Microsoft Azure API Management and Apigee are major competitors in the API management sector. While Azure excels within the Azure ecosystem, Apigee offers superior customization and scalability, making it more appealing for enterprises needing advanced features.
Features: Microsoft Azure API Management offers strong integration with Azure, easy setup, and detailed monitoring, which facilitates user access management and provides comprehensive API analytics. Apigee is recognized for its robust developer portal, extensive analytics, and strong security, offering complex mediation and transformation tasks, which makes it highly suitable for enterprises requiring advanced API management.
Room for Improvement: Microsoft Azure API Management faces criticism for complex pricing, limited API versioning, dependency on Azure services, and costly high-tier features. Apigee users report challenges in on-premises setup, high pricing, limited webhook support, integration with legacy systems, and a need for UI and automation improvements.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Azure API Management benefits from streamlined service within the Azure ecosystem, flexibility across hybrid and public cloud environments, and a broad support network. Apigee supports hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, including on-premises, but setup can be burdensome, requiring more expertise. Both offer strong customer service, though Apigee users seek quicker responses and better troubleshooting.
Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Azure API Management is initially cost-effective with its pay-as-you-go model but becomes expensive with advanced features and premium tiers, offering good value for Azure-integrated users. Apigee is known for high costs, especially for smaller enterprises, due to a complex pricing structure. However, its rich features justify the expense for larger enterprises, providing ROI through powerful analytics and security. Both solutions offer notable ROI when strategically implemented, but cost evaluation is complex.
Proper configuration of the solution, implementation strategy and correct scaling tier selection are other factors that influence the ROI.
Most of the time, where we work in companies, it is more of an internal policy or security guidance that we need to have an API gateway.
It helps connect all multi-environment applications to a single dashboard and give beautiful reports.
They are responsive and provide assistance even during production issues.
We have regular sessions with Microsoft where we can have private previews of new features.
I rate the support from Microsoft Azure API Management a ten out of ten.
The documentation from Microsoft helps our company to solve issues on our own.
Adding extra Cassandra databases is complex.
I rate the scalability of Microsoft Azure API Management a ten out of ten.
It can host it in different regions, and we can point to the same set of backups and try to expose the APIs.
You can add more computing power to your APM gateway.
Apigee is stable, and we have had the system running on Apigee servers for more than four years without any stability issues.
This is the best service we have used within Azure and it has high availability.
I can't guarantee its stability or flexibility until all our databases and financial systems are integrated.
Microsoft Azure API Management is very stable.
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.
The service is extensive and expensive, and this added flexibility would make it more manageable and less prone to errors.
Support for GraphQL, which is a different communication specification, needs to improve.
It's quite expensive, which could be a barrier for some users.
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.
Moreover, there are additional costs to the standard licensing fees.
The more enterprise-level features you go to, the more expensive it gets.
The solution is highly expensive.
The features for API security have been significant with Apigee.
It's a low-code, no-code model of API hosting.
The platform's most valuable features are its rule-based permissions and comprehensive API lifecycle management capabilities.
The ability to create a subscription model for APIs allows companies to monetize valuable data and share it securely.
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.”
Microsoft Azure API Management is essential for managing APIs, facilitating integration, and ensuring secure internal and external communication.
Organizations leverage Microsoft Azure API Management for seamless integration and effective API management. It supports microservices, legacy modernization, and platform orchestration in sectors like healthcare, telecom, and finance. Features such as developer portals and centralized libraries simplify usage. While it showcases strengths in hybrid cloud support and scalability, improvements are suggested in versioning and multi-tenancy.
What key features does it offer?Microsoft Azure API Management aids modernization across healthcare, telecom, and financial services by enabling legacy system updates and facilitating smooth platform orchestration.
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