3scale API Management offers a streamlined approach to API exposure, focusing on robust security and seamless integration with OpenShift. Its lightweight deployment is compatible with both on-premises and cloud environments, facilitating API automation and centralized traffic control.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| 3scale API Management | 1.9% |
| Microsoft Azure API Management | 12.4% |
| Amazon API Gateway | 9.8% |
| Other | 75.9% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 4 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 66 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 42 |
| Large Enterprise | 169 |
Designed to manage both internal and external APIs, 3scale API Management provides a containerized gateway that supports microservice architectures. Its integration with ESB networks and compatibility with OpenShift for simple deployment make it desirable for organizations in need of flexible API management. Although appreciated for its security features and ease of installation, challenges persist in its developer portals and CMS usability. The platform supports container deployment and offers centralized policy management and traffic oversight, but there are areas requiring improvement, such as SOAP support and UI simplicity.
What key features does 3scale API Management offer?3scale API Management is utilized across financial and service communication sectors where secure and efficient API management is critical. Companies implement it within hybrid environments, often using AWS for additional management capabilities. Its application in these industries helps maintain secure exposure and traffic monitoring of APIs, pivotal in maintaining organizational efficiency.
Victor Ops, Coca Cola, The Telegraph, Skava, Orange, Typeform
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Program Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees | 3.0 | I use 3scale API Management mainly for monitoring and authentication. It adds security and simplifies API exposure, but its developer portal lacks flexibility. We’ve had past performance issues and may face scalability challenges, though deployment is generally smooth. |
| CIO at Banco Pichincha España | 4.0 | I manage our public API using 3scale in our microservices architecture. The tool offers cost savings while maintaining functionality, but the deployment process could be improved. We haven't considered other solutions or specific cloud providers. |
| Non-Corporate Consultant at Absa Group Ltd | 3.5 | I rate 3scale API Management 7/10, finding it stable, scalable, and good for OpenShift integration. However, I prefer Kong for its route-limiting and authentication, wishing 3scale offered easier plugin integration. |
| Sr. Enterprise Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees | 4.0 | I initially found 3scale API Management easy to deploy, but encountered significant issues with Red Hat's support for specific configurations and unexpected high resource consumption. Ultimately, version incompatibility and support limitations forced me to abandon the product. |
| Associate Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees | 3.5 | I used 3scale API Management for a Gulf client in the ranking domain and found it lightweight with easy installation. However, it lacks flexibility, making customization challenging. It's suitable for small to medium clients aiming to avoid high licensing costs. |
| Technical Lead at Infy | 3.5 | I use 3scale API Management for external service communication and find it valuable for easily configuring and implementing APIs, authentication headers, and filters. However, I believe there is room for improvement in API management and the user interface. |
| lead architect at Sys Manager | 4.5 | I utilize 3scale to manage and secure APIs, benefiting from its automation features. However, the user experience could improve, as the developer portal is complex. Despite this, the cost-benefit ratio is favorable, yielding a quick return on investment. |
| Digital Project Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees | 2.5 | I primarily use 3scale API Management for its API management capabilities, which are its best feature. However, I rate it 5/10 due to its limitation to RESTful APIs, as it lacks SOAP support, which is a significant drawback for me. |
| Co-Founder at a tech vendor with 1-10 employees | 3.5 | We value 3scale's gateway for centralizing API traffic and enforcing organizational processes. However, the developer portal is difficult to customize, leading us to build our own, and technical support post-purchase has been challenging. |
| Principal Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees | 3.5 | I value 3scale API Management's gateway and security, recommending it to clients. While setup is complex and API management features, customization, and onboarding need improvement, stability, scalability, and support are good. I rate it 7/10. |
Our company exposes different APIs, and we use it to monitor traffic, limit traffic, and similar functions.
I don't have much involvement with the solution, though I did conduct some research.
We set up endpoints as a service provider on the server side, not on the consumer side.
It simplifies exposing our APIs externally and inherently adds a layer of security, which I see as a positive impact from the product.
Some of our other teams use an API traffic control mechanism such as rate limiting and throttling in 3scale API Management, but not us. We usually just use it for authentication, monitoring, and related functions.
Not much stands out for me regarding the advantages of this product.
We usually don't tinker with it. Developing developer portals could be more standards-based. I think currently it's Ruby-based. Having more options on designing that would be beneficial. Additional flexibility would have been great; we would have used it more if it aligned with our platform.
I don't use the analytics part.
We don't use monetization features, which help to create a revenue generation model.
I have been working with this solution for approximately five years.
I don't deal with installations, but we generally don't have any issues or delays, which would indicate difficulty.
We have experts in our organization who are able to deploy both ways seamlessly for us, so we've never really had any concerns with that.
We've had performance issues before with 3scale API Management, but we came to certain resolutions, and we're looking to improve or increase our throughput in the near future. I hope we don't run into any more issues with it.
I think we're going to run into that scalability challenge soon enough, but I don't think we have put it through its paces yet.
I've never interacted with technical support for this solution, so I cannot assess it.
Neutral
Previously, we were using on-prem architecture.
I cannot make an assessment comparing 3scale API Management to Microsoft Azure at this time. I'm relatively new with Azure. There are similar technologies on the Azure side, so I don't think one is better for now.
In my work, I am using both Azure API Management and 3scale API Management.
We're on the Red Hat platform, so this product aligns naturally.
I would rate 3scale API Management a six out of ten.
We have a microservices architecture or our public API managed through the 3scale.
The deployment process could be easier.
I have been using 3scale API Management for two months.
I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.
It fits our needs in terms of scalability. It aligns with our current technology stack because we are working with other Red Hat solutions.
10-20 people are managing this solution.
I rate the solution’s scalability a nine out of ten.
We have had some troubles. We have recived the required support. In some cases, you need to pay for some activities, but in general, the support is good.
Positive
The initial setup is complex and takes four months to complete.
I rate the initial setup as seven out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.
We work with an integrator.
It provides cost savings while maintaining the same functionality and capabilities.
I rate the product’s pricing as two out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.
There were two main reasons for consideration. One of them was the cost. It is true that the other solution had more capabilities, but we didn't have plans to use them. We didn't need them, but the cost was slightly higher. Also, we were already working with the Red Hat solution and integrating it with some other solutions we have in place. It was better and more convenient for us.
Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
3scale API Management is used for routing the internal application within the company.
To me, the most valuable feature of 3scale API Management is that it lets you add a backend to the product.
I also like that you can integrate it well with OpenShift clusters, making 3scale API Management a useful solution.
What I'd like to improve in 3scale API Management is its route-limiting feature. Currently, I don't know how to do that effectively on the solution, but in Kong, I know how to do it, so I would love to see route-limiting being easily done on 3scale API Management.
It would also be good if there was some authentication that you could do from 3scale API Management because Kong offers that functionality out of the box.
What I'd love to see in the next release of 3scale API Management is the ability to integrate more plug-ins easily onto the platform, so you'll be able to extend it, and even do customs management. If Red Hat could offer that extension where it allows the internal organization where 3scale API Management is deployed on-premise to integrate its tools on top of 3scale API Management and provide an API for that, that will make the solution very powerful.
My experience with 3scale API Management is more than one year.
3scale API Management is a very stable solution.
3scale API Management is a very scalable solution.
The technical support from 3scale API Management is exceptional. Whenever my team tries to get assistance, the response is almost instant because my company is a Red Hat partner. The support platform is interactive and the documentation provided is detailed. Information about 3scale API Management is well-documented.
In my previous company, I used Kong, and in my current company, I'm using 3scale API Management, but I prefer Kong.
3scale API Management has reasonable pricing, judging from its competitor, Kong. My organization pays yearly for the 3scale API Management license, though I'm unable to give the exact figure because every single day there are new clusters deployed. I'm in charge of three to four clusters in my team, but give or take, it costs a few thousand lakhs.
I use 3scale API Management in the company I currently work in, but in my previous company, I used Kong.
I'm a consultant for 3scale API Management, so my customers use this product.
I belong to a large organization, and around fifty to one hundred people use 3scale API Management, while twenty to thirty administrators maintain it.
My rating for 3scale API Management is seven out of ten.
3scale API Management is a containerized product, so all its parts are deployed into containers, and standard deployment is very simple because it goes on the OpenShift. The solution can be deployed on-premises or cloud and their ability to make a standard deployment is very easy on OpenShift. The solution has easy deployment and standard deployment.
I think Red Hat is improving this issue because they are very technical. One problem that we had, again had a specific case of contractual obligations to have commercial support for all technologies that we were using, and specifically what was happening in that version of the solution that we were running. What was suggested by Red Hat was a crucial part of the configuration, but when we started to ask about the supportability of this configuration, Red Hat said only some parts of the configuration would be supported. So we decided not to go with it. As much as we tried to implement 3scale API Management the incompatibility of the version did not allow us to proceed. The software could support it, but the configuration unit was not updated yet to give this kind of flexibility with support and because of this at the end of the day, we had to scrub the product.
I have been using the solution for two years.
The standard deployment is very simple.
The licensing was a very strong part of this offer. Licensing is per account, but again, we still, need to understand a little bit about how the record licenses work. They were going with the licenses for this integration platform coming as an add-on for the OpenShift licensing. It's in addition to it. Even though there was an option to purchase them independently. We didn't look at this option because we needed more licensing on OpenShift anyways. So it was an add-on for an OpenShift, and it was something very nice. The cost was around $45,000 per year. That was pretty good considering the functionality and considering capability that they have because there is one more product that's a pretty strong product as well, which is called AMQ for asynchronous messaging. This is a product we do use and have used before as an independent product. The cost does not include the internal resources that are required for OpenShift to be run successfully for the 3scale API Management. That's another thing and when you combine those two, then it becomes a much, much less interesting, and much more costly proposition.
I give the solution an eight out of ten.
The solution was an independent product purchased by Red Hat. It's a full-blown API management solution. This I would say considers the majority of the cost of this integration package. This is a very good product, but maintenance-wise and with any skills, you need time and you need a very good understanding of all the moving parts in it because there are many.
There are plenty of things that are not standard about the solution, and you need an understanding of the product and all the subsystems, and their roles in the overall architecture of this product. We had to go through a very diligent exercise with finding out all these details of architecture because we have plenty of SLAs and governmental standards that we need to adhere to. So we needed to understand exactly when it's on, when it's off, and when the specific part is down, what it means. There are a number of SLAs some of them are important, and some of them are not. This information is not available online, and unless we have professional engagement, with the Red Hat team, we would never know the details. It would be very hard to find out the details and that is very crucial. Otherwise, you just install the solution and run it and if you are using it on-prem You will not be able to understand what's going on. Another thing that's problematic is that for each container that we deploy as a subsystem for 3scale initially, again by a pre-sales team, we've been told completely different resource consumption that they will require. When we started to run it, the consumption on OpenShift was much higher for every single technology that they're using to come to complete the set for the 3scale because a number of technologies need to run simultaneously, the number of packages, and that was not a nice surprise, I would say.
This use case was for one of our Gulf clients, specifically in the ranking domain.
The solution is quite lightweight, and the installation is very easy. It's like a two-click installation. You install the operator, and then you simply create an API manager and boom, your environment is ready. The installation process is pretty good.
It lacks some features, and the product is not that flexible for developers. It's less flexible and rigid. It's not easy to make changes or customize it.
One disadvantage is that for customization, it uses liquid templates. However, not everyone is familiar with liquid templates, so if you want to do some customized logging or other tasks, you may need to struggle a lot. Other solutions like IBM API Connect or Apigee use JavaScript, which is more developer-friendly. That's what I found.
I have been working with 3scale for the past six months. I used to work with version 2.9.
This product is stable. I would rate it a nine for stability.
It is a scalable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten since it is cloud-based and deployed in an open shop. It's quite scalable.
Our clients are enterprise-level. One of the biggest banks invested in this so that you can see it as an enterprise plan.
The customer service and support are not very good. I remember working on a dev functionality for this product. The documentation provided by Red Hat was not up to the mark. We reached out to them because my company is in partnership with them, but we did not receive a satisfactory response. Even in our company, another team implementing Red Hat faced difficulties in solution development despite having paid support from Red Hat.
Neutral
The initial setup is very easy to install. Deployment hardly takes 15 minutes. You don't need customization. Everything is pre-configured for you. Just click to deploy and start your development.
Just one person is more than enough for deployment.
For small or medium-sized clients, this solution can be a good fit, especially if they want to avoid high licensing costs. The solution is not overly complex; it's mainly about accessing APIs through the proxy. Customizations are not always required. So in such cases, this solution can be the right fit.
The pricing is affordable; it's cheap. The licensing process is not as high compared to IBM API Connect or Apigee. It is the most cost-effective option among them
My advice would be that if you're a small or medium-sized organization and you don't require extensive customization for your APIs, you can go for the Red Hat solution.
Overall, I would rate it a seven. It should offer more flexibility. Other products allow for drag-and-drop customization and the ability to add scripts or system out statements. However, that is not the case with 3scale API management.
We use the solution for external service communications.
The solution can easily configure and implement any API, authentication headers and filters.
The tool can improve API management and UI.
I have been using 3scale API Management for two to three years. We are using the latest version of the solution.
The product is stable. We haven't seen any major issues, concerns or outages.
I rate the solution's stability a nine out of ten.
The solution is highly scalable. It is always available.
More than 100 users are using this solution.
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
The customer support is responsive.
Neutral
The initial setup is easy.
The solution is affordable.
I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is expensive, and ten is cheap.
We have some templates which we use to implement the new onboarding services. My team has around 20 people.
Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
We use 3scale to manage, monitor, and secure APIs and back up endpoints.
3scale enables us to secure API access. Jobs aren't allowed to talk to the agent without the correct credentials.
I like the API automation.
The user experience could be better. The developer portal is too complex and hard to configure.
I have used 3scale since 2019.
3scale is highly stable. I've never had problems with 3scale in a production environment.
3scale has excellent scalability. You can create more than one instance if needed.
3scale support is excellent.
Deploying 3scale is straightforward. It is deployed on an OpenShift Container Platform. You create an instance, configure 3scale, and run the OpenShift container.
You see an ROI quickly. It's a good cost-benefit ration.
3scale is fairly priced. It's included in a package with an OpenShift subscription.
I rate 3scale API Mangement nine out of 10. I recommend purchasing the OpenShift subscription because 3scale isn't as powerful without it.
I mainly use 3scale API Management as an API management tool.
3scale API Management's best feature is API management.
3scale API Management only supports restful APIs and doesn't support SOAP. In the next release, 3scale API Management should include more healthcare interoperability.
I've been using 3scale API Management for a year.
I previously used Oracle API Gateway.
We used a third-party team.
I would advise anyone considering implementing 3scale API Management to have a clear current state analysis and to extensively consider and map their requirements. I would rate 3scale API Management five out of ten.
The use case is that the organization I work for wanted to work with APIs but they didn't actually know what to do. They knew that it was a good thing to have an API management product. We are now trying to establish an API-first approach for both internal and external APIs, and we use it to provide financial information via APIs.
The deployment is a hybrid. We deploy the gateways in our own OpenShift cluster, provided by a vendor, but not on the cloud. And we have the RHOAM (Red Hat OpenShift API Management) solution for the management part, and that runs on AWS.
Since we introduced the gateway, the API management has given us the ability to get on top of things. It's not just the infrastructure but also the implicit organizational process. Now, things have to go through our API management team, the one that handles the API gateway. And that means we are able to get a handle on what is actually about to be designed and what is allowed to be published. That's the main benefit. The path for how something gets published in our organization has to go through the part of the organization that's actually managing the API gateway. That means we are able to discuss how to design our APIs to make sure they will be a good fit with all the other APIs that we provide.
The gateway is the most valuable feature because it makes it possible for us to gather all traffic into one proxy, which is a good thing.
It also gives us the possibility of using different policies, but we haven't done that to a very big extent.
The comprehensiveness of Red Hat's API management is important, although we are only using a small part of it, the gateway part. I believe it is important and that we will utilize it even more.
We tried to use the portal, but we decided that it wasn't enough. The content management system (CMS) is not easy to use if you want to customize things, and it's hard to get someone who has the knowledge to work with the CMS. The CMS is not good because it's hard to see what's about to be released. Also, you can't test the whole thing at one stage, rather you have to update different fragments of the content, and there's no way to look at the whole picture before you release it. You can end up limbo with some of the content in development, so we decided to build our own portal.
Also, the use of Liquid scripts is not that nice. It does its job, but it hasn't been well documented and it has cost us quite a lot of hours just to understand how to do things. When you do understand how to do them, it's quite easy, but it hasn't been well documented.
We have been using 3scale API Management for three years.
We have not been in the new environment for that long time. We've been up for about a month and we don't have that much traffic on that one. But the stability seems fine. The stability in the new environment looks promising.
In the older environment, we have had some issues but they are not because of the gateway. They were caused by a lack of resources in the OpenShift data center. The cluster didn't have enough resources and we had some downtime.
When it comes to support cases, to technical feedback and real support—and not just, "Oh, it would be good to have this feature"—but actual help, there have been a lot of tasks ping-ponging, and that has not been a nice experience. It has taken a lot of time to get small things done, both on our side and from Red Hat.
If they really wanted to support us, it would have been better if they had actually scheduled a meeting with us. The pre-sales team was super at supporting us, but when we bought the product and still needed some support, it was really hard to get it through support cases.
Neutral
The deployment process is not that complex, but we have had issues with operators that have been hard to configure with our GitOps strategy. We want to deploy everything based on Argo CD with GitOps, and it hasn't been possible to do that with the operator part of the gateway. We've run into a few issues there.
We did the deployment in another part of the organization at first, and now we have done it in our target environments, with our target vendors. I wasn't involved in the first round, with version 2.5, but I have been involved in deploying the later version.
The time it took for deployment doesn't have as much to do with Red Hat as it has to do with our setup with GitOps and our vendors. The installation process is quite fast, but figuring out the issue with the operators and why that is not working has cost us quite a lot of time. But overall, the installation part is quite smooth.
We have one gateway for customer-facing, external APIs, proxying all the traffic from the customers, partners, external parties. And after some consideration and talking back and forth with Red Hat, we decided to have an internal gateway for internal APIs and that one is available for all internal applications. Internal applications are internal to the organization, but they don't have to be in the same network. They could be on an external network. And we may not have made the right decision there. We had a bit of a problem understanding why we should have internal APIs. Because we are going with API-first, we believe that we should externalize all APIs.
I don't have exact figures, but we have definitely had return on investment using 3scale.
I don't think that 3scale is very expensive.
We were choosing between Apigee and 3scale. The feature set of Apigee was a lot larger and we thought that it was best-in-class, but 3scale also looked promising and the price was lower and we are also really a Red Hat shop. All of that pulled us in the direction of 3scale.
If you want to significantly impact how your developer portal will work, then you shouldn't think about 3scale as your base for the developer portal. If you just want something out-of-the-box, then 3scale would be sufficient. The consideration should mainly be around the portal.
Overall, it's the organizational things that make you succeed or not. We could probably have managed the API transformation path that we're into, trying to go to API-first, even without the gateway, but it would be a bit harder because it wouldn't be a natural thing to have someone proxying all the things that go not only into the infrastructure but also into the organization. That's the crucial part for success with API management. The product has helped us to get there, but theoretically, it could have been done without the gateway as well. It helps, but it's not a silver bullet.
Setting the portal aside, since we have decided not to use it, and just rating the parts that we are using, I would give 3scale a seven out of 10. But we haven't even tried the Fuse part. That could be a strong addition if you want the ability to integrate as well.
We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.
This is a container platform with a developer portal.
3scale API Managment provides a platform facilitating Trusted Service Providers communicating with the service provider securely and efficiently. Greatly enhance direct business transactions and application to application communications
The most valuable features are the gateway and security features.
It would be helpful to improve the customization features so that the customer can do it based on their own needs.
Some of the portal features are in need of improvement. The API onboarding process is quite primitive. It may not fit for an enterprise who is trying to manage their API users and the approval process. The development portal needs to better address this functionality.
API management functionality should be improved so that the partner can better group it, and use it.
We have been using 3scale API Management for one year.
As we are new to this product, I'm not sure about stability. At this stage, it has been okay. We have not experienced any serious issues or crashes.
We have done some scalability and performance testing in our office, and it has been pretty good. We have eight people in the company who are working with it.
The majority of our customers are large companies and I would say that this solution is more enterprise-driven. The entry point and required skill set are quite high.
We have been in contact with technical support and so far they have been good. With the cases we have logged, they have given us responses quickly.
I have used similar solutions and I find that 3scale is more technical-driven. It uses great technologies and it is still easy for us to customize ourselves.
In terms of API management features, I think that it is less rich than the other major competitors. The way they manage the API is different, which is something that they can improve.
The initial setup is complex at the beginning because there are a lot of steps that we have to follow. Two to three people are needed for deployment and maintenance, at least.
It takes approximately six months to deploy.
This is a product that I like, and have a lot of interest in learning. It is one that I recommend to our clients.
I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.
