

IBM DataPower Gateway and Apigee compete in the API management category. Apigee has the upper hand with its extensive analytics and flexible setup, offering a broader range of features.
Features: IBM DataPower Gateway provides high-speed operation, robust security, and multi-protocol handling, making it suitable for large organizations. Its appliance-based approach enhances stability and integration capabilities. Apigee offers extensive analytics, a developer portal, and API management capabilities, with strengths in customization, integration support, and advanced monitoring tools.
Room for Improvement: IBM DataPower Gateway faces challenges with its high cost and complexity, requiring significant training and better language support. Apigee is similarly costly and needs better integration capabilities and a more efficient support model. Both could improve in user accessibility and integration options.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM DataPower Gateway is typically deployed on-premises or in hybrid environments, with a complex initial setup. Support is good for critical issues, but response times can be lengthy. Apigee offers flexible deployment in public, private, and hybrid clouds, although on-premises setups may be challenging. Support is generally good, but response times are a concern.
Pricing and ROI: Both IBM DataPower Gateway and Apigee are expensive, with IBM noted for a high price point even for smaller use cases. Apigee offers enterprise-level pricing models based on API calls, which may not suit smaller companies. Despite costs, both products are seen as worthwhile investments for improved API management and security, with Apigee offering more pricing flexibility.
We count the number of hits and can say we earn and actually get the benefit from it.
They are responsive and provide assistance even during production issues.
In the past two years, I have been experiencing less assistance.
The customer service and support are cooperative and effective in providing insights and solutions during challenges.
In terms of OEM support, it is poor.
I would evaluate customer service and technical support as a little bit weak, so I give it a seven out of ten.
Adding extra Cassandra databases is complex.
Once you install the product, we can't scale the resources on the IBM DataPower Gateway.
Apigee is stable, and we have had the system running on Apigee servers for more than four years without any stability issues.
IBM DataPower Gateway does not handle all the traffic on a single node.
Analytics is one of the areas needing enhancement, specifically more visibility and control over traffic to improve capacity management and high availability.
Apigee only allows validation of transactions up to a four-hour period, which requires manual hovering over the date and time.
Apigee should also incorporate these capabilities, especially in the on-premises version.
If we require additional features, we can't configure them on the IBM DataPower Gateway.
Whenever I am writing code, it should give recommendations automatically by incorporating AI so I can write the code in a few minutes or seconds.
My experience with the pricing of this product is that pricing is too high and should be reduced.
Apigee's product cost is quite high compared to other products.
Apigee is high-priced, suitable for large enterprises where the benefit aligns with the cost.
Apigee is perceived as slightly costly compared to other tools in the market.
I think it costs around 5 Crore in Indian Rupees.
It provides all the necessary capabilities for current technologies, enabling communication and translation between protocols, along with supporting stringent security features.
Apigee's analytics capabilities aid in monitoring and optimizing APIs, which are also beneficial for our operations.
We rely on Elasticsearch to monitor traffic, which provides high visibility and control and surpasses Apigee in certain features.
No other Gateway offers this as part of the integration offering.
As per the development perspective, there are some limitations with IBM DataPower Gateway because it only supports XML and XSLT language, but it does not support the Java language.
IBM DataPower Gateway has positively impacted my organization by allowing me to implement rate limits on the different API usage, which is the benefit.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Apigee | 8.8% |
| IBM DataPower Gateway | 3.1% |
| Other | 88.1% |



| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 20 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 9 |
| Large Enterprise | 65 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 11 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 17 |
Apigee is a platform for developing and managing APIs. Apigee offers an interface for your core services by wrapping them with a proxy layer which is then accessed by other developers. With Apigee, you can design and build APIs and then securely share their services and data without exposing any code.
Because app developers make HTTP requests to an API proxy rather than directly to your services, your services are separated from the developers. All the developer needs to know is the URL of the API proxy endpoint, necessary query parameters, authorization credentials (if they exist), and the response data format.
The API proxy isolates the app developer from your backend service. Therefore, you are free to change the service implementation if the public API remains consistent. By maintaining a consistent frontend API, existing client apps will continue to work regardless of changes on the backend.
Key capabilities of the Apigee API management platform include:
Reviews from Real Users:
Apigee stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its rich developer portal, its advanced analytics, and its central monitoring system.
Carlos R., a software architect at Caja Los Andes writes, “The central monitoring feature is the most valuable. It also provides security for the APIs and high availability for our use cases. Apigee is the best product in the industry in comparison to other API management solutions. It helps in fast development, which is a top point. It also supports a lot of industry standards and has excellent documentation.”
An associate vice president at a tech services company notes, “The analytics function and the developer portal are the two valuable features of Apigee. The analytics part is very good, and the developer portal is quite rich in features. The authentication mechanisms are quite easily built into Apigee, which is something that most of the other products have also now started supporting.”
IBM DataPower Gateway is a robust, secure next-generation enterprise-grade single multichannel API gateway that supplies dynamic access, integration, control, and outstanding security. The solution is available in a broad range of workload capabilities, including application programming interface (API), service oriented architecture (SOA), B2B, cloud, web, and mobile. These dynamic capabilities ensure users are able to quickly increase the reach of an organization's critical IT resources to new channels, which will provide shareholders, team members, and clients with safe, secure access at all times.
DataPower Gateway is very flexible and is widely available in virtual, cloud, traditional, physical, Docker, and Linux form factors.
IBM DataPower Gateway Features
IBM DataPower Gateway has many value-added features. Some of these features are included below:
IBM DataPower Gateway Benefits
IBM DataPower Gateway provides many benefits. Some of those benefits include:
Reviews from Real Users
“My company has a good impression of IBM DataPower Gateway. What I like about it is that because it's an appliance, it's a turnkey solution that's very fast and out of the box. Another valuable feature of IBM DataPower Gateway is that it's easy to integrate with other products.”- Bálint T., Solution Manager at Intalion
“You don't have to have a separate DMC proxy because DataPower Gateway is an appliance and will take care of a lot of security features. These include data validations, encryption, as well as XML or any type of scripting or security threats that are present. From a security point of view, being an appliance in the DMC zone, IBM DataPower Gateway will take care of the entire security angle for the infrastructure.” - Sathyan K., Founder/Director at perfTech Solutions Pvt Ltd
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