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3scale API Management vs Apiary comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

3scale API Management
Ranking in API Management
17th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Apiary
Ranking in API Management
36th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of 3scale API Management is 2.3%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apiary is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

Featured Reviews

KavitaChavan - PeerSpot reviewer
Lightweight solution but less flexible customization features
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.
PW
The ability to configure rules to check for consistency has helped
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.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution is quite lightweight, and the installation is very easy. It's like a two-click installation."
"I like the API automation."
"The standard deployment is very simple."
"It's good that they aren't adding a lot of features like ESP, etc. It's okay with just being a gateway."
"3scale API Management's best feature is API management."
"The product is stable."
"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."
"The most valuable features are the gateway and security features."
"In two years, there was one time the service was down for an hour or so."
"I find the generation of mock services very useful, especially when demonstrating for new consumers."
"Quick and easy way to share a new API design with teams."
"Git integration"
"I do like the overall performance of the solution."
 

Cons

"It would be helpful to improve the customization features so that the customer can do it based on their own needs."
"The user experience could be better. The developer portal is too complex and hard to configure."
"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."
"The product is not that flexible for developers. It's less flexible and rigid. It's not easy to make changes or customize it."
"I believe the CMS part of it has room for improvement though. That is where you write a couple of things if you want to publish your API. It's based on liquid scripting, which doesn't seem like the obvious ones to script with."
"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."
"3scale API Management only supports restful APIs and doesn't support SOAP."
"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."
"Swagger (OpenAPI Specification) and Blueprint Support"
"I would like an integrated option to download a Swagger version of the definition."
"The Oracle release cycle is very bad because the patches only update once a year."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is affordable, it's cheap."
"The cost was around $45,000 per year."
"I don't think that 3scale is very expensive."
"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."
"It is easy to get started with personal (free) accounts, but a subscription is required for additional features."
"There is a free subscription option to start and try the service."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Insurance Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Media Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Victor Ops, Coca Cola, The Telegraph, Skava, Orange, Typeform
Microsoft, salesforce.com, Bloomberg, GoodData, Viacom, Akamai Technologies, DigitalGlobe
Find out what your peers are saying about 3scale API Management vs. Apiary and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
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