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Apigee vs IBM DataPower Gateway comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Apigee
Ranking in API Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
86
Ranking in other categories
API Testing Tools (6th)
IBM DataPower Gateway
Ranking in API Management
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (6th), Application Infrastructure (9th), SOA Application Gateways (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Apigee is 15.0%, up from 15.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 3.8%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

Q&A Highlights

Rav Bangalore - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 24, 2019
 

Featured Reviews

ShawkyFoda  - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides high visibility and control with good traffic monitoring
Analytics is one of the areas needing enhancement, specifically more visibility and control over traffic to improve capacity management and high availability. The replication process between Master and Slave for disaster recovery takes too long. Dependencies on analytics impact the performance of the user interface, which should be separate. The complex setup process on-premises, especially with multi-node installations, could also be improved. Additional control in product declarations, based on operations like POST and GET, is needed.
Mehdi El Filahi - PeerSpot reviewer
Security features meets compliance needs and offers MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) that simplifies integration efforts
While I like IBM products, I'm not an evangelist. I work with Java, Microsoft ASP.NET, and various technologies. I'm not tied to any specific vendor. However, I do find IBM to be a bit greedy. It's a large, profit-driven company. The support team is mostly based in India, and they follow a very structured process and protocol. Sometimes, it feels like playing ping pong with them – lots of back and forth before the problem gets escalated. You might even have to get your sales rep involved to push things along. For me, the support it could be better. Indian support teams aren't inherently bad, but with IBM, it feels impersonal. They respond, sure. But if it's a complex technical issue, they might ask you a lot of questions that just seem designed to waste your time. Sometimes it feels like they hope you'll get frustrated and solve the problem yourself.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I simply like how you can personalize your products and put them into product categories. That's what I like the most."
"Apigee is very easy to use, and you can code in any language."
"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."
"Apigee is a strong-featured solution. It leads in Gartner Quadrant ratings and it is a full-slated API solution that has the features that an API gateway requires."
"It nice and easy for the clients and those using the product to access the product's help resources."
"The initial setup was easy - there was an onboarding document with steps that we followed."
"Apigee Analytics dashboard is useful to monitor transactions, error percentage, transaction latency, etc."
"It is easy to deploy, configure, and monitor the APA."
"I like the tool's security. Also, all functionalities are integrated within on platform."
"The most valuable features for our business include the ability to monitor and log data transactions and handle multiple request at an enterprise level."
"If you have an API application in your organization that you want to make safe and secure, in addition to your existing WAF or load balancer, this product comes with all those capabilities:"
"It is a scalable solution."
"The product's most valuable features are AAA policies and security features."
"It can look for the various security threats, productions, payload scanning, and perform routing based on the content type."
"You don't have to have a separate DMC proxy because DataPower Gateway is an appliance and will take care of a lot of security features. These include data validations, encryption, as well as XML or any type of scripting or security threats that are present."
"The solution is very easy to work with."
 

Cons

"The solution could add even more functionalities."
"Role-based access management needs to be improved. It would also be nice if the solution could be integrated with code versioning systems like Git/Bitbucket."
"They have an external developer platform that was a little bit painful."
"Maintaining and deploying revisions need to be more defined."
"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 heard there maybe be some security issues that need to be addressed. If this is the situation I would encourage taking a look at the security matters."
"Apigee on premise is quite complex and it is always moving faster."
"We are experiencing some performance issues."
"It is a costly product."
"The product's cost for data appliances or hardware is quite high. It needs improvement."
"The user interface or the application development perspective and customization of the tool could be a little better."
"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."
"Small and medium-sized companies might look for cloud-hosted applications due to the cost."
"An area for improvement in IBM DataPower Gateway is its price point because it's a relatively expensive product. Sometimes, when the customer use case is just a very small subset of what's being offered in IBM DataPower Gateway, then the product can be expensive, making my company lose some of the opportunities because of the expensive pricing. A lower price point for IBM DataPower Gateway, even if that results in a less feature-rich version, would be appreciated. In terms of additional features that I'd like to see in the next release of IBM DataPower Gateway, nothing specific comes to mind because IBM constantly improves its standards and provides quarterly updates to the product, so it's quite fine."
"The components that they include in the product that are, in fact, a WTX, really need to be removed from the product because they tend to fail."
"Its support services could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is fair. You need to pay additional costs for the support."
"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 is a bit on the expensive side. Its licensing cost is a bit high, and that's where we've seen people going back on their decisions."
"The solution’s pricing could be more competitive."
"My clients pay for a license."
"The price of Apigee could be less expensive. The solution can be purchased monthly or annually."
"The cost increases as the usage increases."
"If the budget is not a concern then I will choose to go with Apigee over WSA-2, but if it is then I would prefer the latter solution."
"As far as I know, they have a perpetual license for this product. They are paying perpetual fees rather than an annual subscription or annual pricing."
"The tool's initial costing is expensive for small banks and financial institutions."
"The appliance is a bit on the expensive side for the workloads that are not too high."
"It is an expensive solution."
"This product is a bit expensive as IBM products are costly assets. However, for enterprise customers it is a worthwhile investment."
"It's expensive when you compare it with others."
"The product is expensive."
"The total cost of IBM DataPower Gateway would depend on the configuration, but in my experience, it can amount to 60,000 Euros per box, even for the virtual version. Usually, customers need high availability and a non-production environment, so the total price for IBM DataPower Gateway can be quite a lot. It can be 200,000 Euros or a similar figure."
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Answers from the Community

Rav Bangalore - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 24, 2019
Sep 24, 2019
First, we should not compare data power and Apigee. Both meant for different purpose. Generally, DataPower used for authentication most of uses cases, where Apigee enable digital technologies. In addition, it is establish the connectivity from both external/internal/Omini connectivity. DataPower support internal connectivity with limited support in terms of Digital enablement. Apigee is lates...
See 2 answers
DM
Sep 23, 2019
1) Let us start from the base that Google APIGEE is an API Management platform, so it offers more capabilities than a Gateway, therefore we must compare it against IBM API Connect which is the IBM API Management and whose gateways are Datapower machines. 2) An API Management platform consists mainly of three key components: • Portal: where the catalog of available APIs is discovered. • Management: where the life cycle of the APIs is managed. • Gateway: Where the APIs are exposed. At Management level: Google APIGEE and IBM API Connect • Manage the life cycle of the API. • Manage users roles and permissions. • Manage security in APIs. • Manage the consumption of APIs. • Allows traffic policies to be applied. • Allows you to configure, create and attach custom policies. At Portal level: Google APIGEE and IBM API Connect • Display the API documentation • Test the exposed APIs. • Register application developers. • Customize corporate brand. • Manage community. • Self-management. At Gateway level: Google APIGEE and IBM API Connect • API deployment and execution • Execution of security policies • Integration with data sources • Apply traffic policies. • Different types of gateways: • Google APIGEE o Edge Enterprise Gateway. o Microgateway (Limited features)  Does not support all OAuth2.0 flows  No Caching  No threat protecction  Basic monitoring. • IBM API Connect o Microgateway (Discontinued). o Gateways:  Datapower Gateway (Compatible with API Connect version 5)  API Gateway (Focused on the 2018 version of API Connect) At the Deployment level: • Distributed: o Google APIGEE:  Edge Enterprise Gateway: • The complete instance must be taken to each cloud. • The deployment of each instance requires a license.  Microgateway: • They connect to the same instance, however, the limited policies of this component must be kept in mind. • Can only be used by purchasing the full license of the API Management. o IBM API Connect:  Datapower Gateway (7.6 or <): • Compatible with version 5.0.8.x  API Gateway (7.7 or> = 2018.4.x): • Compatible with version 5.0.8.x and 2018 of IBM API Connect.  Both Gateway: • It is only necessary to deploy the Gateway in each cloud, not the full instance of the product. • Manages licenses that charge for API Calls generated in the Gateway and includes the deployment of nodes of its components in any cloud. Both APIGEE and API Connect offer good capabilities to accelerate the deployment of business capabilities such as services or APIs. The decision of which one is better will depend on the conditions of our business and purpose.
SA
Sep 24, 2019
First, we should not compare data power and Apigee. Both meant for different purpose. Generally, DataPower used for authentication most of uses cases, where Apigee enable digital technologies. In addition, it is establish the connectivity from both external/internal/Omini connectivity. DataPower support internal connectivity with limited support in terms of Digital enablement. Apigee is latest integration deployment software in the form of integration software, SaaS and Cloud.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Apigee differ from Azure API Management?
Apigee offers both cloud-based and on-prem options while Microsoft Azure API Management currently only offers a cloud-based solution. Both solutions are easy to use. Apigee allows for the ability...
Which is better - Apigee or Amazon API Gateway?
Amazon API Gateway is a platform that supports the creation and publication of API for web applications. The platform can support thousands of simultaneous API calls, and it provides monitoring, ma...
What do you like most about IBM DataPower Gateway?
The MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) is great because it allows you to easily expose services using various protocols – web services, REST (JSON), and others. This flexibility simplifies things.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM DataPower Gateway?
I would rate the pricing a two out of ten, with one being high price, and ten being low price. It's high-priced for smaller companies. But it is okay for enterprises. So, the price could be more fl...
What needs improvement with IBM DataPower Gateway?
The price could be more flexible for different clients.
 

Also Known As

No data available
WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Adobe, advance.net, Amadeus, AT&T, Bechtel, Belly, Burberry, Chegg, Citrix, Dell, eBay, Equifax, GameStop, First Data, Globe, HCSC, Intralinks, Kao, Meredith, Mitchell, Orange, Pearson
RBL Bank, Availity
Find out what your peers are saying about Apigee vs. IBM DataPower Gateway and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.