IBM DataPower Gateway vs Postman comparison

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IBM DataPower Gateway

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM DataPower Gateway and Postman operate in the API management and testing domain. While IBM DataPower offers superior enterprise security features, Postman stands out due to its user-friendly interface and efficient workflow.

Features: IBM DataPower Gateway provides strong security features such as threat protection, API authentication, and comprehensive integration capabilities, making it ideal for enterprises needing high-level data protection. Postman focuses on ease of use in API testing and collaboration with features like automated testing, mock servers, and extensive API documentation.

Room for Improvement: IBM DataPower can improve in areas such as simplifying deployment processes, enhancing user interface designs, and expanding customer support options. Postman could enhance its API automation features, introduce more advanced testing capabilities, and offer better integration with other enterprise tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM DataPower Gateway's deployment is more complex, catering to enterprise-level security configurations, making it suitable for large companies. Postman offers a straightforward deployment process, appreciated for its quick setup and user-friendly nature, with readily available customer support and resources for rapid issue resolution.

Pricing and ROI: IBM DataPower requires a significant investment due to its advanced security and integration features, providing a substantial return on investment for enterprises. Postman, with its free and premium versions, presents a more budget-friendly option, delivering considerable ROI for development teams focused on API testing and collaboration. It appeals to a broader audience with its affordability and efficient feature set.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Postman Report (Updated: March 2025).

IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Postman

March 2025

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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

IBM DataPower Gateway

Ranking in API Management

7th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (4th), Application Infrastructure (6th), SOA Application Gateways (1st)

Postman

Ranking in API Management

11th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

API Monitoring Software (1st), API Testing Tools (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 3.9%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Postman is 0.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

API Management

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi

Co-Founder at tenekit

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.

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Anagha Mahadik

Product Development Manager at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

Solution simplifies web service testing with impressive speed and accessibility

It is very easy for me to use and I highly prefer it compared to SoapUI and other products for performing its job. It is more handy and faster. It has impacted us very nicely. Postman is used for free by us. I'm not sure if there might be a paid version for multiple users. It is a very good product used for development. It is easy to install, as well as to learn, particularly for new users, even if they are not developers. I taught my business analyst to use it. I just showed them once, and it was easy for them to understand. For example, I gave them the URL and request format and asked them to test independently. They were able to use it on their own and do their testing as well. It was a good experience, especially for generally smart people, like those we usually hire in our company. It is pretty easy to explain, and learning it is not complex.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's high-speed and it can be remotely administered via an API."

"The solution is very easy to work with."

"The product's most valuable features are AAA policies and security features."

"It is easy to use, easy to install, and it's resilient for high availability."

"The solution is straightforward and for large organizations, it functions well."

"I like the tool's security. Also, all functionalities are integrated within on platform."

"Since it is a gateway, it provides a lot of security features."

"My company has a good impression of IBM DataPower Gateway. What I like about it is that because it's an appliance, it's a turnkey solution that's very fast and out of the box. Compared to other gateways, I also like that IBM DataPower Gateway is function-rich. For example, for one of the projects, there was a need for specific transformation and security features available in IBM DataPower Gateway out of the box, so my team just needed to configure the appliance. There was no need for separate development, and I found it quite neat. Another valuable feature of IBM DataPower Gateway is that it's easy to integrate with other products."

More IBM DataPower Gateway pros

"The initial setup is simple."

"It is a very stable solution."

"Postman is easy to use and enables us to test all possible API testing scenarios."

"We use it for REST API testing. Feature-wise, it is pretty lightweight. It is pretty fast, and we don't have to do a lot of things. We can just simply go and post our endpoint, and it gives different kinds of authorizations. We usually use authentication 2.0, which is the most common industry practice. So, it has the support for authorization through 2.0."

"It is nice to have different workspaces. You have your personal workspace, and then you have a team workspace. In general, I like its UI. It is quite cool."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is Collections."

"Postman helps to write pre-request scripts and make a collection out of each request. You don’t have to spend time writing or copying the requests. The solution lets you integrate multiple environments and their features. Either the tool’s pro or premium version lets you do the merge and pull request for the Git directly."

"The product is easy to implement."

Cons

"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."

"It is a costly product."

"The product should be more adapted to the DevOps process."

"Making it more user-friendly would be an improvement."

"In the next release, I would like to see the product price reduced. It should be cheaper."

"They should improve the solution's clustering features."

"Small and medium-sized companies might look for cloud-hosted applications due to the cost."

"DataPower isn't the most user-friendly tool. It is not an easy tool to use. Some things could use better wizards to guide you through processes."

More IBM DataPower Gateway cons

"It would be beneficial to expand functionality with additional testing options."

"Postman needs more advanced data-driven testing."

"I would like that if you click on one of the fields you should be able to see the entire row of fields, names, and values."

"Testing API is pretty straightforward in Postman, but it falls short when testing web services. For example, when we test web services, there is a visual component that we can import in SoapUI but not in Postman."

"There is no support for the testing of the SOAP APIs."

"An area that needs some improvement would be to allow multiple windows with different collections to be open at the same time."

"We'd like to see videos or user-friendly reference documentation to help us figure out the solution or troubleshoot issues on our own."

"If they could implement auto-validations and assertions from SoapUI, that would be a very good feature."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive in comparison to other products."

"Most customers' use case budgets are not inlined with the price of IBM DataPower Gateway. It is too expensive."

"The cost is very high and requires all five components in the API management solution."

"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."

"The licensing cost is very 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."

"The appliance is a bit on the expensive side for the workloads that are not too high."

"It's expensive when you compare it with others."

More IBM DataPower Gateway pricing and cost advice

"We are currently using the free version, but we have plans to buy a license."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"We are using the free version that is available."

"The solution is open-source and free."

"It is free."

"We are using its free version."

"We use the open-source version. They introduced a new licensing model where your company must subscribe to their services if you're using it for business purposes. However, I think they charge too much if you're only using the basic features. It limits what your organization can do if you're not a paying customer."

"Postman is a free service."

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

30%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

16%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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...

How does Postman compare with Apache JMeter?

Postman lets you easily define variables, which then get updated automatically. This is a huge time-saver and makes processes very efficient. We can also export the test cases we create and share t...

What do you like most about Postman?

The product is easy to implement.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Postman?

Postman is open-source, so the cost is minimal compared to commercial platforms.

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Product Reports

Download IBM DataPower Gateway product report

IBM DataPower Gateway

April 2025

Download Postman product report

March 2025

Also Known As

WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower

No data available

Overview

IBM DataPower Gateway is a robust, secure next-generation enterprise-grade single multichannel API gateway that supplies dynamic access, integration, control, and outstanding security. The solution is available in a broad range of workload capabilities, including application programming interface (API), service oriented architecture (SOA), B2B, cloud, web, and mobile. These dynamic capabilities ensure users are able to quickly increase the reach of an organization's critical IT resources to new channels, which will provide shareholders, team members, and clients with safe, secure access at all times.

DataPower Gateway is very flexible and is widely available in virtual, cloud, traditional, physical, Docker, and Linux form factors.

IBM DataPower Gateway Features

IBM DataPower Gateway has many value-added features. Some of these features are included below:

Control: The solution provides decision point authorization and authentication for all standards, including Lightweight Direct Access Protocol (LDAP) and Open Authorization (OAuth), which allow for better access control across an organization’s entire network.
DataPower dashboard: The dashboard is specifically designed to enhance performance and determine problematic processes. The solution provides intuitive real-time performance transparency to diagnose operational and performance anomalies and offer repair and restoration recommendations.
Enhanced messaging: Users are able to easily mediate messaging and protocols by incorporating the best of today’s traditional and modern application standards.
Integration: IBM DataPower Gateway offers super fast mainframe connectivity, database connectivity, transport protocol bridging, content-based routing, and any-to-any message transformation, ensuring secure and immediate connect service.

IBM DataPower Gateway Benefits

IBM DataPower Gateway provides many benefits. Some of those benefits include:

Flexibility: The solution is easy to use and configure and provides for a pleasant, intuitive overall user experience. The solution can immediately be used out of the box, which makes overall process management simple.
Protection: The solution provides sturdy continuous service protection and application performance using robust powerful routing and traffic control.
Security: The solution’s enterprise-grade De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) ready gateway enables users to enforce the desired runtime application security across all messaging protocols.
Profitability: The solution’s design ensures significant reduction of development costs in addition to the streamlining of overall operations. Users are able to achieve reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and experience a near-immediate ROI.

Reviews from Real Users

“My company has a good impression of IBM DataPower Gateway. What I like about it is that because it's an appliance, it's a turnkey solution that's very fast and out of the box. Another valuable feature of IBM DataPower Gateway is that it's easy to integrate with other products.”- Bálint T., Solution Manager at Intalion

“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. From a security point of view, being an appliance in the DMC zone, IBM DataPower Gateway will take care of the entire security angle for the infrastructure.” - Sathyan K., Founder/Director at perfTech Solutions Pvt Ltd

IBM

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