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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
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (4th), Application Infrastructure (6th), SOA Application Gateways (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Apigee is 14.5%, down from 14.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 3.8%, up from 3.7% 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

"It's a good return on my investment."
"We have been using Apigee mostly for proxy FGIs. We also use its security features as well as traffic control features."
"It is easy to deploy, configure, and monitor the APA."
"Apigee gives you plenty of opportunities to set up your workspace depending on how you want to manage your APIs."
"The analytics feature is quite good."
"The following features are most valuable: API Management, Analytics, Quota, and the Developer Portal."
"The initial setup was easy - there was an onboarding document with steps that we followed."
"The analytics function and the developer portal are the two valuable features of Apigee. The analytics part is very good, and the developer portal is quite rich in features."
"It can look for the various security threats, productions, payload scanning, and perform routing based on the content type."
"The product's most valuable features are AAA policies and security features."
"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."
"The most valuable features for our business include the ability to monitor and log data transactions and handle multiple request at an enterprise level."
"It's high-speed and it can be remotely administered via an API."
"The solution is stable."
"The solution is very easy to work with."
"Since it is a gateway, it provides a lot of security features."
 

Cons

"The technical support could be improved because their response time is slow."
"It is an expensive solution."
"Development IDE, especially for Architect Review."
"Apigee is not a solution compatible with public clouds, making it one of its shortcomings where improvements are required."
"The analytical aspect of it could be better. I think it is fair if Apigee lets you configure some of the metrics of the key details you want to monitor in terms of analytics."
"We are experiencing some performance issues."
"iPaaS is something that we would like to see. For example, MuleSoft is kind of an integrated platform as a service (iPaaS), and it provides a lot of out-of-the-box connectors and other such things. This is where Apigee lacks. I'm not sure if that's the roadmap for Apigee, but any improvements on those lines would be helpful where things become easier to implement."
"One feature they have to invest time into is the developer portal they use."
"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."
"We are always looking for more features wherein it could be easily integrated with cloud applications. We are looking for either a cloud solution or a cloud integration option."
"Traceability could be improved, especially for business operations. The traceability of the transactions could be an improvement point for DataPower to work on. It would be better if they provided JSON support. JSON protocol data has changed format. It started performing internal transformation to JSONx. This might be an additional complexity."
"Making it more user-friendly would be an improvement."
"The initial setup isn't so easy, you need who has experience working with the solution to help."
"The product's cost for data appliances or hardware is quite high. It needs improvement."
"Scripting needs improvement. It's hard for our customers."
"Small and medium-sized companies might look for cloud-hosted applications due to the cost."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My clients pay for a license."
"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."
"Compared to other products, Apigee had higher pricing."
"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."
"Based on your usage of the APIs you can take a decision to go with either an on-cloud or OPDK version. Get in touch with the sales representatives of Apigee."
"Its price is reasonable for the features they provide and the maturity of the platform."
"Since it was acquired by Google, we can get a license based on our requirements and the cost level will depend on cloud access and support."
"Pricing options need to be chosen on a case-by-case basis."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The licensing cost is very expensive."
"The cost of this product varies from customer to customer and the relationship with IBM, including how many offerings from IBM are already being used."
"It's expensive when you compare it with others."
"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."
"IBM DataPower Gateway is quite expensive to get resources to work on this product. If the price could be cheaper, I think that will make it a little bit better and easily accessible to smaller clients. Then it could compete with other solutions that are available in the market. There's a whole lot of other solutions available that work well and are cheaper than IBM's products."
"The product is expensive."
"The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."
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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
21%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Insurance Company
10%
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 DCDR process should be less complex. AI should improve developer efficiency and effort. Whenever I am writing code, it should give recommendations automatically by incorporating AI so I can wri...
 

Also Known As

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

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
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