Application programming interfaces (API) management is about creating and publishing APIs, enforcing policies on their use, managing access rights, reporting on performance, and analyzing statistics on usage rates.
Safety obviously plays a major role. Finally, organizations increasingly rely on APIs to facilitate their interaction with a variety of other applications, cloud services, and mobile devices. Inattention can expose data and other company resources to unauthorized users.
API management software helps simplify the process of designing, deploying, and maintaining APIs. For example, TIBCO offers the TIBCO Cloud API management platform, of which Tibco Mashery is a component. Google offers Apigee API Management, a solution it acquired a few years ago. Since then, Google has tightly integrated it into its many cloud computing offerings.
TIBCO Cloud API Management and Apigee API Management are both popular options with users. But what’s best for your business?
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TIBCO vs. Apigee: Key Features
TIBCO Cloud API Management software is designed to provide enterprise interoperability with API-driven integration, respond to real-time business events, gain business insights with data-as-service APIs, and deploy APIs in hybrid and multi-cloud environments and to manage.
It provides service mesh management so that a single control plan of distributed microservices provides traffic management, security, and observability and visibility of the end-to-end service chain. Instead of multiple API silos, it offers one screen for managing APIs, bridging internal, partner, and public APIs. API automation bots, widgets and analytics make API product management more efficient.
TIBCO Cloud API Management software also helps IT securely manage APIs as products. It can be used to create revenue opportunities, go-to-market routes, respond to market changes, and add value to partners. A separate element of the platform, TIBCO Mashery Local, is a cloud-native API gateway that can be used to configure API policies, packages, and schedules, and to manage API keys.
For Google, Apigee API Management is just one facet of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Apigee helps IT design, secure, analyze, and scale APIs anywhere with visibility and control. It can be used to increase consumption of APIs with flexible developer portal options and gain insights into API value chain or monetize API products.
Tight integration with GCP means it can plug into an immense range of applications. Gartner ranked Apigee well ahead of TIBCO in its Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management. Apigee received a Leader rating for its feature-rich API management capabilities, available for public cloud (GCP), private cloud, or data center deployments.
There’s also Apigee Hybrid, a deployment option at the Apigee Enterprise and Enterprise Plus tiers that allows users to run the runtime on Azure, AWS, on a private cloud using the Google Anthos platform, or on an Apigee-managed control plane on GCP can manage .
Who wins at features? TIBCO lags behind in terms of breadth of functionality and pace of innovation. Until last year, elements such as native service mesh support, API design and implementation, API testing, and API monetization were missing. It has since added them, but definitely plays up to Google. As a result, Apigee has a significant feature lead over TIBCO.
However, Apigee also has limitations. For example, it’s primarily designed for API management use cases, has no integration platform, and can slow down users with labor-intensive configuration and customization. Those who want access to some artificial intelligence and ML capabilities have no choice but to use Apigee’s public cloud or Apigee Hybrid.
Despite these disadvantages, Apigee wins in this category.
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TIBCO vs. Apigee: Evolution
TIBCO’s platform now enables the development of APIs from any data source. Developers can use modeling tools to access backend systems and model any data source. Cloud-native apps can be designed using API choreography, event-driven APIs, and other non-REST protocols such as AsyncAPI, Websockets, GraphQL, gRPC, and Kafka types. API delivery and testing can be standardized with automated CI/CD tests for load, headers, objects, data and business logic. API products can be packaged, cataloged, and discovered, including API-led microservices on Kubernetes.
Apigee also includes features to ensure APIs are available to developers and partners and work as expected. You can quickly identify and diagnose API problems. Industry API accelerators are available, e.g. B. Apigee Open Banking APIx, which supports open banking. This is a requirement of Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) in Europe and Consumer Data Right (CDR) in Australia. The company’s bank-specific developer portal with API documentation makes it popular in these markets.
Apigee wins again, although TIBCO has been catching up lately.
TIBCO vs. Apigee: Security
TIBCO provides authorization, authentication, auditing, and key gateway traffic capabilities that enable IT to remain in control of agile app development, access and security policy definition, and API product line management. A single system manages traffic for all gateways, including embedded micro-gateways. The platform allows users to define access and security policies such as rate limiting and throttling for different API consumers. Users can invoke robust security standards like OAuth2, HTTPS, JWT, HMAC, XML-Sig, Kerberos, CORS, WS-I, ISO 27001, PCI, Hitrust, Kubernetes Secrets with RBAC and MTLS.
Apigee offers layered security and privacy along with a similar security cover. Developers can add multiple layers to API security, e.g. B. Cloud Armor, CMEK, IAM and other cloud security features. Data can be regionally stored and managed according to data sovereignty regulations to ensure regulatory compliance.
Who wins? It’s a tie in this category.
TIBCO vs. Apigee: Management and Analysis
Service Mesh Management is a newer offering within the TIBCO Cloud API Management Platform, providing a single plane of control of distributed microservices with traffic management, security, and full service chain observability and visibility connecting internal, partner, and public APIs.
Management functions span planning, design, implementation, testing, release, security, operations, usage, maintenance, versioning, and retirement. Static and interactive documentation can be created to inform users about the available APIs and their work with them.
TIBCO Cloud API Management analytics and reports measure the success of any API program and identify areas for potential investment. Consolidated usage and performance analysis dashboards help ensure the performance of API programs across globally distributed regions with optimized token synchronization, auto-scaling, and response caching. IT can also monitor and visualize custom operational and usage-based KPIs with endpoint-level drill-down.
Apigee promotes its AI-powered automation capabilities that can turn API data into insights, predict API traffic patterns, detect anomalies in real time, and protect APIs from malicious bot attacks. AI can be applied to historical API metadata to predict API behavior and automatically detect anomalies. Apigee wins in this category for the sophistication of its management and analytics offerings. TIBCO’s capabilities have become more sophisticated recently, but they’re not yet as battle-hardened as Google’s.
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TIBCO vs. Apigee: Mobility and Cloud
TIBCO can be deployed via SaaS, a private cloud, or on-premises. It includes Mobile Device Management (MDM) capabilities to manage APIs for mobile devices. Traditional API management capabilities can be extended through universal connectors, templates, dashboards, and industry accelerators.
With GCP’s resources behind it, Apigee can leverage Google’s global reach to ensure API programs span the globe. Google also provides access to last-mile performance and caching via Cloud CDN. Apigee is happy to host the API on-premises, on Google Cloud, or in a hybrid environment. IT manages and controls runtime, allowing the business to position gateways closer to API traffic and leverage existing compliance, governance, and security infrastructure.
This category is close, although Google narrowly wins.
TIBCO vs. Apigee: Price Comparison
TIBCO offers a basic or enterprise version of its Cloud API Management platform. Basic starts at $500 per month. Enterprises require the fully featured version, for which pricing was not available. Google’s pricing, for its part, is murky and has been described as expensive by some users.
TIBCO wins.
TIBCO vs. Apigee: Conclusion
Google Apigee Named a Leader in Garner’s Latest API Management MQ. It has an active development pipeline. For example, it launched Apigee X, a GCP-based SaaS deployment that combines Apigee with other GCP products such as Cloud Armor and reCAPTCHA. This makes it more secure and is an answer to evolving user needs. It also offers a choice of API gateways.
TIBCO Software only received a niche player rating in Gartner’s MQ. However, since the MQ’s release, the company has upgraded the platform from TIBCO Cloud Mashery to TIBCO Cloud API Management. The added skills can improve the rating in the next MQ. The analyst firm gave the company high marks for its geographically diverse customer base, particularly among medium-sized and large companies.
TIBCO has sales offices in dozens of countries and relationships with more than 1,500 system integrators and VARs. It also performed well on metrics related to high availability and disaster recovery. However, limitations include API management, which is primarily designed for the open banking and healthcare sectors. It offers accelerators for other industries, but isn’t as strong there. The company is also slower on the innovation front.
Overall, it’s difficult for TIBCO to compete with Google’s reach when it comes to helping organizations use APIs to achieve digital ambitions. According to Gartner, Apigee’s services and support for building external-facing API products are particularly strong. The API developer portal options are highly customizable and the data monetization features are strong. This helps it dominate in industries like financial services/banking, retail, and healthcare.
Apigee is the winner, although TIBCO is making a big effort to catch up.
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