In WSO2 API Manager, we had little flexibility and were restricted to a specific software or tool. The entire API publication or API creation was done using a particular pipeline we had developed. It was automated in our organization, but it would be really great to have a pipeline rather than doing manual entries. I'm aware that WSO2 has some Groovy scripts that can be run to create the APIs. However, we can improve it and make it more user-friendly or easy to use.
WSO2 team recommends mTLS as security. Recently, my company faced some issues when implementing mTLS between the DB and front-end applications. My company needs Technical help from WSO2's team to deal with the aforementioned area. WSO2 team should provide better guidance in documentations to implement this.
In the future releases of the product, I hope WSO2 API Manager remains available as an open-source product. In the Gulf region, there is a great need for open-source technologies. WSO2 API Manager should be always available to users as an open-source product that is license-free. In that case, it will be very much appreciated and used in the Gulf region and Saudi Arabia.
WSO2 API Manager has some support problems and can be a little complex. So our developer teams decided to use 3scale or Kong instead. We found WSO2 API Manager to be a bit complex. So, in terms of complexity, WSO2 API Manager has some challenges. Also, there is a bit of an issue with the pricing and license of WSO2. It's a little high.
They are developing another platform called Choreo that allows you to create API itself using the WSO2 programming language Ballerina. It would be great if they added a direct connection between Choreo and API Manager, that would be great. I think they are working on that, but I'm not sure.
They've already improved a lot of features between versions six and seven. The user interface could be a bit better. Sometimes you have different visual aspects when you change from one screen to another.
WSO2 API Manager can be improved a lot relating to usability. It is a bit heavy. The workflow is more complicated in terms of API creation and publishing.
Integration Architect at a tech consulting company with 201-500 employees
Real User
2022-05-26T13:29:49Z
May 26, 2022
We had some problems with the reverse proxy not being able to invoke fully qualified domain names, so we have to build some custom scripts to solve this issue. In the next release, WSO2 should make multifactor authentication simpler.
I would improve the product documentation. There are some gaps, and it can be difficult to find the proper documentation for the product if you need to solve something. There are some new features, but we are not currently using the most recent version. We're looking forward to the new release. The initial setup could be simplified.
Open Bannking,API and SOA Technical Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2022-02-09T07:49:46Z
Feb 9, 2022
WSO2 API Manager could increase their security compliance. Here in India, the government is coming with a lot of regulations and required security features which the solutions have to upgrade to meet this requirement. Most of the solutions sell API management as a security solution, but they have to improve the security features. There are a lot of modules and it can be complex.
Product Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2021-11-03T11:44:32Z
Nov 3, 2021
The user interface needs to improve, it is a bit outdated. There is an Affiliate Marketing monetization in Google Apigee that you would like to use in this solution but is not available. We end up having to build an alternative to get the job done. This feature should be added to this solution.
Chief Technology Officer at Swifta Systems and Services
Real User
Top 10
2021-09-29T15:48:00Z
Sep 29, 2021
In version 2.5, there is room for improvement on the UI. That may have been addressed in the upgrade to 3.2, which uses the latest front-end framework that's commonly used in other solutions like JIRA. I would need to play around with the upgrade, but I believe the UI issue has been addressed. I can only speak about my experience with the 2.5 version because that's the one I've been able to use extensively. I can say that user management is not really flexible. So, if I want to create 1,000 store users, I can't do it as a publisher. You have to register as a store user using the store URL. It would be nice if API Manager had that functionality as an administrator, so you would have a user management interface where you can create store users.
CTO Cloud Division at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2021-02-26T14:54:45Z
Feb 26, 2021
The user interface provides all functionalities to configure and manage the product, however its usability, espacially for first-time users, is a little bit "rough" compared to the UI of other commercial API Managers
Sr. Technology Specialist at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
2021-02-10T09:52:46Z
Feb 10, 2021
They don't have different URLs for administrators. They should have one in place like Kong. For example, Kong has Konga as an administrative URL, where everything is available in one place for submissions and subscribers. But with WSO2, they have exposed it on a different port, and if I want to publish, I have to open a different URL with a different port for publishers and subscribers. It'll help if they can combine it on one port. WSO2 API Manager could also be somewhat cheaper.
Project Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
2021-01-21T19:14:41Z
Jan 21, 2021
I have been using the older version of the solution and they have made a lot of changes in the newer versions. I tried version 3.2 and it is easier to navigate the APIs and even to manage the API. From what I have experienced from the versions I have tried, they could improve on the multi-tenant environments to allow some kind of SSO single sign-on between tenant. This is one great way to improve this product.
From a product perspective, the first thing is that although the documentation provided by WSO2 is good, it could be much better. We're in the middle of a complex migration, moving away from VMs to Kubernetes with the latest version of WSO2 and good documentation is essential to us right now. If you are doing some basic implementation, that's easy enough to do with the current documentation, but suppose you are stuck with an error or you're engineering a complex scenario. In this case, when diving deep into the documentation, it's very helpful to find more information on how things are connected, what each file does, and what the various configuration settings do. Although they do have paid support which may help in cases where documentation is lacking, we aren't paying for a support license at the moment so we would definitely like to see better documentation for those in our kind of situation. Especially since we're using WSO2 API Manager to such a large extent. Beyond documentation, they have provided a caching mechanism which I believe could also use some improvement. Once you have set up and implemented WSO2, caching becomes very important and I think they could work on the cache parameters, etc., to make it easier to work with. Regarding the code itself, there are some bugs which we have encountered among the many different enterprise-level scenarios we have faced. Once again, because we are not paying for the licensed version, it becomes more difficult to request changes and bug fixes to the WSO2 codebase. So, for example, when we find a bug, we would like to be able go to GitHub and get better help on creating a solution that we can quickly push into production.
In terms of what can be improved, we are doing a proof of concept and we found some problems with the migration process from the last version to the 3.2. We have problems with the migration of the tenants.
I think it would be very unfair for me to answer this question because we are running a very outdated system (they might have improved it a lot with their newer versions), but I'm going to try it anyway. I think they could greatly improve the general UX with their solutions because when you manage different components that are meant to work together, it's very difficult. You have to deal with two completely unrelated interfaces. Perhaps they should include a tool to assist with migrating to Azure.
Integration Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2020-11-19T07:24:43Z
Nov 19, 2020
I would like it to be a more convenient development platform with the ability to write orchestrations and so on. Our problem with this product is that in my country, we are the only enterprise that has been using this product. We're missing a lot of knowledge from colleagues to consult with, and we also aren't able to recruit people with relevant skills. It is a big problem. The small team that is maintaining this product is the only team that can actually relate to any technical issue. The support that we're getting from the company is not great. There is also a cultural gap there because they're from Sri Lanka, and it is not easy. They're putting in a lot of effort, but they are not meeting our expectations.
Business&Integration Arch Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Real User
2020-10-14T06:37:00Z
Oct 14, 2020
I'm using the open-source version, therefore my comments are basically related to just the open-source version. I specify this, due to the fact that, if you have a subscription, you can have access to enterprise support. I need to work within the open-source community to get answers. When I deal with the stack overflow, it's a complex item that could easily be addressed by technical support, and yet, I don't have access to them on my current system. It would be helpful if the solution offered more communication about their technology and services. It would be useful for those of us on the open-source option. Since the product is updated periodically there are lots of provisions. The documentation could be stronger and maybe the community support could be stronger. I don't have the luxury of turning to their in-house technical support to help me troubleshoot. I'm reliant on documentation and the community. The stability is pretty good, but it could be improved. It would be ideal, for our purposes, if the solution offered GraphQL support for the micro-gateway.
Lead Business Analyst at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
2020-08-23T08:17:18Z
Aug 23, 2020
Integration is an area that needs to be improved. In the next release, I would like to see a suite of applications, from other providers. They have many features that should be integrated to be a part of the WSO2 API Manager.
Chief Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2020-07-05T15:50:00Z
Jul 5, 2020
WSO2 API Manager is a little complex to use. I think the user interface could be improved. Additionally, the installation setup is a little complex. I think in future versions I would like to see some improvements in the system's installation.
Chief Technology Officer at Swifta Systems and Services
Real User
Top 10
2019-08-01T05:43:00Z
Aug 1, 2019
It is a very good product, but still, there are some things I think can be improved. I think the interface is the one that comes to mind first. The interface should be much more user-friendly and modern. If you look at other products and their modern user interfaces, you could see what the other companies are doing and what you could be doing. A nice look and feel is something that can impress a user, and it can be trendy and inviting. I think the user interface for now for the WSO2 is not really there yet. The one complaint I get from our business team is the same: they find it not that user-friendly and this makes it more difficult for them to use. It takes some experience to get around. Another feature which I love but can also be improved is usability in terms of switching across the different components of the product. You could have just the user management console and some adjustment in design would make us have less trouble navigating. But the components are all separate. You have to access the publisher console, and then they have a flash publisher. Then you have the store, and more. It is just many things you have to know. So there are different interfaces. I would love a situation where you should be able to just have a single interface where you're executing your role per security. Depending on the role you have, will determine what you can do. I don't have to switch across different interfaces before I could access the publisher using the same roles if I am assigned the privilege. Lastly, another feature I think is needed is in the area of customization. Before you can make any custom changes, you have to be very technical. But it's a bit difficult to make changes depending on what you need to accomplish. The documentation is also not that straight forward and could use work. You have to make a whole lot of changes to the framework. It's a framework, which I think is something that can be more efficient. It's not the common framework that you see in today's development as we have in other products. It is a custom framework that we use for the product. I think for now that really all of the problems are summarized by the interface. They need to invest more on the front end. I know sometimes people will want to work as a back-end guy and that should remain. I think they should invest more on the user interface, user experience to make it better for less technical people.
WSO2 API Manager is a comprehensive platform that allows organizations to design, publish, and manage APIs.
It provides a centralized interface for API governance, security, and analytics.
With features like API monetization and developer portal, it enables businesses to drive innovation and create new revenue streams.
One area for improvement is monitoring. Dashboards for application monitoring of the APIs would be beneficial, allowing us to check for faulty APIs.
In WSO2 API Manager, we had little flexibility and were restricted to a specific software or tool. The entire API publication or API creation was done using a particular pipeline we had developed. It was automated in our organization, but it would be really great to have a pipeline rather than doing manual entries. I'm aware that WSO2 has some Groovy scripts that can be run to create the APIs. However, we can improve it and make it more user-friendly or easy to use.
The solution’s interface should be more user-friendly.
The commercial aspect could be improved. Pricing varies with partners, so selecting the appropriate pricing can be challenging at times
WSO2 team recommends mTLS as security. Recently, my company faced some issues when implementing mTLS between the DB and front-end applications. My company needs Technical help from WSO2's team to deal with the aforementioned area. WSO2 team should provide better guidance in documentations to implement this.
In the future releases of the product, I hope WSO2 API Manager remains available as an open-source product. In the Gulf region, there is a great need for open-source technologies. WSO2 API Manager should be always available to users as an open-source product that is license-free. In that case, it will be very much appreciated and used in the Gulf region and Saudi Arabia.
The product hasn’t been updated for some time. I wonder if it has reached the end of its life and is no longer being maintained.
WSO2 API Manager should improve its marketplace subscription model and documentation in order to reach a higher level in the market.
The technical support must be improved.
WSO2 API Manager has some support problems and can be a little complex. So our developer teams decided to use 3scale or Kong instead. We found WSO2 API Manager to be a bit complex. So, in terms of complexity, WSO2 API Manager has some challenges. Also, there is a bit of an issue with the pricing and license of WSO2. It's a little high.
We've had some challenges with the professional support and licensing aspects of WSO.
They are developing another platform called Choreo that allows you to create API itself using the WSO2 programming language Ballerina. It would be great if they added a direct connection between Choreo and API Manager, that would be great. I think they are working on that, but I'm not sure.
They've already improved a lot of features between versions six and seven. The user interface could be a bit better. Sometimes you have different visual aspects when you change from one screen to another.
I'd like to see some new features and updated functionalities.
WSO2 API Manager can be improved a lot relating to usability. It is a bit heavy. The workflow is more complicated in terms of API creation and publishing.
We had some problems with the reverse proxy not being able to invoke fully qualified domain names, so we have to build some custom scripts to solve this issue. In the next release, WSO2 should make multifactor authentication simpler.
I would improve the product documentation. There are some gaps, and it can be difficult to find the proper documentation for the product if you need to solve something. There are some new features, but we are not currently using the most recent version. We're looking forward to the new release. The initial setup could be simplified.
WSO2 API Manager could improve the API approval system.
WSO2 API Manager could increase their security compliance. Here in India, the government is coming with a lot of regulations and required security features which the solutions have to upgrade to meet this requirement. Most of the solutions sell API management as a security solution, but they have to improve the security features. There are a lot of modules and it can be complex.
The user interface needs to improve, it is a bit outdated. There is an Affiliate Marketing monetization in Google Apigee that you would like to use in this solution but is not available. We end up having to build an alternative to get the job done. This feature should be added to this solution.
In version 2.5, there is room for improvement on the UI. That may have been addressed in the upgrade to 3.2, which uses the latest front-end framework that's commonly used in other solutions like JIRA. I would need to play around with the upgrade, but I believe the UI issue has been addressed. I can only speak about my experience with the 2.5 version because that's the one I've been able to use extensively. I can say that user management is not really flexible. So, if I want to create 1,000 store users, I can't do it as a publisher. You have to register as a store user using the store URL. It would be nice if API Manager had that functionality as an administrator, so you would have a user management interface where you can create store users.
Providing easy configuration for email and SMS notifications, layout and customization of admin and developer landing pages.
The user interface provides all functionalities to configure and manage the product, however its usability, espacially for first-time users, is a little bit "rough" compared to the UI of other commercial API Managers
They don't have different URLs for administrators. They should have one in place like Kong. For example, Kong has Konga as an administrative URL, where everything is available in one place for submissions and subscribers. But with WSO2, they have exposed it on a different port, and if I want to publish, I have to open a different URL with a different port for publishers and subscribers. It'll help if they can combine it on one port. WSO2 API Manager could also be somewhat cheaper.
I have been using the older version of the solution and they have made a lot of changes in the newer versions. I tried version 3.2 and it is easier to navigate the APIs and even to manage the API. From what I have experienced from the versions I have tried, they could improve on the multi-tenant environments to allow some kind of SSO single sign-on between tenant. This is one great way to improve this product.
From a product perspective, the first thing is that although the documentation provided by WSO2 is good, it could be much better. We're in the middle of a complex migration, moving away from VMs to Kubernetes with the latest version of WSO2 and good documentation is essential to us right now. If you are doing some basic implementation, that's easy enough to do with the current documentation, but suppose you are stuck with an error or you're engineering a complex scenario. In this case, when diving deep into the documentation, it's very helpful to find more information on how things are connected, what each file does, and what the various configuration settings do. Although they do have paid support which may help in cases where documentation is lacking, we aren't paying for a support license at the moment so we would definitely like to see better documentation for those in our kind of situation. Especially since we're using WSO2 API Manager to such a large extent. Beyond documentation, they have provided a caching mechanism which I believe could also use some improvement. Once you have set up and implemented WSO2, caching becomes very important and I think they could work on the cache parameters, etc., to make it easier to work with. Regarding the code itself, there are some bugs which we have encountered among the many different enterprise-level scenarios we have faced. Once again, because we are not paying for the licensed version, it becomes more difficult to request changes and bug fixes to the WSO2 codebase. So, for example, when we find a bug, we would like to be able go to GitHub and get better help on creating a solution that we can quickly push into production.
In terms of what can be improved, we are doing a proof of concept and we found some problems with the migration process from the last version to the 3.2. We have problems with the migration of the tenants.
I think it would be very unfair for me to answer this question because we are running a very outdated system (they might have improved it a lot with their newer versions), but I'm going to try it anyway. I think they could greatly improve the general UX with their solutions because when you manage different components that are meant to work together, it's very difficult. You have to deal with two completely unrelated interfaces. Perhaps they should include a tool to assist with migrating to Azure.
I would like it to be a more convenient development platform with the ability to write orchestrations and so on. Our problem with this product is that in my country, we are the only enterprise that has been using this product. We're missing a lot of knowledge from colleagues to consult with, and we also aren't able to recruit people with relevant skills. It is a big problem. The small team that is maintaining this product is the only team that can actually relate to any technical issue. The support that we're getting from the company is not great. There is also a cultural gap there because they're from Sri Lanka, and it is not easy. They're putting in a lot of effort, but they are not meeting our expectations.
I'm using the open-source version, therefore my comments are basically related to just the open-source version. I specify this, due to the fact that, if you have a subscription, you can have access to enterprise support. I need to work within the open-source community to get answers. When I deal with the stack overflow, it's a complex item that could easily be addressed by technical support, and yet, I don't have access to them on my current system. It would be helpful if the solution offered more communication about their technology and services. It would be useful for those of us on the open-source option. Since the product is updated periodically there are lots of provisions. The documentation could be stronger and maybe the community support could be stronger. I don't have the luxury of turning to their in-house technical support to help me troubleshoot. I'm reliant on documentation and the community. The stability is pretty good, but it could be improved. It would be ideal, for our purposes, if the solution offered GraphQL support for the micro-gateway.
Integration is an area that needs to be improved. In the next release, I would like to see a suite of applications, from other providers. They have many features that should be integrated to be a part of the WSO2 API Manager.
WSO2 API Manager is a little complex to use. I think the user interface could be improved. Additionally, the installation setup is a little complex. I think in future versions I would like to see some improvements in the system's installation.
It is a very good product, but still, there are some things I think can be improved. I think the interface is the one that comes to mind first. The interface should be much more user-friendly and modern. If you look at other products and their modern user interfaces, you could see what the other companies are doing and what you could be doing. A nice look and feel is something that can impress a user, and it can be trendy and inviting. I think the user interface for now for the WSO2 is not really there yet. The one complaint I get from our business team is the same: they find it not that user-friendly and this makes it more difficult for them to use. It takes some experience to get around. Another feature which I love but can also be improved is usability in terms of switching across the different components of the product. You could have just the user management console and some adjustment in design would make us have less trouble navigating. But the components are all separate. You have to access the publisher console, and then they have a flash publisher. Then you have the store, and more. It is just many things you have to know. So there are different interfaces. I would love a situation where you should be able to just have a single interface where you're executing your role per security. Depending on the role you have, will determine what you can do. I don't have to switch across different interfaces before I could access the publisher using the same roles if I am assigned the privilege. Lastly, another feature I think is needed is in the area of customization. Before you can make any custom changes, you have to be very technical. But it's a bit difficult to make changes depending on what you need to accomplish. The documentation is also not that straight forward and could use work. You have to make a whole lot of changes to the framework. It's a framework, which I think is something that can be more efficient. It's not the common framework that you see in today's development as we have in other products. It is a custom framework that we use for the product. I think for now that really all of the problems are summarized by the interface. They need to invest more on the front end. I know sometimes people will want to work as a back-end guy and that should remain. I think they should invest more on the user interface, user experience to make it better for less technical people.
Support GPRS protocol.