Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Amazon API Gateway vs IBM API Connect 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon API Gateway is praised for cost-effectiveness, time savings, and secure infrastructure, offering financial benefits for users.
Sentiment score
6.9
IBM API Connect enhances profitability and efficiency by reducing development time, improving security, and enabling seamless system integration.
API Gateway saves time and secures my infrastructure, allowing effective deployment.
Reducing development hours from eighty to four for an API was possible due to reusing existing scripts from DataPower.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Amazon API Gateway offers strong customer support, especially for enterprise plans, with variable response times based on support tier.
Sentiment score
6.4
IBM API Connect support is proactive and expert but variable in speed, with regional availability challenges noted by users.
Within 15 minutes, we had a support engineer allocated via Amazon, and we were able to resolve the issue promptly.
Technical support is excellent, deserving a ten out of ten rating.
If you have a tier-one partnership, the support has been phenomenal.
Support is excellent when it comes to APIC.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon API Gateway excels in scalability, efficiently managing traffic for diverse users, perfect for small teams and large enterprises.
Sentiment score
7.4
IBM API Connect offers excellent scalability through on-premise and cloud solutions, supporting enterprise-level operations and customization features.
It is very scalable, and we don't need to hire additional engineers.
We've significantly increased our traffic from hitting it once or twice a minute to now hitting it ten to fifteen times within a minute.
I haven't observed any significant issues indicating a lack of scalability, as it can be efficiently managed through configurations.
With container versions, scaling up or down the gateways deployed into pods is a two to three-minute task for the operations team.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.6
Amazon API Gateway is highly stable and reliable, with minimal disruptions and a 99.99% uptime, supporting millions globally.
Sentiment score
7.3
IBM API Connect is generally stable and reliable, especially in government and banking, despite occasional upgrade issues.
I've deployed it for a client with millions of users without issues.
Our applications are stable, owing partly to our architecture, which is spread across three regions.
But, once it starts, it never fails.
The runtime engine for the APIC Gateway is still a DataPower component, which has been stable in the industry for about fifteen years.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon API Gateway requires enhancements in pricing, integration, security, technical support, feature richness, and reduced latency for improved user experience.
IBM API Connect needs better integration, automation, monitoring, documentation, and usability, facing issues in setup, costs, and support.
A local version of the API Gateway would be beneficial for testing purposes without incurring extra costs.
AWS charges for data ingress and egress, which could be further reduced.
It's important to consider the type of gateway endpoint carefully.
Examples include the lack of connectivity to MQ.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Amazon API Gateway's serverless, pay-as-you-go pricing competitive and flexible, despite potential high-volume cost concerns.
IBM API Connect offers scalable solutions with high costs, suitable for large enterprises, available in SaaS and on-premise versions.
However, my understanding is that it easily goes to $14,000 or $15,000 USD each month for each account, and we have several such accounts.
It is a really cheap product, but if used incorrectly, it can become expensive.
It is expensive.
Pricing depends on how many instances run across environments.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon API Gateway provides scalable integration with AWS, robust security, and cost-effective management for API applications.
IBM API Connect excels with strong security, integration, usability, analytics, flexibility, and scalability, enhancing API management and monetization.
Rest API provides robust and more secure authentication features.
Additionally, it's cost-effective, even as our workload and the number of APIs we manage have increased.
It acts as a master tool, offering easy configuration and excellent integration capabilities with third-party services.
It offers significant development efficiency, reducing man-hours from eighty to four when creating APIs.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon API Gateway
Ranking in API Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM API Connect
Ranking in API Management
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Amazon API Gateway is 12.7%, down from 14.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM API Connect is 6.4%, up from 6.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

Featured Reviews

Rahul Kundu - PeerSpot reviewer
Cost-effective serverless routing with room for extended timeout settings
We are using API Gateway to route the traffic to our Lambdas. Every API pass is linked to some of the Lambdas. When traffic hits CloudFront, it redirects it to API Gateway, which then redirects it to the respective Lambda server. We have different kinds of services invoked through these Lambdas…
Shanmugasundaram Shanmuganathan - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers basic API orchestration and provides robust security and governance features
While Azure API Management offers configurable scalability, IBM API Connect relies on Kubernetes clusters. This might seem manual and require defining cluster instances upfront, but it's completely customizable and not on-the-fly scaling. It's completely custom-driven, not on-the-fly scaling, which some may consider cumbersome. Overall, I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. Almost all applications we've been exposing lately go through this middleware, so it's used extensively. There are around sixty applications directly using it, but six Kubernetes clusters serve those applications. It's heavily used for integration, including system-to-system integration and product integrations. Our usage has been increasing year-on-year based on our needs.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which API Management solutions are best for your needs.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
20%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Insurance Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Apigee or Amazon API Gateway?
Amazon API Gateway is a platform that supports the creation and publication of API for web applications. The platform can support thousands of simultaneous API calls, and it provides monitoring, ma...
How does Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager compare with Amazon API Gateway?
I have found that Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager is the best integration tool out there for API management. It is easy to implement and learn; it provides several options for deployment, (including ...
Which is better - Azure API Management or Amazon API Gateway?
If you use Azure products, API Management is a great solution. It solves many of the problems of externalizing web services. For example, when you need versioning, establish a developer portal and ...
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?
Pricing depends on how many instances run across environments. I don't deal with licensing, but compared to other IBM products, the licensing is not significantly higher.
What needs improvement with IBM API Connect?
When comparing API Gateway with DataPower Gateway, several features in DataPower Gateway are absent in the APIC layer. Examples include the lack of connectivity to MQ ( /categories/message-queue-mq...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Autodesk, Fox Digital Consumer Group, iFlix, UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), Miovision, Olympusat, PhotoVogue, Royale International Group, Veracode
Heineken, Tine, Finologee, Axis Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon API Gateway vs. IBM API Connect and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.