What is our primary use case?
I am API architect. We are service providers and provide API solutions to our customers.
What is most valuable?
Apigee provides out-of-the-box policies, so it is ready to use with minimal configuration to those policies. You can govern your API and manage the life cycle of the API completely with the Apigee tool.
You can use the documentation through the API portal and integrate it with the open API specification, and then design and create your API process.
When we compare Apigee with Mulesoft, we find that Mulesoft provides many out-of-box connectors to your legacy applications and it is now part of Salesforce. It was acquired by Salesforce. It has hundreds of soft connectors available and an exchange place where you can put your reusable assets. A similar kind of thing is available in Apigee as well, where developers start putting their assets which can be reused.
What needs improvement?
Right now we can create custom policies using Java scripts and other supported languages. That's the good thing. But if you are supposed to have created some APIs that are available on the market as public, it would be good if you can share it. It would give a bit more flexibility and then connect configurations that you can do on your own which are not supported by APIs.
From a connector perspective, it would be good if it could allow you to create a custom connector, or it could provide out-of-box connectors, or some in the backend. That would be great.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Apigee almost five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Apigee is an excellent product.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability depends on your configuration. You can make it scalable.
Other vendors are basically giving more. For example, Azure. Azure is cloud-based, so they offer many things, including client support and hosting. So if you take Azure for all your storage and hosting, then they are inclined to use their API data solution. Similarly, MuleSoft provides you many things. It is an ESB kind of service broker, so you can connect to many varieties of backends. It supports that, so they can use Mulesoft API. Apigee provides a number of out-of-the-box policies and it handles the API governance. But if are looking for an end-to-end solution, Apigee is a bit behind. But if it is combined together with Google Cloud, and if the Google cloud offerings are comparable to Azure, then probably Apigee will lead.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is very good. In my previous company we had on-premise Apigee installed. For that we reached out to customer support. It was excellent. And while deploying it to our customer side, we reach out to them, for both Mulesoft and Apigee. And it has a very good community portal. Customers have shared their experiences troubleshooting - their challenges, issues, and resolutions. It was good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have used Mule API, Mule API Gateway, and API Manager.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is pretty simple.
It provides some sort of integral service communication support. We have a multiple API proxy with multiple APIs currently deployed. So if API A is calling API B, and API B is calling API C, if that left to right communication is also available in API B, for that we have to use some kind of service tool. That is also available inside Apigee.
What other advice do I have?
Apigee is more of an entry level solution that does basic things pretty well, but if you want to go more customizable, you want to really look for another solution.
My general advice is, suppose you have minimal organizational and transformation requirements, and you have an all HCTP backend with no processing required, then definitely you should go for Apigee, because Apigee provides all those things out of the box. It can protect your backend from any penetration threat and you can integrate it with your identity provider for security. All those things are provided by Apigee. Suppose you have very, very little request response, it does not require much transformation. In that case, you can use Apigee. But if it requires a huge transformation and lots of calculations and business logic is involved, in that case, you have to go for where you can write your custom logic, so for that you should go for a Mulesoft kind of solution.
On a scale of one to ten, I would give Apigee an eight.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.