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NGINX API Gateway vs Runscope [EOL] comparison

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Executive Summary

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

NGINX API Gateway
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
API Monitoring Software (2nd)
Runscope [EOL]
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

RituRaj - PeerSpot reviewer
SDE 2 at Virtusa
Traffic management has reduced incidents and has provided faster, more controlled releases
While our overall experience with NGINX API Gateway has been positive, there are a few areas where I feel it could be improved. One is an easy centralized management UI. A lot of advanced configuration is still heavily file-based and engineering-driven, so for larger enterprise environments, a modern, intuitive centralized management dashboard would help operational teams significantly. More built-in API lifecycle management features would also be helpful. Compared to some enterprise API management platforms, features such as developer portals, API monetization, and version lifecycle management are not as comprehensive out-of-the-box. Configuration complexity at scale is another concern. As an environment grows, managing large configuration files across many services can become difficult. We handle this through automations and templating, but it still requires an experienced engineer. The learning curve for advanced tuning also presents challenges. The basic setup is straightforward, but optimizing performance, caching, and traffic strategies for higher traffic requires deep expertise. In our case, none of these are blockers, but improving these areas would make the platform even more enterprise-friendly and easier to operate at a very large scale. A few additional improvements come to mind regarding NGINX API Gateway. One area is documentation for advanced enterprise use cases. The basic setup documentation is quite good, but when dealing with complex traffic routing, multi-region deployments, advanced caching strategies, or large-scale Kubernetes integrations, teams often need to rely heavily on community forums and internal experimentations. More real-world architecture examples and enterprise deployment patterns would be very helpful. Support response quality can also vary depending on the complexity of the issue. For standard operational problems, support is generally responsive, but for highly specific performance tuning or advanced configuration challenges, resolution sometimes requires deep internal troubleshooting from the engineering team. Another improvement area is operational visibility. While integration with monitoring tools works well, having more built-in dashboards for traffic analytics, latency trends, upstream health, and API usage would reduce dependency on external observability platforms. Finally, although performance is excellent, onboarding newer engineers can take some time because advanced NGINX API Gateway configurations and migration patterns require fairly strong infrastructure knowledge. More guidance, templates, automation recommendations, and best-practice deployment blueprints would make adoption easier for a growing team.
Director5672 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Engineering at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Enables us to monitor API endpoints to ensure everything is running
I've noticed, once or twice, when there were some updates pushed by Runscope, at times it didn't refresh the pages. I was running it, there were multiple tests running at the same time, and it didn't update the webpage I was looking at. So I had to refresh it manually. Occasionally, it still happens. Another thing I have found is that the built-in editor for the scripts can be improved a lot. Instead of making such a basic editor, maybe include a little more so it is easier to look at things and debug. Finally, other than the Runscope documentation, I haven't seen too much elsewhere. I haven't seen a user community.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's easy to install, and the performance is good."
"We do not face any lags."
"We use it for container deployment, mostly for Kubernetes, and sometimes we also use it for testing purposes as I am using it for my own personal learning purposes."
"API routing is the most valuable feature."
"The best features of NGINX API Gateway are the authentication aspects, since it adds a barrier to your application before requests hit the main service, and also the load balancing aspects where it handles system downtimes by routing requests to the next available service."
"NGINX API Gateway has been a reliable and high-performance platform for our organization, providing an excellent balance between performance, flexibility, and operational efficiency while handling large API traffic very well and remaining lightweight and relatively cost-effective compared to some heavyweight enterprise solutions."
"We love the fact that we can have our API tests run on a schedule as often as we need. We also take advantage of being able to set up different environment settings so that we can use the same test in our production, integration, and QA environments, easily. The ability to string together a number of API tests for a test suite is very important to us as well."
"We can receive an email and slack notifications if tests are failing/passing."
"This solution has improved our responsiveness to issues in both production and non-production environments."
"It uses JavaScript which is easy."
"Runscope is the best option for REST API automation."
"It helps us verify that production deployments do not break the features our customers use."
"It has allowed us to go from no API tests to scheduled, automated tests integrated with PagerDuty in a few months."
"This solution has improved our responsiveness to issues in both production and non-production environments. Through integration with Slack, our development and DevOps teams are quickly aware of issues related to new changes deployed to non-production environments, which tightens our feedback loop during testing. Through integration with PagerDuty, our DevOps resources are able to reduce the adverse impact of a given production issue."
 

Cons

"The product must improve its security features."
"While our overall experience with NGINX API Gateway has been positive, there are a few areas where I feel it could be improved."
"The UI could be more attractive."
"I believe NGINX API Gateway could improve by offering token authentication in the normal version instead of only in NGINX Plus, as it currently requires migration to enterprise for that feature."
"It could be more secure because security is always a problem."
"We would like to have an improved ability to share a set of tests across different environments (e.g., dev, stage, and prod)."
"The documentation of Runscope needs to be improved."
"Overall, the user interface (UI) requires a lot of clicking around."
"One thing that can be improved is the logging. Sometimes, when we have an error, we don't know how to find more information about the problem that has happened. Sometimes, it just returns something like "that gateway." More information would be a way to improve it."
"We would like the ability to configure Runscope behavior when a given test has its schedule modified. That is, in a non-production environment, we often need to pause a test (either by removing it from the schedule or adjusting its frequency) and this results in the automatic kick-off of this test in all other environments. We would like the ability to simply pause a test for a specific shared environment without causing additional tests to be started."
"File upload is a big part of the products that we test. The lack of file upload in Runscope requires us to still use UI (Selenium) automated tests for these scenarios."
"There have been some Runscope outages in the last year. Though not many, Runscope availability is of critical importance in our production context."
"The initial setup included a lot of repetitive manual work."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the open-source version."
"We are using the open source version, so there is no cost involved."
"Pricing is fair."
"Runscope pricing is unbeatable"
"The price for the product is very reasonable for a team of more than four to five members."
"Having the different plans organized by team size, buckets, and requests per billing period works for our needs. Larger companies may need to take a close look at these elements."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Outsourcing Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX API Gateway?
As a developer, I am not directly involved in pricing, setup cost, and licensing, but from what I hear from the team, the feedback on pricing is generally positive, especially when compared to some...
What needs improvement with NGINX API Gateway?
I believe NGINX API Gateway could improve by offering token authentication in the normal version instead of only in NGINX Plus, as it currently requires migration to enterprise for that feature.
What is your primary use case for NGINX API Gateway?
I have been using NGINX API Gateway for most of my personal projects, and I primarily use it for authentication aspects, rate limiting, and as my reverse proxy. I normally use NGINX API Gateway for...
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Also Known As

No data available
CA Runscope
 

Overview

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Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Twilio, Microsoft, Adobe, Okta, Tesco, Charter Communications
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