Apigee Reviews

It is an API gateway. It provides protection to our backend services.

The solution has improved our organization by formalizing the API interfaces. Through API specification documents, we can automate our documentation of those APIs and we can make it easier for our customers to integrate as it's a standard way of defining those APIs.

Items around the mobilization of the API interface and the ability to automate validations for our APIs are the most valuable aspects.

We have looked at MuleSoft as well, which is a competitor. MuleSoft has a richer set of integrations for an iPaaS solution. There's an IP gateway that we're using Apigee for, however, it cannot be used as an iPaaS, whereas the MuleSoft solution can be used as both an API gateway and an iPaaS. We've started talking to Google about their iPaaS solution, however, it doesn't play nice yet. 

They have an external developer platform that was a little bit painful. They do have some built-in developer tools, however, you can build an external development portal. It would be nice to have a built-in bundle that was more complete.

I've used the solution for about two years. 

I'm confident in the stability of the solution. It is very reliable and has good performance.

I'm quite confident of the scalability. I did do some comparisons between MuleSoft and Apigee, and a third one whose name slips my mind at the moment.

With Apigee, we don't have to think about scaling. There are still some limits, however, you can buy up. They have 80 million transactions a year, 80 million or 800 million, however, you can buy up if you start to exceed that. On some of the other platforms, you have to post the service yourself and you have to make sure that you were managing scale. That was one thing that is an advantage on Apigee.

There are something like 60,000 users using the solution, however, our load plan around it is more so that I don't think we've fully deployed it to the extent that we plan to. It's probably a small effect of that. The number of users that are impacted by it is probably in the order of nearly 10,000.

It's not being used as much as we would like. We're still ramping up and prioritizing people to be building around. Some of our existing technology does not traverse through it. Over time, we do plan to extend it until all of our external-facing interfaces go through Apigee.

We underutilized technical support initially. We have since engaged in a better way. There's a lot of documentation out there. They were helpful through the sales process to make sure we understood things, however, once we passed that, the support was more tactical and less strategic. We needed to go to third parties to get strategic support.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The setup itself was not complicated, however, the learning curve to integrate into our platform was way too complicated. It took over a year for us, from the time we purchased it until the time that we actually were running APIs through it. The ramp-up time took too long.

I would rate the solution a three out of five. I can't blame the vendor alone. It's also due to what I did or did not do.

We did not have enough of an implementation strategy. With the setup, there are instructions set up. Going through a setup is fine, however, knowing what to do with that setup and how it fits into a grander picture has been a journey.

The amount of staff needed for deployment and maintenance depends on the organization that's trying to deploy it. We have a fairly rigorous DevOps process, so there's somebody that is needed to manage the actual deployment of it. You'd need at least one, maybe a redundant person. Then, you need one person and a redundant person to manage the DevOps integration and to be able to build a pipeline so that you can deploy it. You also need at least one person that knows how to work in the platform to build APIs. I would say you'd probably need five or six people that really understand this to be able to deploy it.

We used two resellers, two integration partners. The first one got something going and we learned from them, however, nothing ever came out of it and it got shelved for a little bit. When we went with a second integration partner they actually helped us build an API documentation server. It's got a different name. 

It's a developer portal. They helped us build a developer portal, which is still not rolled out as it did not meet our standards. We've had to do things a little bit manually. One thing that I would say is that inside of deploying an API gateway, from not knowing anything about it, there was a big learning curve that we had to go through.

Now that I know what I know, it is a competitive product. Any of the products I would have started with I would've struggled with. There's just something about that strategy that you're talking about that is a big learning curve.

We have not been able to leverage ROI that much as we have not deployed it all the way. However, the ROI is in our opportunities. When we talk to our customers and explain what we're doing with our Apigee, their confidence in our ability to scale and secure is higher. When we don't, when we go to customers and we don't talk about Apigee or our gateway strategy, then there are many more questions that come up. It greases the wheels so to speak, on that sales process, security audits, et cetera.

It was fairly expensive. I don't know what the standard pricing is. I want to say that it's something like $80,000 for 800 million requests (approximately) a year. It's basically a full-time person cost. It's not higher than the competition. Everyone is expensive. 

With Apigee, it's all-you-can-eat up to a point. For example, you can think of it as a dining hall where you can go in and eat anytime you want for up to 500 meals. After that, you need to buy up to get another 200 meals.

We also looked at MuleSoft. I evaluated multiple solutions to determine that we would go with the choice that we chose, however, did not have experience with competitive products beforehand. Our platform was not using one.

I'm just a customer.

It's a hosted solution. It's my understanding that it gets updated by Google when it needs to be.

I'd advise potential users to do as many POCs as they can on the free version, and get their feet wet with it. There's a lot they can do with the free version. You can learn a lot by just getting out there and starting.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

Apigee is an API gateway used for API management.

The most valuable feature of Apigee is its simplicity of deploying an API and restricting access, like rate limit, with the API.

The technical support could be improved because their response time is slow.

I have been using Apigee for two and a half years.

I rate Apigee an eight out of ten for stability.

Apigee is a pretty scalable solution. Approximately ten developers use Apigee in our organization. The traffic that we have is close to 10,000 API requests a day.

I rate Apigee a nine or ten out of ten for scalability.

The solution's deployment is quick and does not take more than an hour. However, when you face challenges, the support is not very great.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy, I rate Apigee an eight or nine out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

Apigee is a pretty expensive solution.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten.

Apigee is deployed on the cloud in our organization. I would recommend the solution to other users. Our clients for Apigee are mostly medium and enterprise businesses.

Overall, I rate Apigee a nine out of ten.

We have been using the solution for multiple customers. We performed a greenfield implementation for one of our customers in Canada. It is a complete enterprise platform. The version is Apigee X. We have also created an in-built developer portal. It is mostly used for external APIs, exposing APIs to partners and vendors.

One of our banking customers also uses Apigee. They use it more like a gateway and not like a full-fledged marketplace. We are also doing a lot of support work for one of our European customers. They have internal and external API exports on Apigee. We support the whole platform. We have done a lot of automation, built a lot of processes, and brought in governance.

The development is quite standard. The deployment can be completely automated because the solution exposes APIs. We have built a completely automated deployment cycle. It triggers validation, verification, deployment, testing, and promotion to the higher environment. It is completely done through Ansible Playbooks. Apigee also provides a few playbooks.

The solution is quite strong in security. It provides integrations, OAuth mechanisms, and token-based integrations. We have integrated some identity providers. We can customize the dashboard. The tool provides a lot of custom monitoring dashboards. We can track the API usage analytics. Apigee gives us a lot of parameters to track.

We can decide what to turn on or off and build the dashboards accordingly. We have built an analytics dashboard. We have built dashboards to see the usage trends, performance of the APIs, and degradation seen by API consumers. Monetization is a strong feature. We haven’t used it, though. The developer portal feature is very rich. We have also built a portal on Apigee using ReactJs. The developer portal is good.

Some customers are moving away from Apigee to other tools like Kong. The product’s licensing model is very expensive. Apigee is completely SaaS-hosted. We do not have control over the installation. API management solutions like Kong have a very good separation of concerns between the control and data planes. Apigee does not have such features.

I have been using the solution for more than six years.

I rate the tool’s stability an eight or nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight or nine out of ten.

I rate the support a six or seven out of ten. We tried contacting support five years ago. We needed help with policies and architecture. We did not get much support. It might be because the product was still growing in Canada.

Neutral

The deployment is quite easy.

I rate the pricing a ten out of ten. The tool is extremely expensive.

We are a service provider. Our customers use Apigee. We are also partners with Google. We are SI integrators. The tool is quite stable. It has rich features. Customers prefer it if they can afford it. It is one of the best products we have. Overall, I rate the product a seven or eight out of ten.

I use Apigee as it is an API gateway.

The live tracking API feature of the product is Apigee's most valuable component.

I don't see any problems in Apigee where improvements are required.

Apigee is not a solution compatible with public clouds, making it one of its shortcomings where improvements are required.

In the future releases of Apigee, I would like it to offer more cloud compatibility features.

I have been using Apigee for four to five years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

Apigee's technical support is okay. My company did not have any issues with Apigee's technical support.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I haven't used any other solution before Apigee. My company chose to work with Apigee since it offered an enterprise edition, making it an easy-to-maintain solution with live tracking API features.

The product's initial setup phase was not difficult.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

Apigee is a very good product since my company hasn't faced too many issues with it. The tool allows users to look into the performance metrics, dashboards, and proxy performance, which are some of the positives. On the negative side, Apigee is not a cloud-compatible tool because it serves as an API gateway and a lot of systems are connected to it, which was a bottleneck for our company to deal with since we wanted to move to the cloud.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

We are utilizing Apigee as a means to host and manage our internal APIs. This involves creating an Apigee proxy that acts as a reverse proxy and hosting it on our gateway. When external customers want to use and monetize our internal APIs, we use Apigee to host them. Additionally, for internal applications that require interaction with our existing APIs, we also host them on Apigee.

The most valuable feature of the current version of Apigee, such as Apigee Edge, is that the maintenance and scalability of the service are not our responsibility. As a SaaS platform, Google takes care of it, ensuring the system is stable. Another valuable feature is the ability to customize the platform extensively. We can add JavaScript functionality to cater to any use case that is not available out of the box.

Compared to its competitors, such as Axway AMPLIFY API Management and Layer7 API Management, Apigee could benefit from having more policies to cater to various use cases. This would reduce the need for writing custom JavaScripts. If more features come straight out of the box, we can leverage them instead of writing custom code to achieve the same functionality.

I have been using Apigee for approximately two years.

The solution is stable.

Apigee is scalable. It can handle a decent amount of traffic.

We have 15 architects and developers using this solution in my organization.

The technical support team is not good. The support is not proactive. Google is a heavyweight in the industry, its support may not be as good as that of other industry partners. It is possible that Google's market dominance may have made them complacent in terms of support.

I rate the support Apigee a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup of the solution is easy. The setup is being handled by Google, you only need to request a new setup and procure a license for the solution.  Google takes care of everything else.

The current version of Apigee is not too expensive, but we are currently in talks with Google to understand their roadmap for Apigee X. However, we anticipate that with the introduction of Apigee X, the pricing will likely increase.

When comparing this solution to others, such as Axway AMPLIFY API Management Layer7 API Management, Apigee is a more stable and mature solution. Being a SaaS platform, you do not need to worry about deployment, scalability, server performance, and other related issues. However, with the upcoming release of Apigee X, there may be some constraints applied to the current version. If you choose to continue using Apigee it is a good choice.

I rate Apigee a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for all of our security. There are a few use cases for us where we use it to protect API to third parties.

The solution, overall, is quite good.

The product has a few restrictions I'd prefer weren't there.

We have trouble finding use cases. For example, when we google "data locator" we can't find a use case scenario at all. We can't find more than, approximately, five use cases, however, we need more.

We needed to do more than 20 configurations, and we weren't able to do that as the limit is 20 on the solution.

The solution tends to hide the limitations to keep selling the product. I can't blame them for doing it, however, it makes it difficult for those of us who eventually sign on.

The solution is expensive.

I've been dealing with the solution for close to three years at this point.

The stability of the solution is good. There aren't issues surrounding bugs or glitches. We don't find that it crashes or freezes. It's pretty reliable.

The scalability of the solution is okay. If a company needs to scale it, it should be able to do so.

Currently, we only have about ten people on our team that use it.

We haven't found the technical support to be that good, to be honest. We're not completely satisfied with the level of service.

We're currently using IBM Connect as well as Azure. Functionality-wise, there aren't too many differences. One is on-premises, however, therefore it's really difficult to compare both together. With IBM, you have to maintain a few more things. There are more administrative tasks.

The initial setup wasn't straightforward. It was complex due to the fact that Apigee didn't have any integrations and we had IBM APA Connect Resources.

There were many things we weren't told earlier. Once you clear certain items you can't change the name, for example. There were a few other items, like monitoring, which had a limited number of configurations which was an issue.

Deployment was fairly quick. It only took five minutes or so.

The solution is not a cheap product. Licensing can be quite expensive.

Our contract is around $2 million for three years.

We don't have a clear picture how the billing works. We have one service package of one size and yet we don't have a clear picture of the purchase or the status or if they will charge more due to earlier limits on services. The solution needs to make licensing more clear. Even if they charged us $10,000 or even $20,000 more but they were clear about the what and the why, we'd be okay with that. We'd just like to know.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

We are removing our IBM products and transition completely over to Apigee.

We have Azure's API as well. In next one year or two year, we are going to dissolve IBM API Connect as well as Azure CIM and move everything to Apigee.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I'd rate Apigee at an eight. We'd rate it higher, however, they aren't clear on their offering. We just want everything automated and easy. The cost is not the issue. The lack of information is.

I'd recommend the solution. It's a nice product and companies should go ahead with it, so long as they are okay with the pricing, as it is rather expensive. If a company is cost-consious, IBM API Connect may be better as the licensing costs are lower.

I work for a medium to big size IT consultancy firm in Mexico, and I am in the innovation and interoperability division. Our main work here is to develop projects on interoperability platforms and KPI management, et cetera, and transition from a legacy system to micro-services. In the last year, I have worked on a project on migrating a very big telecom firm from several API gateways and API exposures to Apigee. They're centralizing all their API gateways into Apigee.

We are hoping to lay out the plan for migrating the first sprint of about 200 APIs starting in January. Originally, the plan was to start in December, but the project is so big that it was suffering from delays.

We are going to start doing the actual proxies and migration in January next year. The project consists of about 10-month long sprints. We are going to use all of next year on this first phase. During the course of the next year, we are going to lay out the plan for the next phases. At this point, the total number of APIs to be migrated to Apigee is not clear, but we're thinking that it's about 300, 400 APIs that are going to be migrated.

The solution is deployed on-premise. They're thinking that in the second phase, they're going to go hybrid to have some of the features in the public cloud and some in the proprietary. 

We are integrators.

I think the most valuable features are the security features. Of course, the user access control is the same as the security. The other very important issue is the sandboxing capability of Apigee.

The caching capabilities are somewhat limited. This is more on the developer-oriented capabilities.

At this point, we aren't sure of what else could be improved since we are migrating some pieces of code that are really legacy and really difficult to model as a standard REST API. We are not sure in which areas Apigee is going to fall short. I think that next year we will have a more clear picture of some issues that we are going to find that could be addressed by a new feature, or by enhancing some existing feature in the next versions of the tool.

I have been using Apigee for one year.

Right now, in the development area of Apigee, we have about 20 developers, architects, et cetera. We are in the process of training because our expected growth drives us to have about 100 developers by the end of next year. I think that by the end of Q1, next year, we're going to double our capacity. By mid-year, we have to have 20 more, and so on, until the end of the year. We are planning to have about 100 trained developers, or configuration experts, in Apigee.

All the infrastructure, the enablement, is being done by another company. They are in charge of all the dimensions and actually creating all the infrastructure to host the platform. I have never installed Apigee as a proprietary cloud. I have been working either on the pure cloud environment or hybrid environment. I didn't phase the deployment of the tool, just the configuration.

In Latin America, Apigee is expensive. It's not for small businesses; it's more for big businesses. That's why I was trying to compare, for example, WSO2 against other API management tools. We are trying to create an inside practice in our company to also recommend WSO2 for a mid-size or small-size company where maybe the Apigee pricing for them is too heavy.

Apigee prices are targeting medium to large companies in Mexico. In Latin America, it's basically the same.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10. 

I think the correct roadmap should be first an approach to Google to create a partnership. Then create a team of developers and an architect, and then start adding more resources as the demand grows.

The primary use case for this solution is to integrate both external applications as well as internal applications. We use some to integrate other applications, but most of them are just proxies that are for fronting the backend APIs.

We want to create one API to be used by different clients. In terms of management, even though the proxying of an API is not a lot of work, it is better to create a single API that can be reused. When the API version changes, you only have versioning for a single API, rather than in several places with the same capability.

Moving forward, if you change or update the version, the underlying functionality of the application needs to fashion the APIs correctly. This solution is created for the same capability. To prevent that, we just create the same API, and then we productize it and you are versioning a single API and not going back and versioning different APIs that do the same thing.

One of the concepts offered with this solution is called Productization. This concept allows you to bundle the APIs together and present them to clients as products, which allows you to configure the API with restricted access for different clients. An example of this would be Client A is granted access as read-only and able to do a few updates, whereas Client B would have full access to the APIs. You can configure different products for them in such a way that one of the products would have limited access, and the other would be granted full access. You are not creating another API, rather you are using the same proxy with limited access to the proxy. This is one of the features that has helped us a lot. 

We have APIs that we use internally and externally for clients outside of our network using the cloud with a SaaS solution that needs to access our API. The same API we use internally is the same API we expose externally. The level of security is different for internal applications and for external applications. To accommodate both we use the same API but add additional security features to the APIs.

The number one area this solution could be improved is by implementing support. Support is not a part of this solution.

I think that this solution is pretty stable, but when the open-source vendors upgrade their software, Apigee doesn't conform with the upgrade of the open-source vendor. They require patch releases and an upgrade for on-premises users. The component is always late.

I think it's pretty scalable. Currently, we are doing about sixteen million calls per quarter. As we are not using it on a large scale, we don't usually have latency issues whatsoever. We have a clustered environment and there is little to no downtime, even when we are running patches on the operating system. We have between twenty-five and thirty regular developers that use this platform. We have four nodes in the cluster that are serving internal traffic, and then we have another four nodes for external traffic so that way we don't really require any upgrade.

At this time there is no immediate need to scale up the environment. We have four servers with four nodes in the cluster that service the internal traffic, and we have another four gateway nodes for the external traffic.

The support is lacking. One of the main reasons it is lacking is because they have different applications bundled together. As an example, they are using Apache ZooKeeper and Drupal from different open-source vendors. We have two critical security updates that require support. A claim had been opened in May and did not receive any support.

Compared to other vendors that we deal with, I would have to rate this solution a five or less in terms of support.

We are currently looking for other alternatives because of some issues we are facing.

We believe that they do not want to continue with their on-premises version of the product, as they are not responsive to support cases.

We have MuleSoft, but we are only using their ESB, not API management. Apigee is the first solution we are using for API management.

The initial setup is not straightforward. It is very complex. They use different open-source applications in this solution. When installing this solution you have to be knowledgeable in the different applications, what the different applications do, and how they behave with each platform.

The documentation they have available is very good and available online.

Using different applications bundled together in this single product makes the maintenance and installation a challenge. 

The deployment took three months. We had many different environments including development, test, QA, and production environments. For the QA and production environments, we had both an external and an internal gateway. We did this ourselves in conjunction with the Apigee team.

Most of the maintenance is being done by two of our offshore colleagues in Chennai, India. They maintain the platform.

It's a good return on my investment. In the past, we were struggling with the way we would interface with external clients, where we would open a firewall and do many network-level configurations before we were able to open an API. Now everything goes through Apigee and we only open the first ones for Apigee. After that, all other communication goes through Apigee.

We evaluated three different products, including API management from Apigee, API management from CA, and MuleSoft. This evaluation was three years ago, and at that time the Apigee platform was more mature than other platforms.

For on-premises I would not suggest this solution. Generally speaking, the product is a good one, it is matured and the features are okay. If anyone wants to use this solution they should first consider the cloud-based version.

Because the support is lacking, we would have considered a different product. I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. If the support was better, I would have given them a nine.