Apiary Reviews

API design (primarily with an API first approach) using API Blueprint and Swagger/Open API notations for both client engagements and open source projects.

Apiary provides a free tier of the platform which allows a small group of developers to collaborate easily on the design of open source APIs. In addition to this, it provides mock endpoints allowing people to experiment with the API without depending or having to stand up a real backend.

With our clients, using Apiary allows us to very quickly pull together an API definition (particularly when using API Blueprint). The whole API design process for the simpler use cases can be done in a relatively short workshop which makes it a lot easier to agree, publish, version-manage an API definition with suitable documentation. This can then be evolved and enhanced (particularly in the documentation aspects).

With the ability to support Swagger (Open API v2 and introducing/ed support for v3) and API Blueprint makes it a very versatile tool.

With our business clients, the ability to configure rules to check for consistency has helped. Integration with GitHub has made version management of specifications very easy. The mock endpoints have been a great enabler.

The ability to work with both API Blueprint and Swagger/OpenAPI notations has made it a lot easier to use a single tool to collaborate. We find API Blueprint helps with less technical audiences, but more established API people use Swagger — so the same tool can be used.

• Validation messages could be a bit clearer.
• Autocomplete, particularly around open API would be nice, or even the ability to pop up the syntax spec.

3+ years

Very good.

Look at it as a SaaS solution. It has millions of existing users and runs without issue.

Navigating through your APIs if you have 100s of APIs in a single account might get unwieldy from a usability perspective.

Very little need to contact them. But they have responded well when making suggestions to them.

Defining API specs has been a long-standing practice, having used simple word docs, XML schemes being annotated and published on wikis, etc.

I've used SwaggerHub but found it isn't as intuitive, and it's a bit more feature restricted (particularly when using the free tier).

Open API and API Blueprint tooling plugins for Visual Code IDE aren't as nice, although they can (and some do) leverage the open-sourceh code developed for parts of Apiary

As a cloud service, it's very easy to register and get started.

N/A

Vey high - very easy API design with no setup effort

So Apiary has a free tier which gives you the fundamental basics. Team and enterprise give you more collaboration and quality tooling, which is nice to have, but not essential.

See the previous answer.

There is a good integration ecosystem around the product, for example, API Fortress can take an API spec from Apiary and generate test cases. APIMatic hooks in. There is a bit of overlap with APIMatic, but it is a more expensive product.

The feature I find most valuable is that it offers authentication and allows us to develop communication points. I do like the overall performance of the solution.

I would like to see an improvement in the access to portals. It should be more user-friendly. I also think the delivery patches should be updated more often.

I don't think this solution is very stable so we try to manage stability from our side. Also, the Oracle release cycle is very bad because the patches update only once a year. 

The solution is scalable enough on the level that we operate, so we are satisfied with the level of scalability it offers.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup was not complex at all; it was really straightforward. Deployment took us only a few hours as we have our own IT team who is responsible for it. Every week we deploy a specific life cycle for the release plan point of it. Therefore we don't have many problems as we do a real-time deployment. At the moment we only have one person responsible for the deployment and maintenance of API.

We are partners of this solution and we used our own IT team to take care of the installation and deployment.

Oracle is stable, so I would recommend it to others but because it is not very user-friendly, I will only rate it a seven out of ten.

We are using Apiary to design APIs that we offer to our customers, brokers, and partners for insurance products. We use the product in concert with the Oracle API Platform and surface (and style) the documentation in a custom JavaScript Dev Portal. The customer's developers leverage the mock resources, the documentation, code snippets, and attribute definitions. 

Apiary has allowed us to produce human-readable API definitions as well as provide a common place for developers to retrieve the resource endpoints, JSON schemas, and documentation. The business-friendly definitions have allowed developers to work more closely with business stakeholders to ensure they use the APIs in the correct way.

I find the generation of mock services very useful, especially when demonstrating for new consumers. I also like how you can document many viewpoints for the same resource and easily let users navigate through these in the rendered definition.

Reuse of objects within the editor, and how easy it is to add enumerations, are also valuable features.

The ease of integration with GitHub, allowing multiple versions to run concurrently, is also an important feature.

I would like an integrated option to download a Swagger version of the definition. Currently, you can download an API Blueprint file that can be converted using other tools into OpenAPI or Swagger; however, built-in support would be ideal.

We have also used other utilities for rendering the API Blueprint, such as Agilo, for offline documentation. It would be nice if there were an option for offline documentation within the product.

I have not experienced any downtime in the Apiary cloud.

We embed the Apiary documentation in our custom developer portal and do not see scalability issues. We have seen that it is sometimes slow to render large projects, but this is not noticeable by the API consumers.

Most questions are answered and product issues have been raised under the API Platform support product.

Prior to this solution, we used Swagger and manual documentation.

It is very quick and easy to get started.

We implemented this solution in-house, relying on GitHub and Wiki pages for support on the MSON schema used by Apiary.

This solution has allowed us to standardize API definitions and bring consistency into our shared components. This has reduced the effort and cost of using functionality across domains within the organization. The ROI on shared services is predicated on a good API strategy, for which Apiary is crucial.

It is easy to get started with personal (free) accounts, but a subscription is required for additional features. These include protecting access to the documentation, linking to GitHub, and sharing editing rights amongst the team.

We have a set number of users with each API Platform subscription that we have with Oracle, and this meets our needs.

We looked at tools to document Swagger and considered using a combination of Confluence Wiki and Postman. Ultimately, we chose this solution.

• Swagger (OpenAPI Specification) and Blueprint Support
• Git integration
• Role-based access

Quick and easy way to share a new API design with teams.

While the implementation team is working on actual API code, others that need to use it can use the API definition on the Apiary for their tests.

Better Swagger support.

Two years.

In two years, there was one time the service was down for an hour or so.

No.

There was no need to involve customer service.

Very good. When project-specific questions are asked, the comprehensive answer will be provided in around 24 hours.

No, it was the first API management solution we used.

The whole setup is for users and Git integration, so there are not too many setup tasks.

It was an in-house implementation

Quick ROI in our case.

• There is a free subscription option to start and try the service.
• Standard subscription is $99 for 10 users per month.

Swagger UI, Apigee, and Mashery.

Mostly, price versus features played a big role in selection.