IBM DataPower Gateway vs Tyk comparison

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IBM DataPower Gateway

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM DataPower Gateway and Tyk compete in the API management category, each offering distinct advantages. IBM DataPower Gateway holds the upper hand in security and enterprise-level integration, while Tyk stands out for its open-source flexibility and scalability.

Features: IBM DataPower Gateway provides comprehensive security features, transaction routing, and enhanced policy management. Its robust security measures and enterprise-level integrations are particularly valuable. Tyk offers open-source flexibility, seamless scalability, and high customizability, empowering developers to create tailored solutions easily.

Room for Improvement: IBM DataPower Gateway could enhance its agility and ease of customization to better serve agile environments. It may also benefit from a more flexible deployment model and user-friendly interface. Tyk could improve the maturity of its cloud version and address its nascent stage of development. Additionally, Tyk might focus on expanding its capabilities to match more established competitors in the market.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM DataPower Gateway offers a traditional deployment model that is well-suited to complex enterprise infrastructures, backed by dedicated customer service channels. Tyk provides a streamlined deployment process, particularly beneficial for cloud-native settings. Its responsive customer support enhances accessibility and user experience.

Pricing and ROI: IBM DataPower Gateway involves a significant upfront setup cost, with great ROI for enterprises prioritizing security and compliance. Tyk's cost-effective setup appeals to startups, offering a scalable ROI as organizations grow. Tyk's pricing revolves around openness, making it attractive for cost-sensitive environments.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Tyk Report (Updated: April 2025).

IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Tyk

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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 DataPower Gateway

Ranking in API Management

12th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (6th), Application Infrastructure (7th), SOA Application Gateways (1st)

Tyk

Ranking in API Management

20th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 3.9%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tyk is 2.0%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

API Management

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi

Co-Founder at tenekit

Security features meets compliance needs and offers MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) that simplifies integration efforts

While I like IBM products, I'm not an evangelist. I work with Java, Microsoft ASP.NET, and various technologies. I'm not tied to any specific vendor. However, I do find IBM to be a bit greedy. It's a large, profit-driven company. The support team is mostly based in India, and they follow a very structured process and protocol. Sometimes, it feels like playing ping pong with them – lots of back and forth before the problem gets escalated. You might even have to get your sales rep involved to push things along. For me, the support it could be better. Indian support teams aren't inherently bad, but with IBM, it feels impersonal. They respond, sure. But if it's a complex technical issue, they might ask you a lot of questions that just seem designed to waste your time. Sometimes it feels like they hope you'll get frustrated and solve the problem yourself.

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MarkDoherty

Founding Director at Point Group

Fastest to get up and running and fewer idiosyncrasies than competitors

In terms of our usage, the main area of concern is that they tend to build enhancements slightly ahead of the considerations for what those enhancements and extensions are. So it could be slightly better communication with the customer base that would be my main issue with them. But as a product, it's very difficult to find any major faults.

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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 robust."

"What I like most is the stability."

"The scalability of the solution is good."

"It is easy to use, easy to install, and it's resilient for high availability."

"Since it is a gateway, it provides a lot of security features."

"The solution is stable."

"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. Compared to other gateways, I also like that IBM DataPower Gateway is function-rich. For example, for one of the projects, there was a need for specific transformation and security features available in IBM DataPower Gateway out of the box, so my team just needed to configure the appliance. There was no need for separate development, and I found it quite neat. Another valuable feature of IBM DataPower Gateway is that it's easy to integrate with other products."

"The product's most valuable features are AAA policies and security features."

More IBM DataPower Gateway pros

"The portal for developers that this solution provides has great functionality."

"It is a good product for API management."

"The scalability is very good. That was a key factor in the selection, like how it could be pushed to high volume and scalability, which seemed to be very good."

"The feature I find most valuable is that this solution allows us to manage our security."

"You can set up workflows and write limited pieces of logic."

"The most valuable feature is the load balancing with the circuit-breaker function."

Cons

"Traceability could be improved, especially for business operations. The traceability of the transactions could be an improvement point for DataPower to work on. It would be better if they provided JSON support. JSON protocol data has changed format. It started performing internal transformation to JSONx. This might be an additional complexity."

"The product should be more adapted to the DevOps process."

"I would like the tool to improve its training."

"The initial setup isn't so easy, you need who has experience working with the solution to help."

"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."

"IBM DataPower Gateway is quite big for smaller organizations, looking at different types of clients who are virtually assisted in this, I would say it's not really a good product for smaller firms."

"They should improve the solution's clustering features."

"In terms of OEM support, it is poor. If I raise a CBRT one, as per the SLA, they should respond in one hour, however, sometimes it takes four or five hours to respond."

More IBM DataPower Gateway cons

"We would like a better tool for generating documentation for the APIs to be developed."

"It is a young product and does not have the kind of brand recognition that would make it a more popular solution with our clients."

"I would like to see some additional features like having some extensions for .NET core because we use it for our back-end language."

"Sometimes when new features are released, they are not immediately stable."

"In terms of our usage, the main area of concern is that they tend to build enhancements slightly ahead of the considerations for what those enhancements and extensions are. So it could be slightly better communication with the customer base that would be my main issue with them."

"We ran it for a while, but then we decided to move away from Tyk, because Tyk's cloud version, the SaaS version, has a significant limitation of limited flexibility, so you can't program very much."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM DataPower Gateway is quite expensive to get resources to work on this product. If the price could be cheaper, I think that will make it a little bit better and easily accessible to smaller clients. Then it could compete with other solutions that are available in the market. There's a whole lot of other solutions available that work well and are cheaper than IBM's products."

"As far as I know, they have a perpetual license for this product. They are paying perpetual fees rather than an annual subscription or annual pricing."

"The licensing cost is very expensive."

"It's expensive when you compare it with others."

"The cost is very high and requires all five components in the API management solution."

"It is an expensive solution."

"The total cost of IBM DataPower Gateway would depend on the configuration, but in my experience, it can amount to 60,000 Euros per box, even for the virtual version. Usually, customers need high availability and a non-production environment, so the total price for IBM DataPower Gateway can be quite a lot. It can be 200,000 Euros or a similar figure."

"The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."

More IBM DataPower Gateway pricing and cost advice

"We are using the open-source version of this product, so there are no licensing costs for its use."

"It had a free version, which suited many of our needs, but not all, but we were happy to go ahead with the licensed version as well, which is the paid version."

"There are different versions and plans available depending on the requirements, so there is flexibility in terms of the pricing."

"The price is low compared to other products of a similar type."

"The cost curve is far smoother, both in terms of volume and the number of calls it's running on, compared to most competitors. So it's a tad more expensive at the very low end, but the curve is nothing like Apigee or some of the others."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

30%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

14%

Healthcare Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM DataPower Gateway?

The MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) is great because it allows you to easily expose services using various protocols – web services, REST (JSON), and others. This flexibility simplifies things.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM DataPower Gateway?

I would rate the pricing a two out of ten, with one being high price, and ten being low price. It's high-priced for smaller companies. But it is okay for enterprises. So, the price could be more fl...

What needs improvement with IBM DataPower Gateway?

The DCDR process should be less complex. AI should improve developer efficiency and effort. Whenever I am writing code, it should give recommendations automatically by incorporating AI so I can wri...

What do you like most about Tyk?

The scalability is very good. That was a key factor in the selection, like how it could be pushed to high volume and scalability, which seemed to be very good.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tyk?

The pricing is actually quite competitive. In Azure environments, it gets beaten by Microsoft API Gateway, but on the other hand, it offers some features that Microsoft lacks. So it really comes do...

What needs improvement with Tyk?

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Product Reports

IBM DataPower Gateway

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Also Known As

WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower

No data available

Overview

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:

Control: The solution provides decision point authorization and authentication for all standards, including Lightweight Direct Access Protocol (LDAP) and Open Authorization (OAuth), which allow for better access control across an organization’s entire network.
DataPower dashboard: The dashboard is specifically designed to enhance performance and determine problematic processes. The solution provides intuitive real-time performance transparency to diagnose operational and performance anomalies and offer repair and restoration recommendations.
Enhanced messaging: Users are able to easily mediate messaging and protocols by incorporating the best of today’s traditional and modern application standards.
Integration: IBM DataPower Gateway offers super fast mainframe connectivity, database connectivity, transport protocol bridging, content-based routing, and any-to-any message transformation, ensuring secure and immediate connect service.

IBM DataPower Gateway Benefits

IBM DataPower Gateway provides many benefits. Some of those benefits include:

Flexibility: The solution is easy to use and configure and provides for a pleasant, intuitive overall user experience. The solution can immediately be used out of the box, which makes overall process management simple.
Protection: The solution provides sturdy continuous service protection and application performance using robust powerful routing and traffic control.
Security: The solution’s enterprise-grade De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) ready gateway enables users to enforce the desired runtime application security across all messaging protocols.
Profitability: The solution’s design ensures significant reduction of development costs in addition to the streamlining of overall operations. Users are able to achieve reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and experience a near-immediate ROI.

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

IBM

Tyk is an open source API Gateway that is fast and scalable, an API management platform featuring an API gateway, analytics, developer portal and dashboard. Available in three flavours to best suit your architecture and governance. We offer full cloud or on-premises options, and the best of both worlds with our unique hybrid model. www.tyk.io

Sample Customers

RBL Bank, Availity

Trip Advisor, Juniper Networks, AT&T

IBM DataPower Gateway vs. Tyk