI. Split workflows (if/then) are very, very clunky. I wasted a huge amount of time manually replicating automations for various gateways.

• Easy commissioning of APIs.
• Great policies to control access.
• Easy mock services for testing.

Incentivized

• Marketing Automation
• Enroll learners in a course
• Send Instant Order Confirmation Email, SMS and Whatsapp Message
• Connect Google Sheet with other apps

Incentivized

• Lack of robustness is a bit of an issue. Several other providers offer more options and capabilities, but then, they are lacking in interface ease.
• As with anything Azure, pricing is really hard to stay on top of. I always find that you really don’t know what you’re paying for until you get the bill. Having an excellent Azure Administrator can help resolve that.
• Integrating with app services outside of Azure can be a challenge, or at least much more challenging than just using Azure App Services.

Incentivized

• Their workflow builder is almost impossible to use.
• Troubleshooting errors is difficult unless you are a programmer.
• User unfriendly for non-techies.
• Relies heavily on JSON publishing for many tools rather than native integration.

Azure APIM vs Amazon API Gateway:

1) Azure APIM was a complete package that included a developer portal.

2) We are very Microsoft centric - so the Microsoft product suite aligned very well with our business needs.

3) It was faster and easier to stand up Azure APIM for testing than it was for the Amazon API Gateway.

Incentivized

Integrately is super easy to use, there isn’t a huge learning curve to using it, and their live chat support is also great, so Integrately is better than most.

Incentivized

• We can always think of positive ROI impact on business
• It helps to easily facilitate the design, deployment, and maintenance of our APIs

• I wasted a huge amount of time building workflows that I ultimately walked away from because they did not reliably work.
• They are more affordable than Zapier but in this case, you definitely get what you pay for.