Likelihood to Recommend If you are truly using IBM API Management for an API gateway, you will be ok. if you start trying to build custom scripts to transform messages complex in nature, it will soon become unmanageable.
Read full review ReadyAPI and SwaggerHub are a match made in heaven. Being able to so easily import the API directly into ReadyAPI and then being able to generate a test suite from the API is my favorite part of these softwares. We have rather large services so building out the API can take some time
Read full review Pros Import APIs - We have an existing inventory of APIs and services, so having an easy import process was required. IBM provides the ability to import Swagger so the process was quick and easy. Service Offerings - Can create plans to control various model offerings for varying clients depending on the need. You are not locked into a tier structure and can customize if a need arises. API Usage - visibility into the use of an API with a wealth of reporting information allows you to support an API from a production use to trending and forecasting any future growth. Read full review Treating the design as documentation ensures that we have consistent and well defined APIs API consumers can export the swagger definition or code stubs to use within their development environment We can iterate through multiple versions of a definition privately before making a version publicly available Read full review Cons Troubleshooting deployment pipeline - identifying issues with your api based on restrictions through a deployment pipeline is difficult. If a quality assurance environment is less stringent than a production environment, making sure your api is accessible and configured appropriately is tough. Code level scripting is limited to javascript and xslt. so if any complex fanning needs to occur, you are limited in tooling. Administration is more cumbersome than it needs to be. There are roles/profiles that are defined, but to use a group email for the approval or use of an api needs to managed better. A more thorough thought process needs to be defined - which I think IBM is tackling as an improvement. Read full review The user interface could be more improved to sustain with other similar tools in the market. Beneficial if we have better integration with third party softwares. Nice to have ability to download the documentation in usable formats. Read full review Alternatives Considered There are a lot of similarities between
Apigee Edge and IBM API Management. Some of the differences at the time of this posting is... 1) IBM APIM/C integrates better with other products. Dynatrace is used to track API and service specifics with the ability to offload those statistics for operational reporting. 2) If you are evolving from DataPower, IBM API Management is a logical choice to support additional REST APIs. 3) Generating keys is simple. Integration of those keys with a secure data vault is easy as well for your consumer.
Read full review The only other product we looked at was
Postman . But we liked the SwaggerHub UI & the integrations it has with the AWS API gateway. Though
Postman has some other great features like the ability to write test cases & execute them, SwaggerUI was more convenient to document & share them.
Read full review Return on Investment Centralizing on an API management platform was imperative. Being able to support SOAP UIs as well as REST APIs was required. Because of the tooling, service inventory and provisioning can be managed - regardless of the pricing and cost structures are used. Constructing plans that provide tiering options based on rate limits help in onboarding new consumers. The lesser cost in onboarding through an API gateway outweighs the cost of modifying/configuring an API to handle multiple clients. Defining guidance and onboarding practices while rolling out the product also helps in the adoption, reference architecture, and governance that can save your company money. Read full review Faster API development lifecycle. Reduced discussion time when building a new vital API endpoint. Complete documentation which makes the new team member onboarding process easier. Read full review ScreenShots