IBM DataPower Gateway vs SwaggerHub comparison

IBM and SmartBear are both solutions in the API Management category. IBM is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.2, while SmartBear is ranked #14 with an average rating of 7.8. IBM holds a 3.1% mindshare in APIM, compared to SmartBear’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of SmartBear users who would recommend it.

IBM DataPower Gateway

Read 31 IBM DataPower Gateway reviews

5,240 Views
3,825 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

SwaggerHub

Read 13 SwaggerHub reviews

1,522 Views
1,522 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

IBM DataPower Gateway

SwaggerHub

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM DataPower Gateway and SwaggerHub are competing in API management and integration. IBM DataPower Gateway excels in security, making it ideal for enterprises emphasizing data protection. In contrast, SwaggerHub leads with its extensive API design capabilities, providing flexibility in development.

Features: IBM DataPower Gateway offers robust encryption, access control mechanisms, and seamless integration with IBM solutions. SwaggerHub provides user-friendly API design, collaboration tools, and extensive OpenAPI capabilities.

Room for Improvement: IBM DataPower Gateway could enhance its deployment simplicity and user interface. Improvements in cost-effectiveness and broader integration features would benefit SwaggerHub, along with refining its documentation accessibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM DataPower Gateway has a complex deployment process focused on security configurations, supported by strong enterprise-level customer service. SwaggerHub offers a straightforward deployment process with accessible support aligned with development needs.

Pricing and ROI: IBM DataPower Gateway involves significant initial costs due to its enterprise security focus, providing long-term ROI through secure operations. SwaggerHub, while priced higher, offers ROI through enhanced development efficiency and collaboration tools.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM DataPower Gateway vs. SwaggerHub Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway vs. SwaggerHub

February 2026

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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

10th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (5th), Application Infrastructure (7th), SOA Application Gateways (1st)

SwaggerHub

Ranking in API Management

14th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the API Management category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 3.1%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SwaggerHub is 1.5%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

API Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM DataPower Gateway	3.1%
SwaggerHub	1.5%
Other	95.4%

API Management

Featured Reviews

AkshaySawant

Manager at CSB Bank Ltd

Security features excel but development limitations emerge

We are using the IBM DataPower Gateway for security purposes. As per the development perspective, there are some limitations with IBM DataPower Gateway because it only supports XML and XSLT language, but it does not support the Java language. This is the only limitation of the IBM DataPower Gateway. For the authentication and authorization purpose, we can use the IBM DataPower Gateway. It's a very good product. We are mostly using the IBM DataPower Gateway for security purposes and load balancing purposes. If we are handling the load for a particular server, then we can use the IBM DataPower Gateway. The IBM DataPower Gateway is mostly used for security purposes. If we have some APIs and we are using some security for those APIs, then we can use it. It can also be used as a load balancer. It's also used for certificate management, user management purposes, authentication, and authorization. For routing, the IBM DataPower Gateway has multiple URL-based routing and content-based routing capabilities. If we have multiple URLs, then we can use an XML script. Using the XSLT language, we can configure multiple URLs and implement URL-based routing. Content-based routing means if we have multiple requests, we can route the request to a particular URL. For this, we need to use the XSLT language only. We can't use XML, Java, or other scripting languages. With IBM DataPower Gateway, we are using all the APIs. All APIs have been configured on the gateway. We have configured the particular TLS profile and some TLS client profiles as well. Using that TLS profile, we have configured the APIs and authentication. We have configured some tokens also, including JWT tokens and different types of auth tokens. There is also a rate limiting feature which we use for handling API loads.

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Manish Indupuri

senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Has streamlined API documentation and integration workflows across cross-functional teams

Documenting SwaggerHub has a standard and consistent structure of API definitions, and it automatically generates interactive documentation which helps the developers to understand everything. There are certain areas where SwaggerHub can go beyond here as formatting options for documentation pages are restricted, and the import and export options of API collections are complex in SwaggerHub. It provides various collaboration tools where we can work and do it. The strong validation against the API maintains conformity and reduces errors. That part is very great in SwaggerHub. Overall, scalability and stability-wise, it varies high compared to the competitors, but there are still certain areas where competitors are providing various customizations. SwaggerHub can understand those aspects and implement them as well. The complex import and export of API calls and collaborations can be challenging in SwaggerHub. If they can make it easier for us, that would be great. Their performance is degraded if there is too much load on the API. The customization and doc formatting options for documentation pages are restricted in SwaggerHub. A few of my teammates have complained that they find the UI unintuitive where it requires multiple clicks for simple tasks. SwaggerHub is a great tool, but these limitations can be addressed to make things better and easier.

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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

"We are mostly using the IBM DataPower Gateway for security purposes and load balancing purposes."

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

"The most valuable features for our business include the ability to monitor and log data transactions and handle multiple request at an enterprise level."

"What I like most is the stability."

"I like the API Gateway feature."

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

"I like the API Gateway feature."

"I like that it is very stable, and we never experience any downtime."

More IBM DataPower Gateway pros

"The scalability is endless."

"I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten."

"It is a stable solution."

"The product's initial setup phase was easy and not at all difficult."

"You can click & play and add the notation in a human-readable form. Spotlight is also very good in the graphical design of APIs."

"SwaggerHub plays a crucial role in order to bring teams and automate things faster and also reduce the man-hours and increase the work efficiency."

"One of the best features of SwaggerHub is how it allows me to create APIs and control the evolution of APIs within an organization."

"SwaggerHub has significantly improved how my organization designs, documents, and manages APIs, centralizing API management so that all API definitions are stored in one location, which makes it easy for stakeholders, developers, QA, DevOps, and products to access the latest version."

More SwaggerHub pros

Cons

"IBM DataPower Gateway is quite big for smaller organizations, looking at different types of clients who are virtually assisted in this, I would say it's not really a good product for smaller firms."

"The two biggest issues of this solution are the complexity and the maintenance procedures."

"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."

"The DCDR process should be less complex."

"For the workloads that are not too high, appliance is a little bit expensive."

"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."

"Its support services could be better."

"It is a costly product."

More IBM DataPower Gateway cons

"It could be more intuitive compared to one of its competitors."

"At some point, we were missing some tagging of the APIs, and we could not do that."

"The customization and doc formatting options for documentation pages are restricted in SwaggerHub."

"SwaggerHub's UI needs to be improved as it looks very old school."

"It has limited functionality...Unfortunately, some of its features are not what we need."

"More integration and usability with the cloud microservices would be nice"

"We have to use additional tools to test APIs."

"The review process should be improved. There seem to be some gaps, at least for us, for the editing part because we would like to have a full request review mechanism. They support some comments, but it is really hard to manage those comments. We would like to use the full request. Therefore, we are now looking to integrate with repositories. It has integration with Bitbucket and GitHub, but we have some internal constraints, and we need to move some of the repositories to GitHub. Our source code is on-premise in Bitbucket, and it was a bit of a problem for us to integrate. Now we are transitioning our repositories to GitHub, and hopefully, we can enable the integration. This will probably solve the problem with the review and approval. Its customization should also be improved. There are limitations around the support for the developer portal. There should be more customization options for the website that you can use as a developer portal. Currently, it has only Swagger UI with minimal customization. You cannot actually add additional pages and documentation for explaining concepts and general things. That's why we have started to look around to see what other tools are doing. They should also allow tagging on the API. We would like to add some tagging on the API to reflect certain things. Currently, any metadata that you would like to have has to be a part of the spec. You cannot do anything else. It should also have support for Open API 3.1, which was released at the beginning of the year. It would be great to be able to switch to that."

More SwaggerHub cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As far as I know, they have a perpetual license for this product. They are paying perpetual fees rather than an annual subscription or annual pricing."

"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."

"This product is a bit expensive as IBM products are costly assets. However, for enterprise customers it is a worthwhile investment."

"The tool's initial costing is expensive for small banks and financial institutions."

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

"The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."

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

"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."

More IBM DataPower Gateway pricing and cost advice

"The tool is cheap."

"It has a yearly subscription, but I am not sure."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	17

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Large Enterprise	9

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM DataPower Gateway?

This product is definitely expensive because if any issue occurs in the live environment or production environment, and our organization faces some issue with the IBM DataPower Gateway, then the IB...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM DataPower Gateway?

The developer portal should be an integrated part of IBM DataPower Gateway to improve it. I think it is fine as is, and maybe no other additional features should be included in the next release. My...

See all answers

What needs improvement with SwaggerHub?

We have tried automated code generation several times, and I think maybe some people are still using it somewhere, but it is not something that we do as a consolidated practice. At some point, we w...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SwaggerHub?

We still use SwaggerHub, but we did not change much in the way we are using it, meaning just limited functionality. For us, SwaggerHub serves as a central place to publish the documentation for our...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering SwaggerHub?

As a technical person, I cannot comment on the money side, but we did not necessarily look to use the whole feature set of SwaggerHub. We do not do editing of the APIs in SwaggerHub; we basically u...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 40% of the time

Apigee vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 7% of the time

Kong Gateway Enterprise vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 5% of the time

Amazon API Gateway vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 3% of the time

Microsoft Azure API Management vs IBM DataPower Gateway

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM DataPower Gateway Competitors

MuleSoft API Manager vs SwaggerHub

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Azure API Management vs SwaggerHub

Compared 10% of the time

Apigee vs SwaggerHub

Compared 10% of the time

Postman Enterprise vs SwaggerHub

Compared 9% of the time

Stoplight vs SwaggerHub

Compared 6% of the time

More SwaggerHub Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway

February 2026

Download IBM DataPower Gateway product report

Buyer's Guide

SwaggerHub

January 2026

Download SwaggerHub product report

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

SwaggerHub is an integrated API Development platform, built for teams, that brings the core capabilities of the Swagger framework to design, build, document and deploy APIs. SwaggerHub enables development teams to collaborate and coordinate the entire lifecycle of an API with the flexibility to integrate with the toolset of your choice.

SmartBear

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity

Sonic, Zuora, Woolworths, CrowdFlower

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway vs. SwaggerHub

February 2026

Free Report: IBM DataPower Gateway vs. SwaggerHub

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DataPower Gateway vs. SwaggerHub and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.

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