Cloud Elements (discontinued) vs. SwaggerHub

Areas where it would be appropriate:

1. If you want a really 'deep' integration with a third party software, and you want all the control over how it interacts with your software
2. If you want a totally white-labeled solution, that is totally invisible to your customers.
3. if you care more about a well thought out/useful API, rather than a pretty UI

Areas where it is less appropriate:

1. If you want a Zapier-esque hands-off integration for YOU.
2. if you want your customers to do more of the work, pay for it/etc.
3. if you're a really small business, it could be too expensive. But it depends on your individual contract with them.

Incentivized

We use SwaggerHub to design API endpoint and documentation for our microservices architecture system. It's working really great for us to be able to collaborate more easily on developing API in our team. It also can test our API endpoint which makes an integration test easier when we deploy changes to the API, especially for non-developers/QA.

Incentivized

• Customer Support -- They have a knowledgeable team and are very responsive.
• Communication -- Most questions are addressed quickly
• Documentation -- The API documentation is well organized and easy to follow.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• There weren't really many cons to our experience. The only slight downside was the cost but they worked with us on that to make it work.

Incentivized

• Swagger Editor can be bit more user friendly by providing the means to persist different projects as part of user profiles
• Swagger UI's testing capability or means to test APIs can be improved
• Swagger UI clients can be added as part of Spring ecosystem

Incentivized

MuleSoft is also a similar product to Cloud Elements, but is not available as an option in this form.

Workato and MuleSoft are competing cloud API connector platforms that perform a similar function to Cloud Elements. We chose Cloud Elements over them because CE provided a more robust path to unifying the behavior of connected systems.

Zapier is a workflow automation tool that I feel draws erroneous comparison to Cloud Elements that I need to highlight. Workflow automation tools (Zapier, IFTTT, Microsoft Flow) do provide multiple integrations, but for simplistic scenarios where only a handful of explicitly described steps need accomplished. Cloud Elements is a platform for developers to deliver faster and with higher reliability than making integrations one-by-one in complex systems that solve demanding problems.

Incentivized

We have had SwaggerHub for as long as I have been with the company, so I am not sure why SwaggerHub was selected compared to other similar tools

Incentivized

• We are able to build integrations in HALF the time we could build them from scratch.
• They allow our development team to spend more hours focused on developing our core product, not connections to other products.
• Their large catalog of services to connect to allows us to spend much less time researching other platform integration endpoints and increases our R&D speed a considerable amount.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized