Layer7 API Management and Apigee are major competitors in the API management space. Layer7 is especially notable for companies prioritizing security and cost-effectiveness, while Apigee stands out with its comprehensive API management features, favored in digital transformation, particularly in cloud-native environments.
Features: Layer7 is known for its strong security measures, including protocol translation and integration with enterprise tools like SiteMinder. It offers REST-to-SOAP conversions and supports flexible integrations. Apigee is praised for its advanced analytics, developer portal, and extensive policy options, catering to complex API management needs with flexible service monetization.
Room for Improvement: Layer7 often faces critiques around its user interface, with calls for a modernized developer portal and better integration capabilities. Apigee users express a need for more flexible integration options and seek improvements in pricing models. Improved documentation would enhance user experiences on both platforms, particularly in Layer7’s policy management and Apigee’s API lifecycle management areas.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Layer7 is tailored for on-premises and hybrid cloud deployments, which require meticulous planning for high availability. Despite supportive customer service, some users feel service responsiveness declined post-Broadcom acquisition. Apigee emphasizes cloud-first strategies with SaaS and hybrid options, offering versatility and efficient support, appealing to diverse enterprise needs.
Pricing and ROI: Layer7 is perceived as cost-effective for companies within CA's ecosystem, providing a good return on investment through robust security. Apigee’s pricing reflects its feature-rich, enterprise-level capabilities, seen as higher cost yet justified by comprehensive analytics and API management functionalities. Both solutions face cost transparency challenges, with Layer7 being more accessible for smaller setups while Apigee aligns with extensive API traffic demands in large enterprises.
They are responsive and provide assistance even during production issues.
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.
Apigee only allows validation of transactions up to a four-hour period, which requires manual hovering over the date and time.
Analytics is one of the areas needing enhancement, specifically more visibility and control over traffic to improve capacity management and high availability.
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 is perceived as slightly costly compared to other tools in the market.
Apigee is high-priced, suitable for large enterprises where the benefit aligns with the cost.
Seeing other products makes the tool's pricing seem high.
The features for API security have been significant with Apigee.
The flexibility to develop APIs for various platforms, from front-end applications to ATM machines, is valuable.
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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