Many enterprises now implement an API management strategy, which comprises a set of practices and tools to build, manage and analyze APIs in a secure environment. API management tools also play a big role in fundamental tasks like application communication, version control, log monitoring, load balancing and data analytics.
Two of today’s popular API management platforms are Apigee Edge (owned by Google) and Mulesoft Anypoint (owned by Salesforce). However, Apigee and Mulesoft offer distinctly separate tooling lineups. This comparison looks at Apigee vs. Mulesoft as platform providers, examines their features and benefits and should help you understand what to consider about your needs before you settle on a provider.
What Is Apigee?
It’s a cross-cloud API management platform offered by Google.
Apigee is an API gateway tool that provides a secure environment for multiple cloud services and applications to exchange data.
In short: Google Apigee is that platform that helps you manage all your APIs in one place. A platform that brings together all your digital experiences.
What is an API Management Platform, More Precisely?
So, an API management platform is:
The process where you manage all your APIs in a secure and scalable environment.
A process that enables you to use an API for overseeing the interface’s lifecycle. This way, you make sure that all the apps and developers using that API have their needs met.
And now, there are 3 key functions that an API management platform should support:
- Security
- Monitoring
- Version control
Some basic features that would allow you to accelerate innovation in your organization and adapt easily to customer expectations of flexible and scalable technology:
- API key and authorization management
- Analytics
- Live updated documentation
- Developer community management
- Developer portal to simplify the acquisition and distribution of the certain APIs needed for building apps
Key Features of Apigee
Now, that looks tempting enough, doesn’t it? To be able to manage all your APIs from the one central place.
But what are the features, designed to streamline the whole API management process, does Apigee provide you with?
How precisely does it sustain you to be effective once managing your APIs?
- It provides constant version updates
- It provides troubleshooting options
- It taps into machine learning and analytics to generate actionable insights
- It scales to your needs
- It supports multi-cloud and hybrid cloud
- It automates the process of generating API documentation and software development kits
- It speeds up the implementation of API proxies with integrated metrics and dashboards
- It provides the modern UI for your legacy data stores
- It provides monitoring tools for security, API troubleshooting, and optimization
What Is MuleSoft?
MuleSoft is a software company that provides an integration platform — Mule ESB — for centralizing all the apps, data, and devices across the on-premise and cloud environments in an organization.
Benefits of Mulesoft anypoint Platform
- Unlock legacy systems, rapidly connect legacy assets to SaaS technologies, and reduce integration costs—without disrupting existing business processes
- Increase developer productivity and shrink the development times through open technologies that promote reusability, modularity and collaboration
- Reduce the time to resolution by managing all resources from a single pane of glass
- Increase the innovation and value creation across the enterprise through tools that enable faster development, testing, and implementation of APIs
- Increase agility with a flexible architecture that evolves as your business does
- Create happier customers and competitive advantages by delivering services and experiences
What’s the difference between MuleSoft and Apigee ?
For they’re both API management platforms, they both seem to be serving the same API centralization and management needs and they’re equally popular.
Here’s a first differentiator:
In Google, Apigee APIs are consumption-centric, whereas in the Mule ESB they’re exposure-focused (or reuse-focused).
Apigee Pros
- Tracing in the Apigee is a very good feature. The ease of creating the policies has been the most useful of the solution’s features.
- It’s a quick ramp-up time.
- It’s easy for our support staff to implement the policies in API management layer.
- I have found the most valuable features to be tracing a proxy, and managing proxy versions and revisions via Edge UI component.
- I have not encountered instability with the product.
- We use it to build the API proxies for securing the targeted back-ends with an emphasis on Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD).
Mulesoft Pros
- The most important features are API management and API development.
- The documentation is great; it’s always up to date and well-presented.
- One of the most valuable features is the stability of the platform.
- Whenever there was an issue,then the support was excellent.
- The most valuable feature is the ability to investigate the APIs.
- The ESB, enterprise service bus is what we primarily use.
- In addition to that, the API management. These are the two tools that we have been using extensively.
- The enterprise platform.
Apigee Cons
- As it is now, the rotation of certificates is a manual task and is something that can be improved.
- The number one area this solution could be improved by implementing support.
- Support is not a part of this solution.
- The company needs to better support webhooks. It used to support webhooks and their policies and they have since stopped.
- They had some issues in the product and abandoned the support for them. It’s not come back since.
- Drag and drop of features would be more beneficial, rather than manually working on configuration and updates.
- Apigee on-premise is quite a complex and it is always moving faster.
- I would like them to add features, such as caching and mediation policies.
Mulesoft Cons
- The API gateway and API runtime are too heavy, which means that it is not suitable for the microservices.
- The initial setup is very complex. Not many stand-out features.
- The most important thing that should be improved is that it is too heavy.
- The pricing is quite expensive. It should be adjusted to make it more affordable for users.
- Better documentation to help and explain each of the features would be really helpful.
- Rather than focusing on numbers, they should focus more on the customer support service.