Layer7 API Management and Apigee are prominent players in the API management space, offering comprehensive features for API security and management. Based on the data, Layer7 seems to have a stronger emphasis on security and protocol management, while Apigee stands out with its robust monetization tools and developer engagement capabilities.
Features: Layer7 provides vital security protocols, protocol translation, and content-based routing, significantly boosting backend service accessibility. Its integration with SiteMinder enhances API call security. Apigee, however, offers superior API analytics, monetization capabilities, and an expansive developer portal supporting OpenAPI standards, fostering greater developer interaction and management flexibility.
Room for Improvement: Layer7 could improve its developer portal's customization and integration capabilities with various systems. A more intuitive user interface for policy management is needed. Apigee could benefit from more extensive out-of-the-box features to reduce the need for custom coding and improved integration with different environments. Additionally, streamlining its pricing structure would make it more attractive for smaller businesses.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Layer7 is more focused on on-premises deployments with limited cloud readiness, whereas Apigee provides flexibility with support for multiple deployment models, including public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, and hybrid. In terms of support, both solutions offer satisfactory services, but Layer7 has seen some decline post-mergers, while Apigee is often recognized for its responsive support teams.
Pricing and ROI: Both Layer7 and Apigee are considered expensive, especially for small to medium enterprises. Layer7 offers various licensing models with competitive market deals. Apigee's pricing is based on API call volume, potentially increasing costs with higher usage, but is often justified by its advanced features and suitability for enterprise needs. Despite initial costs, both solutions eventually offer ROI through their comprehensive API management capabilities.
They are responsive and provide assistance even during production issues.
In the past two years, I have been experiencing less assistance.
The customer service and support are cooperative and effective in providing insights and solutions during challenges.
Technical support is excellent, and I would rate them as ten.
Adding extra Cassandra databases is complex.
All nodes communicate with one primary database, affecting connections and causing crashes under high load.
Apigee is stable, and we have had the system running on Apigee servers for more than four years without any stability issues.
Without rebooting for ninety to one hundred eighty days, cache builds up in Linux boxes, causing memory utilization issues.
Analytics is one of the areas needing enhancement, specifically more visibility and control over traffic to improve capacity management and high availability.
Apigee only allows validation of transactions up to a four-hour period, which requires manual hovering over the date and time.
Apigee should also incorporate these capabilities, especially in the on-premises version.
Broadcom's push for upgrades from version nine to ten, ten to 10.3, and onwards to twelve needs improvement in migration processes, especially with service dependencies.
Apigee's product cost is quite high compared to other products.
Apigee is high-priced, suitable for large enterprises where the benefit aligns with the cost.
Apigee is perceived as slightly costly compared to other tools in the market.
Seeing other products makes the tool's pricing seem high.
It provides all the necessary capabilities for current technologies, enabling communication and translation between protocols, along with supporting stringent security features.
Apigee's analytics capabilities aid in monitoring and optimizing APIs, which are also beneficial for our operations.
We rely on Elasticsearch to monitor traffic, which provides high visibility and control and surpasses Apigee in certain features.
The flexibility to develop APIs for various platforms, from front-end applications to ATM machines, is valuable.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Apigee | 8.8% |
| Layer7 API Management | 2.3% |
| Other | 88.9% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 20 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 9 |
| Large Enterprise | 65 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 23 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 13 |
| Large Enterprise | 84 |
Apigee is a platform for developing and managing APIs. Apigee offers an interface for your core services by wrapping them with a proxy layer which is then accessed by other developers. With Apigee, you can design and build APIs and then securely share their services and data without exposing any code.
Because app developers make HTTP requests to an API proxy rather than directly to your services, your services are separated from the developers. All the developer needs to know is the URL of the API proxy endpoint, necessary query parameters, authorization credentials (if they exist), and the response data format.
The API proxy isolates the app developer from your backend service. Therefore, you are free to change the service implementation if the public API remains consistent. By maintaining a consistent frontend API, existing client apps will continue to work regardless of changes on the backend.
Key capabilities of the Apigee API management platform include:
Reviews from Real Users:
Apigee stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its rich developer portal, its advanced analytics, and its central monitoring system.
Carlos R., a software architect at Caja Los Andes writes, “The central monitoring feature is the most valuable. It also provides security for the APIs and high availability for our use cases. Apigee is the best product in the industry in comparison to other API management solutions. It helps in fast development, which is a top point. It also supports a lot of industry standards and has excellent documentation.”
An associate vice president at a tech services company notes, “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. The authentication mechanisms are quite easily built into Apigee, which is something that most of the other products have also now started supporting.”
Layer7 API Management is a comprehensive solution that enables organizations to securely expose, manage, and monetize their APIs.
It provides features such as API gateway, developer portal, analytics, and security to ensure seamless integration and control over API traffic.
With Layer7 API Management, businesses can streamline their API operations and drive innovation.
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