IBM API Connect is a scalable API solution that helps organizations implement a robust API strategy by creating, exposing, managing and monetizing an entire API ecosystem across multiple clouds. As businesses embrace their digital transformation journey, APIs become critical to unlock the value of business data and assets. With increasing adoption of APIs, consistency and governance are needed across the enterprise. API Connect aims to help businesses…
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WSO2 API Manager
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
WSO2 API Manager makes it possible for developers to both develop and manage APIs of different types. Unlike solutions which focus only on managing API proxies, WSO2 API Manager provides tools to develop APIs by integrating different systems as well. It supports a variety of API types from REST, SOAP, GraphQL, WebSockets, WebHooks, SSEs and gRPC APIs with specialized policies and governance for each different type. Being fully open source, its architecture and extensibility…
I love the IBM API Connect features, performance, and security level for all our business data. The workload balancing and integration with other third-party products are very simple. The data migration speed is beneficial, especially for time management, and creating process reports through IBM API Connect is incredible.
It's free! No argument can win a fight with that! And it's the only reason I gave it a 5. If you have no money to spend, and a simple environment you'll have a nice product. But free does come with a price. After 5 years we're still struggling with ports, and analytics (it just won't work without any errors caused by some configuration somewhere). An API Manager should work out of the box. The only configuration expertise that any developer wants to invest in, is the configuration of API's. Not the product itself... Anyone who've seen the training material, just for installing this thing will agree that this is not the way to go. Of all the API Managers out there (we've tried 4), WSO2 is the only one were you need to know how this dragon of a java application works internally. Did I already mention the humongous amount of config files?
The first thing challenge we faced with the product was that if you deploying it to a third party cloud, that was very challenging and we need IBM team help at every step of the way and as well all know IBM support doesn't come cheap. A reason for that is that there isn't enough documentation done on the subject from IBM side.
The upgrade process is not that seamless and involves a lot of hassles.
You really need to have our requirements sorted out clearly because it is not very easy to customize the UI according to your needs, So you need to involve IBM from the start and give them clear requirements and then work with them to achieve it.
IBM API Connect may be less appropriate for small-scale projects with minimal API management requirements, where simpler and more cost-effective solutions suffice. Organizations lacking the necessary technical expertise or resources to harness its full potential may face implementation challenges. In static environments with infrequent API changes or limited developer engagement, the platform's comprehensive features may be excessive for the task at hand.
There are two main reasons for choosing IBM over others. 1) Pricing 2) The conversation during the sales stage. The team at IBM understood our requirements and acted as consultants instead of sales people. They genuinely focused on providing a solution to our pain points which reflected during the implementation and continued after go-live in the form of technical support
Providing better capabilities comparing the overall API lifecycle management, especially the availability of API Integration layer and a strong identity layer of their own which provides an end-to-end API ecosystem that would be advantageous in terms of a large software development initiative.
I consider IBM API Connect as a business capability enabler - the ROI level is practically secondary.
With this platform at the core, associated architectural framework and guardrails ensure that we can progress with distributed development and automation in autonomous teams - a key factor to deliver required time to market performance.
At this time, security and trust is key. A flexible yet secure API manager layer is necessary to ensure our relationships with partners and customers.
We've moved away from legacy SOAP services where nobody knew what services was used by who. WSO2 eliminated at least 90% of time spend on any service.
Creating API's (or actually creating the API Management layer...) is so simple that new developers can get away with it in no time. Again, real time gainer.
Since creating API's is so simple, developers are very fast in adopting a kind of "Domain thinking". In comparison with Azure API Manager: Azure does not demand knowledge of "how" the product works, but it's definitely more difficult to get an API up and running in Azure. And for some reason, azure does not promote clean domain driven architecture. Domain Driven architecture is the greatest time saver strategy possible. And WSO2 fits nicely in there.
