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IBM API Connect vs SwaggerHub 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

IBM API Connect
Ranking in API Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) (7th)
SwaggerHub
Ranking in API Management
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of IBM API Connect is 6.4%, up from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SwaggerHub is 1.3%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

Featured Reviews

KavitaChavan - PeerSpot reviewer
Quite flexible and provides excellent performance for API gateway
The only disadvantage I can see is that it requires heavy hardware support, which can be considered quite expensive. In terms of new functionality, I think the analytics can be improved in V10. The analytics feature was better in the older version, 2.18. But in V10, it's not as flexible. When exporting analytics as KSP or JSON, it's not well formatted. They can work on enhancing the analytics part. Additionally, they can focus on reducing the hardware cost.
SwaminathanSubramanian - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitating enterprise-wide API governance and management
Some areas of SwaggerHub that could be improved include the interface between the code editor and the visual editor, the integration with private APIs, which currently requires an upgraded account. The scalability also needs enhancement, as it becomes flaky under increased load. Additionally, the versioning management could be improved to be on par with source code management tools.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The interface is very nice. It makes the solution easy to use and navigate."
"What's best about IBM API Connect is the excellent administration. The development tool that builds the API is also very simple, and user-friendly, and it doesn't consume too much time. Another valuable feature in IBM API Connect is its good reporting feature, particularly for operations, but the most valuable feature of the solution for the customer is security. IBM API Connect provides a DMZ and a security gateway between the external and internal environment, so you can publish your API safely. IBM API Connect can also integrate with any tool or middleware that works on open standards without the need for development or coding, so integration with the solution is easier."
"IBM API Connect is a reliable and scalable solution."
"The statistics component is easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of IBM API Connect is the security of the protocol."
"Policy configurations are pretty easy."
"Using API Connect allows us to quickly create proxy APIs and saves time on end-to-end testing, which lets us deliver quickly to clients."
"The functionalities on offer are very good."
"The tool's most valuable feature is licensing."
"It is quite a useful tool. It is quite good with the validation of the spec. It works quite well in terms of errors and conformity to the OpenAPI standard. It is better than Visual Studio Code in terms of editing."
"I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten."
"You can click & play and add the notation in a human-readable form. Spotlight is also very good in the graphical design of APIs."
"It is a stable solution."
"The scalability is endless."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy and not at all difficult."
"The most valuable features are the collaboration between multiple teams and the control and distribution of specifications."
 

Cons

"Debugging could be improved."
"I would like to see automation of the installation. If there could be a single-click function where you could automate everything, that would be helpful."
"The developmental process is not quite user-friendly."
"The integration of cloud-based services is where we're looking for improvement in this platform."
"It is expensive within this class of products."
"It should be cheaper."
"Our main pain points are in these two areas: creating a better developer portal and improving stability in terms of synchronization and monetization."
"The implementation process could benefit from improvements, as it may take some time to become accustomed to the deployment."
"The scalability aspect of SwaggerHub can be improved. It becomes a bit unreliable when the load is increased and isn't up to par with expectations for scalability."
"The review process should be improved. There seem to be some gaps, at least for us, for the editing part because we would like to have a full request review mechanism. They support some comments, but it is really hard to manage those comments. We would like to use the full request. Therefore, we are now looking to integrate with repositories. It has integration with Bitbucket and GitHub, but we have some internal constraints, and we need to move some of the repositories to GitHub. Our source code is on-premise in Bitbucket, and it was a bit of a problem for us to integrate. Now we are transitioning our repositories to GitHub, and hopefully, we can enable the integration. This will probably solve the problem with the review and approval. Its customization should also be improved. There are limitations around the support for the developer portal. There should be more customization options for the website that you can use as a developer portal. Currently, it has only Swagger UI with minimal customization. You cannot actually add additional pages and documentation for explaining concepts and general things. That's why we have started to look around to see what other tools are doing. They should also allow tagging on the API. We would like to add some tagging on the API to reflect certain things. Currently, any metadata that you would like to have has to be a part of the spec. You cannot do anything else. It should also have support for Open API 3.1, which was released at the beginning of the year. It would be great to be able to switch to that."
"We have to use additional tools to test APIs."
"Some areas of SwaggerHub that could be improved include the interface between the code editor and the visual editor, the integration with private APIs, which currently requires an upgraded account."
"SwaggerHub's UI needs to be improved as it looks very old school."
"It has limited functionality...Unfortunately, some of its features are not what we need."
"More integration and usability with the cloud microservices would be nice"
"SwaggerHub could be improved with better integration for tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the product price a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"The price for IBM API Connect is reasonable. It's $20,000 to $30,000 yearly for a subscription, and the pricing could vary around $40,000 per year, per subscription. Its price is reasonable for customers who have around sixty million API calls yearly for unlimited environments."
"It should be cheaper. It has a yearly licensing."
"The pricing is too expensive with IBM. Sometimes, we prefer to go with an open source or something more lightweight."
"API Connect is expensive - I'd rate their pricing five out of ten."
"It would be a good idea to bring down the pricing by at least 20 to 30 percent."
"The pricing is significantly high."
"It's an expensive product."
"The tool is cheap."
"It has a yearly subscription, but I am not sure."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
23%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Insurance Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
14%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM API Connect?
Publishers can easily identify, create, and publish APIs on the developer portal, defining plans, packages, and potentially billing rules.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM API Connect?
Price depends on many factors like size of the deal, competitive factors, timing, customer profile or where the pricing for API Calls is very competitive comparing to any of the leader players.
What needs improvement with IBM API Connect?
The only downside where improvements are needed is probably on the licensing side. Scalability is an issue with IBM API Connect, making it an area where improvements are required.
What do you like most about SwaggerHub?
The tool's most valuable feature is licensing.
What needs improvement with SwaggerHub?
Some areas of SwaggerHub that could be improved include the interface between the code editor and the visual editor, the integration with private APIs, which currently requires an upgraded account....
What is your primary use case for SwaggerHub?
I started using SwaggerHub in its previous version, SmartMiner, with a tool called SoapUI. I used it to create mock web services to test web services and create test scripts and mock APIs. This usa...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Heineken, Tine, Finologee, Axis Bank
Sonic, Zuora, Woolworths, CrowdFlower
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM API Connect vs. SwaggerHub and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.