Report:

Magic Quadrant for API Management

Top Vendor Products for API Management in 2023

• Axway
• Google Cloud (Apigee)
• IBM
• Kong
• Microsoft
• Salesforce (MuleSoft)
• Software AG
• Tyk

API Management Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

• Axway - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Amplify Platform enables users to manage and govern APIs across multiple cloud environments and platforms. It provides functionality for discovery, subscription, traceability and productization to other vendors' API gateways, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
  • Product strategy: Axway continues to expand its already diverse portfolio of products to address a wide range of deployment models and use cases, from traditional integration to transformational initiatives. Axway complements its robust API management capabilities with the expertise of its Catalyst strategy team, and with customer engagements to help organizations advance their API strategy.
  • Business model: Axway uses acquisitions and partnerships to improve and complement its products by providing integration, visibility and greater flexibility to customers. Its key partners include Stoplight (for API design) and Cloudentity (for consent management).

  Cons:

  • Sales execution: Axway's strong product vision and product strategy did not translate to strong sales execution. Based on Gartner's revenue estimates for API management for 2022, Axway's market share declined. We estimate that it is now the 10th largest API management vendor by market share.
  • Marketing execution: Axway has a strong track record as a vendor focused on managed file transfer and traditional B2B integration use cases. However, its mind share among software engineers, developer communities and API product leaders is limited.
  • Operations: Despite Axway's product capabilities to support cloud-based API management; and its ongoing strategy to move customers to SaaS/subscription offerings, nearly three-quarters of Axway's clients are running its product on-premises. Prospective customers should evaluate Axway's cloud and hybrid offerings to ensure they align with their cloud strategy.


• Google Cloud (Apigee) - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product strategy: Gartner clients report that Apigee's strategic services and support for creating external-facing API products are strong. Apigee provides targeted solutions for the financial services/banking, retail and healthcare sectors.
  • Vertical/industry strategy: Google provides a strong set of industry API accelerators. In particular, its open banking solution — Apigee open banking APIx — draws on customer deployments worldwide, including in India for Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
  • Pricing: Google Apigee has a simple pricing strategy that supports subscription and pay-as-you-go models to accommodate a high volume of APIs, and does not limit the number of individual APIs or users. This pricing model is especially appealing to large enterprises.

  Cons:

  • Market understanding: Apigee is primarily designed for the API management needs of large enterprises, although it also has capabilities for self-service midsize to small deployments. Organizations seeking a simpler API management solution may prefer a lightweight alternative with less capabilities.
  • Sales strategy: Google's primary sales strategy focuses on Apigee X, its SaaS offering on Google Cloud. Customers wanting to deploy API management entirely on-premises or on other cloud platforms should evaluate Apigee hybrid or alternatives.
  • Innovation: Google has recently been focused on innovation in generative AI, as well as in its separate API security and integration products, rather than on innovation in Apigee's core API management features.


• IBM - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Deployment flexibility: IBM offers strong support for hybrid, multicloud and on-premises deployments. It provides the flexibility to deploy API Connect components together or separately across VMware, Red Hat OpenShift and other Kubernetes environments. It can also be deployed on cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, GCP and IBM Cloud.
  • Product capabilities: IBM API Connect has built on top of an already strong security capability by partnering with Noname Security, an advanced API security offering. This chargeable feature adds real-time behavior analysis and anomaly detection, as well as ML-powered handling of malicious traffic. IBM has added AutoTest Assist to its development environment, enabling developers to test APIs without having to write any test cases.
  • API design tools: IBM offers a strong set of capabilities for designing, testing and productizing APIs. A user can bring their own APIs or use IBM's API design interface to design and manage APIs. IBM's product is tailored to distinct design personas, and its strong mocking and linting capabilities round out a well-integrated environment.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy: As IBM adds new capabilities via acquisitions and partnerships, these enhanced capabilities add more complexity to an already complicated deployment model. For example, it offers two separate development environments: the API Connect UI, which is part of the API Connect offering, and the App Connect Designer UI for application integration scenarios, which is not a part of API Connect and must be licensed separately.
  • Customer experience: The complexity of deploying IBM API Connect can make it difficult for prospective customers to use outside of traditional IBM customer environments and industries. In particular, API Connect is typically used with Cloud Pak to provide extra Integration capabilities, but adds to the complexity. Prospective customers should carefully evaluate deployment models including IBM's SaaS options to determine suitability.
  • Sales strategy: IBM focuses on selling API Connect to its existing customer base and within the verticals it knows, especially banking and financial services. Outside of these core areas, API Connect sales have been relatively limited, despite its efforts to leverage digital channels and product-led growth.


• Kong - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Kong takes a developer-focused approach by offering an API management solution with high deployment flexibility, programmability and performance. As a result of its developer focus, Kong is popular in organizations where developers choose an API management solution.
  • Product strategy: Kong offers a robust solution that includes Kong Gateway, Kong Insomnia for design and testing, and Kong Mesh for service mesh. Customers and partners can also use Kong's plug-in architecture to add capabilities that enhance the solution.
  • Marketing execution: Kong has improved its visibility in the API management market in recent years. Kong consistently makes customers' vendor shortlists, and the company continues to raise its profile through partnerships (such as with AWS).

  Cons:

  • Pricing: The number of services managed is a key factor in Kong's pricing. As a result, customers with a large number of infrequently called APIs may prefer an alternative solution that prices primarily on call volume.
  • Offering strategy: Kong's emphasis on its service mesh and API gateway is less appealing to business users aiming to productize APIs or create API marketplaces.
  • Industry strategy: Kong lacks vertical solutions or an offering message that would appeal to particular industries. However, they offer plugins that may extend product capabilities. Prospective customers with industry-specific requirements should carefully evaluate if Kong is suitable for their needs.


• Microsoft - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product offering: Azure API Management received strong product satisfaction scores in Gartner client inquiries and in reviews on Gartner's Peer Insights platform. Azure API Management provides simple and intuitive developer and administrator interfaces, management API and command line tools. Its developer portal is based on the Paperbits open-source content management system. These features make it appealing to developers.
  • Business model: Azure API Management is the default choice for many Microsoft Azure customers, and Microsoft focuses on selling its API management offering to new and existing Azure customers. The user base of Azure API Management continues to grow as more organizations adopt Azure cloud services.
  • Geographic strategy: Azure API Management is offered across all Azure regions and availability zones. The Azure portal is available in 18 languages and provides documentation in more than 50 languages. The offering's Premium tier supports multiregion deployments.

  Cons:

  • Marketing execution: Microsoft's marketing and go-to-market activities for Azure API Management are delivered primarily in the context of other Azure services. Prospective customers might overlook Azure API Management because of its limited visibility, even if they are Microsoft Azure customers.
  • Sales strategy: Azure API Management is rarely adopted as a stand-alone product. It is almost exclusively used in conjunction with other Azure services. Few customers use Azure API Management outside of the cloud, despite its ability to deploy the API gateway in a hybrid fashion.
  • Innovation: Microsoft lags most competitors in adding new capabilities. While it has a roadmap and added synthetic GraphQL capabilities to enable GraphQL in front of older SOAP services, it has not released any substantial, innovative or market leading features in the recent past.


• Salesforce (MuleSoft) - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: MuleSoft provides capabilities to address current practices in API management. This is demonstrated with its new API governance product, enhanced API design capabilities and GraphQL support, as well as continued advancements with its Anypoint Flex Gateway to protect non-Mulesoft APIs. MuleSoft is also a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for iPaaS, highlighting MuleSoft's understanding that managing APIs for integration initiatives is central for many organizations.
  • Sales strategy: MuleSoft leverages the strong market presence of its parent company Salesforce and uses it to influence buyers in the API management market. It also provides a suite of services for MuleSoft implementation, consulting and training, and its Center for Enablement teams help to ensure successful new customer onboarding.
  • Operations: MuleSoft processed 200 billion transactions in February 2023. It is hosted in AWS and is distributed globally across availability zones. MuleSoft offers industry-leading SLAs and support plans for its customers.

  Cons:

  • Pricing: MuleSoft introduced new pricing to address long-standing concerns related to its core-based pricing. The new strategy has the potential to reduce price-related barriers for small- to medium-size implementations, and ease migration of existing customers away from previous pricing models. However, this new pricing model has been slow to take hold.
  • Innovation: MuleSoft's recent focus has been to advance its universal API management capabilities to support distributed API management needs. While MuleSoft is responsive in delivering capabilities to support contemporary API management practices, its features are largely reactive — not innovative.
  • Offering strategy: MuleSoft's packaging of products has undergone several changes recently. Some of its components are renamed; some of its add-ons are now packaged differently; and some new but seemingly parallel capabilities are added. These changes can be confusing to prospects looking to identify the right composition of components to meet their needs, as well as for existing clients looking to renew their agreements.


• Software AG - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product strategy: Software AG's API management offering provides strong support for a wide range of capabilities, including API design and implementation, versioning and governance, security, consumption, and microservices. Its webMethods AppMesh platform and microgateway enable customers to build APIs using a modern microservices approach, with support for introspecting and securing of Istio- and Kubernetes-based microservices.
  • Market understanding: Software AG's webMethods offering is well-suited for diverse developer use cases, including integration, API productization, B2B ecosystems and microservices-based application modernization. Its April 2022 acquisition of StreamSets, a data integration vendor, further strengthened its product portfolio.
  • Sales execution: Software AG has established itself as a revenue leader in multiple regions by providing strong customer support, building a wide geographic presence and offering localization features. Gartner's revenue estimates for API management show Software AG had one of the top three revenues for Latin America, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa in 2022.

  Cons:

  • Business model: In July 2023, private investment firm Silver Lake secured the majority of shares in Software AG, with the intent to delist the company. While Software AG's products remain strong and viable, prospective customers should review any changes in Software AG's strategy and roadmap during this transition to ensure continued alignment with their organization's needs.
  • Marketing execution: Compared with other Leaders, Gartner sees fewer clients evaluating Software AG's stand-alone API management platform in competitive bids — despite Software AG's continuing efforts to rebrand itself as an API-first solution vendor.
  • Sales strategy: Software AG's API management offering is closely linked to its webMethods integration platform. This approach is attractive to organizations that wish to manage APIs for integration use cases, especially existing webMethods customers, but it may not resonate with organizations that use APIs for software engineering initiatives.


• Tyk - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Tyk markets its solution to developers as a simpler, more productive, and less expensive alternative to its larger competitors. Tyk's positioning and pricing flexibility appeal to customers that are dissatisfied with the higher cost of other API management solutions.
  • Product strategy: Tyk's Universal Data Graph interface provides strong capabilities for GraphQL support. This feature helps differentiate Tyk from the more fully featured offerings of larger vendors.
  • Pricing: Tyk attracts developers with its free, open-source gateway and its free, limited-use SaaS version. Tyk offers tiered pricing for its paying SaaS customers, which is based on the number of API calls per month and allows for customers to manage an unlimited amount of APIs. It also offers tiered pricing for self-managed customers based on the number of gateways, with unlimited API calls.

  Cons:

  • Marketing execution: Tyk has a limited mind share among business users compared to most larger vendors. It is less likely to appear on customers' shortlists for business-led initiatives than for developer-led initiatives.
  • Viability: Tyk is one of the smallest vendors in this Magic Quadrant, although it has grown quickly. Its strong product capabilities and small market share may lead customers to wonder if it will be an acquisition target.
  • Vertical/industry strategy: Tyk focuses on open standards and broad adoption across industry sectors. As such, it does not offer industry-specific accelerators or expertise. Prospective customers with industry-specific compliance requirements may find that Tyk is not suitable for their needs.


• Amazon Web Services - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Offering strategy: Amazon API Gateway is well-integrated with many other AWS products. Developers can efficiently deliver APIs as part of the applications they build using AWS-based applications and services.
  • Pricing: Amazon API Gateway customers pay only for the API traffic they use, with no startup cost. This pay-as-you-go approach is cost-effective for organizations with modest API traffic.
  • Marketing strategy: AWS positions Amazon API Gateway as a simple, high-performance and secure service for managing APIs that are built on its platform. This focus is appealing to existing AWS customers.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy: API Gateway's availability only in AWS eliminates it from consideration for organizations seeking an API management solution that supports multicloud and on-premises deployments. Its continued support of two similar gateway products, HTTP APIs and REST APIs, may confuse customers.
  • Innovation: AWS's API management features are among the most basic of any vendor in this Magic Quadrant. API Gateway lags the leading vendors in this market for capabilities like design, testing and developer portal as they focus mainly on runtime characteristics of the gateway.
  • Market understanding: AWS appears to focus on operational improvements, such as its integration with AWS components. Amazon API Gateway's recent releases do not reflect an understanding of the use cases that are driving the broader API management market.


• SAP - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Customer support: SAP offers workshops worldwide to identify business use cases for APIs and to offer insights on running successful API programs. It has a global network of SAP customer success professionals who can help users quickly set up and scale their API programs. SAP provides 24/7 support from multiple locations worldwide.
  • Product offering: SAP's API Management is tightly coupled with SAP BTP, which provides application development, data management, planning and analytics, automation, and AI capabilities. SAP's offering enables customers to manage all APIs including those deployed in SAP BTP that extend or integrate with SAP as well as non-SAP applications.
  • Geographic strategy: SAP operates in many countries and has a worldwide partner network. Its sales and support services are distributed across the Americas, EMEA and Asia/Pacific, providing a wider range of coverage compared to most vendors.

  Cons:

  • Marketing strategy: Many prospective customers perceive SAP API management as applicable only to existing SAP application customers, where the APIs managed are used to expose data from SAP's own applications. Prospects evaluating SAP as a general-purpose API management platform should ask SAP to demonstrate its API management capabilities for non-SAP applications and data sources.
  • Innovation: SAP's focus is on use cases specific to SAP BTP, such as making it easier to expose SAP data as APIs. Outside of the SAP integration context, SAP has delivered fewer innovations for wider API management than is seen from other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. For example, it has weaker support for security features like anomaly detection, for gateway federation, and for development and test support for APIs not linked to SAP data model definitions.
  • Offering strategy: SAP relies on OEM agreements to provide several components of API Management: Google Cloud (Apigee) for the API gateway, UiPath's Cloud Elements for open connectors, and Solace for messaging and events. Prospective customers should ensure they are comfortable with the level of influence and control that SAP can provide over those aspects of its platform.


• WSO2 - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Sales execution: Based on Gartner's estimates, WSO2's revenue for API management grew faster than the market average in 2022. It was able to capitalize on its strong product capabilities, and its early-mover status on features such as support for publishing event-based APIs in its API developer portal, using AsyncAPI and GraphQL to fuel its revenue growth.
  • Vertical/industry strategy: WSO2 provides a strong set of industry-specific solutions, especially for banking and financial services, government agencies and telecommunications and IT. Its Open Healthcare solution focuses on healthcare interoperability and is particularly well-suited for U.S. healthcare payer and provider APIs. WSO2's Open Banking offering and services help clients meet financial and regulatory requirements.
  • Sales strategy: WSO2 has integration and reseller partners in more than 75 countries, which helps to generate awareness and sales opportunities for its API management products. WSO2 has built a strong ecosystem for API management, as many partners use its open-source offering.

  Cons:

  • Business model: WSO2 promotes both its subscription-based Choreo offering and its open-source products for on-premises deployment and customer-managed cloud deployments. This is a departure from putting more emphasis on Choreo, which may be confusing for customers who associate WSO2 with open-source.
  • Product strategy: WSO2's API management offerings are strongly linked to its integration and identity management offerings. While they work with other vendor's solutions, customers could lose efficiencies and benefits of usability enhancements using WSO2's API management products with other integration or identity management solutions.
  • API monetization: WSO2 is a highly technical, developer-focused product. As such, customers who need to monetize APIs or who require business-level metrics on API value will require other solutions.


• Gravitee.io - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Product strategy: Gravitee.io's offering has strong capabilities and leading-edge features in each aspect of API management. This wide-ranging product strategy sets it apart from competitors that specialize in specific aspects of API management. At the same time, Gravitee.io focuses on support for event-driven APIs as a market differentiator, including publishing and managing event-driven APIs side-by-side with request/response APIs.
  • Market understanding: Gravitee.io was launched to offer a contemporary, developer-focused API management product. Gravitee.io's focus on emerging market trends is evident, as it addresses microservices and Kubernetes management, provides support for GraphQL and gRPC, and is expanding its support for other API gateways.
  • Pricing: The commercial edition of Gravitee.io is subscription-based, and its simple pricing is calculated based on the number of production API gateways (pods in Kubernetes implementations). This pricing includes the full suite of product capabilities and provides customers with a predictable cost for their budgeting needs.

  Cons:

  • Sales execution: Gravitee.io does not have the breadth and depth of customer implementation support and training seen in some other competitors in this market. Prospective customers should verify that Gravitee.io provides enough implementation guidance for their organization's needs.
  • Geographic strategy: Gravitee.io's customer base is concentrated in Europe and, to a lesser extent, North America. It has little presence in other regions. Customers outside of these regions should verify that Gravitee.io can provide adequate service and support in their region.
  • Vertical/industry strategy: Gravitee.io lacks vertical solutions that would appeal to particular industries. Prospective customers with industry-specific compliance requirements may find that Gravitee.io is not suitable for their needs.


• Postman - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Postman targets API developers and product managers by positioning its API platform as an enabler of API creation and consumption. It provides strong support for both internal and external API portals, as well as API testing and API design.
  • Innovation: Postman has delivered several innovative features with Postman Collections and Postman Workspaces. Recent innovations include automatically checking APIs against governance rules, a no-code UI to build API orchestrations and partner workspaces to allow partners outside the organization to collaborate on APIs.
  • Market responsiveness: Postman responds quickly to customer demands. In response to user feedback, Postman expanded support for more API types (GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket), provided version control across environments (dev, test, prod) and began offering real-time security and design linting. It delivers new features via monthly releases and provides a major release annually.

  Cons:

  • Product offering: Postman does not provide its own API gateway. Instead, it enables users to publish API definitions to multiple third-party gateways. Postman customers must separately source a gateway, and delegate responsibility of gateway runtime execution and operational administration to gateway vendors.
  • Vertical/industry strategy: Postman lacks extensive industry-specific accelerators and support for industry API standards. However, they have recently introduced collection templates and support for compliance standards in public workspaces to address this. Prospective customers with industry-specific compliance requirements should evaluate Postman's suitability.
  • Geographic strategy: Most of Postman's revenue is from North America, though it has an expanding presence in EMEA and APAC. Prospective customers outside North America should assess access to localized sales, training and support.


• SmartBear - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • API design and testing: SmartBear provides market-leading capabilities to manage and automate the API life cycle from design to implementation. It provides an integrated platform to perform functional, security and performance tests across multiple API protocols and standards, including REST (OpenAPI), SOAP, AsyncAPI, gRPC, GraphQL and others.
  • Market understanding: SmartBear has a strong understanding of developers' needs for building effective API development workflows, and enterprises' needs for API design, testing, implementation, deployment and monitoring. Its recent addition of PactFlow for contract-testing APIs and microservices is unique and improves this vision.
  • Business model: SmartBear attracts a consistent flow of prospective customers by popularizing its open-source offerings, such as SoapUI, SwaggerHub and Pact. SmartBear also has a strong sales and partner network across North America, EMEA and Asia/Pacific, which attracts large enterprise customers.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy: SmartBear does not provide an API gateway, but rather provides integration with API gateways from vendors such as AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM to deliver runtime capabilities. This use of third-party gateways may not suit organizations looking for a single vendor to provide both development and operational capabilities.
  • Geographic strategy: SmartBear's SaaS offering is only available in two AWS regions: SwaggerHub in AWS US-East and PactFlow in AWS ap-southeast-2. Customers with specific data residency requirements should evaluate private cloud or on-premises models. In addition, most of SmartBear's products and documentation are available only in English.
  • Vertical/industry strategy: SmartBear provides horizontal technology that can be used by any industry, but it does not provide accelerators or solution packages for any particular industry. Prospective customers with industry-specific compliance requirements should review SmartBear's suitability for their needs.


• Solo.io - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Offering strategy: Solo.io offers a Kubernetes-native API gateway and ingress controller, which is attractive to developers who build APIs in this environment. Its open-source, cloud-native approach appeals to developers and cloud platform teams that manage API gateways.
  • Business model: Solo.io's API management products are built on an open-source foundation. All Solo.io products have a free, open-source community version. Prospective customers can also obtain time-bound licensing for commercial Solo.io products at no charge during a proof-of-concept exercise or product investigation, for example.
  • Market responsiveness: Solo.io participates in a wide range of developer conferences, especially Kubernetes-focused events and emerging open-source initiatives, such as Istio Ambient Mesh. This community engagement helps Solo.io to align its product strategy with changing developer demands.

  Cons:

  • Product offering: Solo.io does not provide a SaaS option. Instead, it offers installable software. Also, it does not yet provide industry-specific accelerators for industries such as healthcare and banking.
  • Market understanding: Solo.io focuses its API management offering on its API gateway, Gloo Gateway, and targets customers who build APIs in Kubernetes environments. Though Solo.io's gateway can route to services in non-Kubernetes environments, it may be less suitable for non-Kubernetes deployment models for API design and development.
  • Marketing strategy: Although Solo.io's popularity is growing among developers and developer communities, its emphasis on gateway and service mesh use cases may not resonate with business users and API product managers in organizations looking for monetizing APIs.


• Boomi - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Sales execution: Based on Gartner's estimates, Boomi's revenue for API management grew faster than the market average in 2022. Its above-average growth was driven by its strong reputation as an integration provider, its integration capabilities and its strategy to offer short- and long-term product trials and its pay-as-you-go offerings for lightweight usage.
  • Operations: Boomi has mature operational practices and complies with major industry standard certifications, such as SOC2, PCI, HIPAA, FedRAMP and GDPR. Its SaaS offering runs primarily on AWS infrastructure and is available in multiple regions. It also offers managed services for private deployments on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
  • Geographic strategy: Boomi has a strong, growing network of more than 800 global and regional partners. It has a large customer base in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and it is building more partnerships in Europe, Asia/Pacific and Japan.

  Cons:

  • Business model: Boomi has changed key personnel in executive positions and product leadership roles since its acquisition by two private equity firms (Francisco Partners and TPG) in 2021. Prospective customers should review Boomi's overall strategy, especially for product and pricing to ensure alignment, as it is likely to evolve in the near future.
  • Product strategy: Although Gartner sees a positive change in Boomi's articulated vision for API management in this assessment cycle, its current capabilities focus on APIs built or used in the context of the Boomi Platform. Boomi's offering, as it stands, is less suitable for general-purpose API management.
  • Product: Boomi API Management lacks several features offered by most vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Those features include native support for microgateways, support for third-party API gateways, service mesh, API specification compliance or style guide check for GraphQL/gRPC, support for Async APIs, and an out-of-the-box web application firewall. It also lacks advanced API security and event management functionality.


• Broadcom - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Geographic strategy: Broadcom has a strong global presence. About 40% of Layer7 API Management sales are outside Broadcom's home region of North America. All platform components support non-English character sets at both design time and runtime.
  • Business model: Broadcom takes a highly consolidated approach to addressing its top global accounts by selling portfolio license agreements for its platform. Customers receive unlimited access to Broadcom products at a fixed subscription price. This approach attracts large enterprises and public-sector agencies and has enabled Broadcom to establish itself as a top-10 vendor in terms of API management revenue (based on Gartner estimates).
  • Customer experience: Broadcom emphasizes security and reflects a strong understanding of large enterprise requirements, which are primary concerns for most of its customers. Broadcom's growth among its existing customers indicates high customer satisfaction and loyalty.

  Cons:

  • Innovation: Broadcom has introduced little innovation to its API management offering recently, and it does not appear that Broadcom is investing significantly into research and development for this offering. Any changes that Broadcom makes to its API management product seem to be in response to requests and support issues from its customer base.
  • Sales execution: Broadcom offers few publicly discoverable services and support for implementation, onboarding and training for new customers. However, it offers training and certification for its partners and runs a community based partner advisory board for inputs and feedback. Enterprise clients can also have access to a training academy.
  • Federation: Broadcom has not communicated plans to support third-party API gateway technologies, even as many of its competitors are implementing API management technologies across environments and from multiple vendors.


• Stoplight - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • API design and testing: Stoplight provides market-leading capabilities to manage and automate the API design life cycle. It provides an integrated design and documentation platform that enables engineers and product managers to ideate, design, version and document APIs according to industry standards. Users can then export APIs to the desired engineering repository for deployment and management.
  • Market understanding: Stoplight has a strong understanding of engineering and product management needs for designing and documenting API development, providing the tools they need to deliver verified, custom API portals to development teams or outside the organization. While Stoplight is primarily used for internal APIs, it also enables users to prepare APIs for external consumption and to create permissioned API documentation portals from the same source material. This helps eliminate errors and duplicate efforts.
  • Business model: Stoplight has grown consistently through product led growth enabled by a strong open-source offering. Customers can buy directly, or accept an enterprise deal for more complex scenarios.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy: Stoplight does not provide a native API gateway and has no capabilities for authentication/authorization, generating and managing API keys, or applying traffic-throttling/rate-limiting policies. It relies on integration with API gateways from vendors such as AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM to deliver these capabilities.
  • Geographic strategy: Stoplight is a U.S.-based company that has limited operational presence outside the U.S. Some customers outside of the U.S. may prefer alternatives that enable them to host their own implementations.
  • Vertical strategy: Stoplight provides horizontal technology that can be used by any industry, but it does not provide prepackaged accelerators for any particular industry. However, customers can build out their own vertical solution standards and apply them in the design environment.


• TIBCO Software - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Product offering: TIBCO's integrated platform provides customers with all features they need to develop composable enterprise solutions. TIBCO Cloud API Management offers a single control point to discover, design, productize, deploy, manage and govern most types of internal and external APIs. It also features a universal catalog and AI/ML-enabled API analytics to supplement its platform-agnostic, federated API management capabilities.
  • Sales execution: TIBCO Cloud API Management had above-average revenue growth in 2022 (based on Gartner estimates) and retained its position as a top-10 vendor in terms of market share.
  • Geographic strategy: TIBCO has a global presence, with direct sales and support services in more than 30 countries. It also has a robust worldwide partner ecosystem of systems integrators and value-added resellers.

  Cons:

  • Marketing strategy: TIBCO promotes its API management offering as a component of a wider integration platform, rather than as a separate product. As a result, prospective clients often overlook TIBCO as a stand-alone offering for API management.
  • Innovation: TIBCO's roadmap is focused on enhancing its overall platform and has shown less innovation in delivering features specific to API management, compared to other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. TIBCO's strategy is to provide customers with a unified platform that provides integration, messaging, data management and analytics to address a wider variety of automation and integration use cases, rather than to provide a general-purpose API management platform. Prospective clients looking for a general API management solution should ask TIBCO to demonstrate how stand-alone API management clients will be supported going forward.
  • Market responsiveness: TIBCO delivered regular releases with minor updates throughout 2023, but has not released major function enhancements for API management for a few years.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for API Management, 11-Oct-2023, ID G00782580

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