MuleSoft API Manager and Apigee compete in the API management category. MuleSoft appears to have the upper hand due to its extensive connector ecosystem and ease of use, while Apigee is favored for its monetization and analytics capabilities.
Features: MuleSoft API Manager provides a vast range of connectors, an efficient API gateway, and access to its Connector Marketplace. It is valued for stability, scalability, and orchestration capabilities. Apigee offers advanced API management features, including a developer portal, monetization options, and comprehensive analytics.
Room for Improvement: MuleSoft could improve in business-level analytics, transaction management, and pricing options. Enhancing documentation and the setup process is also recommended. Apigee needs better integration capabilities, reduced complexity, and optimizations in licensing costs. Improving out-of-the-box policy offerings and domain-specific integrations are areas of need.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: MuleSoft's deployment options support private, hybrid, and public cloud environments with strong customer service and technical support. Apigee offers flexible deployments but faces challenges with on-premises complexity. While customer service is robust, technical support responsiveness could improve. MuleSoft provides a broader deployment framework, whereas Apigee’s customer service has room for enhancements in deployment.
Pricing and ROI: MuleSoft is high-priced but offers a significant ROI through reduced integration efforts and API reusability, justifying costs for many. Apigee also has high pricing, which may be challenging for smaller enterprises despite its effective management and monetization features. Both solutions provide notable ROI, with MuleSoft offering better continuous use value due to extensive integration capabilities, while Apigee’s licensing model might deter cost-sensitive businesses.
This iPaaS platform with CloudHub eliminates variable infrastructure-related costs and saves enterprises on connectivity and operations costs, as everything comes bundled from the MuleSoft side.
They are responsive and provide assistance even during production issues.
In the past two years, I have been experiencing less assistance.
The customer service and support are cooperative and effective in providing insights and solutions during challenges.
Our enterprise pays for a special success program, which provides priority support.
If bug fixing is required for downtimes or issues, we receive prompt support with alternative solutions or workarounds.
They can be slow in addressing security vulnerabilities.
Adding extra Cassandra databases is complex.
Regarding availability, especially with iPaaS solutions, they guarantee 99.99%.
Apigee is stable, and we have had the system running on Apigee servers for more than four years without any stability issues.
There was an issue when trying to implement a request-reply pattern using JMS, which was not functioning as expected despite being documented.
Analytics is one of the areas needing enhancement, specifically more visibility and control over traffic to improve capacity management and high availability.
Apigee only allows validation of transactions up to a four-hour period, which requires manual hovering over the date and time.
Apigee should also incorporate these capabilities, especially in the on-premises version.
Introducing features related to auto governance without manual effort would make the API Manager smarter and more efficient for enterprises with complex landscapes.
Managing the cost of MuleSoft, particularly the billing model based on the number of active cores/threads, has been challenging.
Apigee's product cost is quite high compared to other products.
Apigee is high-priced, suitable for large enterprises where the benefit aligns with the cost.
Apigee is perceived as slightly costly compared to other tools in the market.
The pricing is high, which is the biggest point where some customers are hesitant about adopting it.
The major challenge they face is the high pricing, which has become notable especially since they transitioned from a VCore to a usage-based subscription.
MuleSoft is typically more expensive compared to using Java or Spring Boot APIs hosted in containers.
It provides all the necessary capabilities for current technologies, enabling communication and translation between protocols, along with supporting stringent security features.
Apigee's analytics capabilities aid in monitoring and optimizing APIs, which are also beneficial for our operations.
We rely on Elasticsearch to monitor traffic, which provides high visibility and control and surpasses Apigee in certain features.
MuleSoft's ability to connect to third-party monitoring platforms like AWS, Datadog, and Elastic makes operational analysis more efficient.
We can achieve complex requirements using MuleSoft's capabilities without excessive development time.
In MuleSoft API Manager, I find features like throttling and security to be the most valuable, as these are the things we use and configure as part of our deployments.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Apigee | 9.6% |
| MuleSoft API Manager | 4.6% |
| Other | 85.8% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 20 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 9 |
| Large Enterprise | 65 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 43 |
Apigee is a platform for developing and managing APIs. Apigee offers an interface for your core services by wrapping them with a proxy layer which is then accessed by other developers. With Apigee, you can design and build APIs and then securely share their services and data without exposing any code.
Because app developers make HTTP requests to an API proxy rather than directly to your services, your services are separated from the developers. All the developer needs to know is the URL of the API proxy endpoint, necessary query parameters, authorization credentials (if they exist), and the response data format.
The API proxy isolates the app developer from your backend service. Therefore, you are free to change the service implementation if the public API remains consistent. By maintaining a consistent frontend API, existing client apps will continue to work regardless of changes on the backend.
Key capabilities of the Apigee API management platform include:
Reviews from Real Users:
Apigee stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its rich developer portal, its advanced analytics, and its central monitoring system.
Carlos R., a software architect at Caja Los Andes writes, “The central monitoring feature is the most valuable. It also provides security for the APIs and high availability for our use cases. Apigee is the best product in the industry in comparison to other API management solutions. It helps in fast development, which is a top point. It also supports a lot of industry standards and has excellent documentation.”
An associate vice president at a tech services company notes, “The analytics function and the developer portal are the two valuable features of Apigee. The analytics part is very good, and the developer portal is quite rich in features. The authentication mechanisms are quite easily built into Apigee, which is something that most of the other products have also now started supporting.”
Mulesoft API Manager is the portion of the Anypoint Platform that is used for the designing, building, managing, and publishing of APIs. Anypoint Platform uses Mule as its core runtime engine.
Mulesoft API Manager is an extremely versatile solution. It offers users the ability to deploy their APIs in a number of different settings. You can use API Manager on a public cloud, a private cloud, or a hybrid. Additionally, users can use the solution to manage their deployments with ease. A few clicks are all you need to alter your deployment.
Benefits of Mulesoft API Manager
Some of the benefits of using Mulesoft API Manager include:
Reviews from Real Users
Mulesoft API Manager is a highly effective piece of software whose purpose is to enable users to design, build, manage, and publish APIs. It stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are the ease with which users can connect it to their applications and the high level of value that its support offers. It provides users with the ability to easily connect this solution with whatever program they need to join it with. Users can create connections without having to write code. It offers different types of support which ensure that users have a high level of understanding about the product and how to use it.
PeerSpot user Tolulope A., a technical lead specializing in integration and middleware at a financial services firm, notes the ease with which users can connect Mulesoft API Manager to their applications. He writes, “One good thing about MuleSoft is that they have a lot of connectors to those back-end applications. We don't really need to write code to be able to connect to a database or to connect with SAP. You just need credentials and the connectivity details. Most of the development of what we do is just drag and drop. They're able to connect with applications using standard connectors that are provided by ESB, by MuleSoft.”
The CEO & Co-Founder at a computer retailer notes the value of Mulesoft’s supporting documentation. They write, “The documentation is great; it is always up-to-date and well-presented. If any details are missing, then there is a blog available that contains a lot of details. There are also channels on YouTube to help you better understand the solution and what some of the processes look like.”
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