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IBM API Connect vs Postman Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

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
6.9
IBM API Connect enhances profitability and efficiency by reducing development time, improving security, and enabling seamless system integration.
Sentiment score
4.6
Postman's streamlined API workflows enhance collaboration, reduce manual testing time, minimize errors, and improve productivity, leading to cost savings.
Reducing development hours from eighty to four for an API was possible due to reusing existing scripts from DataPower.
A minimum of 50% time is saved when comparing manual to automation.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
IBM API Connect support is proactive and expert but variable in speed, with regional availability challenges noted by users.
Sentiment score
5.9
Postman Enterprise's strong documentation and community support effectively reduce the need for direct technical support despite occasional delays.
Support is excellent when it comes to APIC.
I appreciate the ease of using Postman, especially its desktop version, due to the features it offers such as cookie management and environment synchronization.
There is a lot of support available through forums and user groups, which has been sufficient for me.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
IBM API Connect offers excellent scalability through on-premise and cloud solutions, supporting enterprise-level operations and customization features.
Sentiment score
7.1
Postman Enterprise offers scalable API testing for varied company sizes with efficient management of instances and extensive collections.
With container versions, scaling up or down the gateways deployed into pods is a two to three-minute task for the operations team.
Postman does not have database validation available, which affects its scalability.
This solution is scalable.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
IBM API Connect is generally stable and reliable, especially in government and banking, despite occasional upgrade issues.
Sentiment score
8.0
Postman Enterprise is highly stable and reliable, with occasional latency issues, making it ideal for API testing.
The runtime engine for the APIC Gateway is still a DataPower component, which has been stable in the industry for about fifteen years.
I rate it ten out of ten for stability.
I opened one case during a global incident, and they replied quickly to inform me about the situation. They updated us via their global incident platform.
I have not experienced any issues or downtimes.
 

Room For Improvement

IBM API Connect needs better integration, automation, monitoring, documentation, and usability, facing issues in setup, costs, and support.
Enterprise users desire better automation, UI, and integrations, while seeking improved testing, documentation, performance, and pricing features.
Examples include the lack of connectivity to MQ.
One of the primary challenges with Postman is handling authentication issues, especially relating to tokens and passwords.
If they can enhance it to have a database kind of validation like we have in ReadyAPI, it would be better.
Maybe Postman can be a good contender and replicate some features such as more scripting and control over API calls.
 

Setup Cost

IBM API Connect offers scalable solutions with high costs, suitable for large enterprises, available in SaaS and on-premise versions.
Postman Enterprise offers flexible pricing with free and paid plans, appealing to both small teams and large organizations.
Pricing depends on how many instances run across environments.
Postman's pricing model includes a basic free version, which is favorable given the Professional enterprise options offered.
Postman is much cheaper than the other tools.
Postman is open-source, so the cost is minimal compared to commercial platforms.
 

Valuable Features

IBM API Connect excels with strong security, integration, usability, analytics, flexibility, and scalability, enhancing API management and monetization.
Postman Enterprise offers ease of use, automation, API support, tool integration, and collaboration features for efficient testing.
It offers significant development efficiency, reducing man-hours from eighty to four when creating APIs.
It has helped significantly since it is easy; the development team and QA team all use it, enabling us to automate almost 70% of our APIs using Postman.
Postman's collaboration tools, such as version control and team workspaces, are particularly useful when working with teams of three to four people.
The desktop version's features like cookie management, environment compatibility, security settings, proxy integration, and data synchronization add significant value.
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM API Connect
Ranking in API Management
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) (8th)
Postman Enterprise
Ranking in API Management
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
API Monitoring Software (1st), API Testing Tools (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of IBM API Connect is 6.2%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Postman Enterprise is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Anagha Mahadik - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution simplifies web service testing with impressive speed and accessibility
It is very easy for me to use and I highly prefer it compared to SoapUI and other products for performing its job. It is more handy and faster. It has impacted us very nicely. Postman is used for free by us. I'm not sure if there might be a paid version for multiple users. It is a very good product used for development. It is easy to install, as well as to learn, particularly for new users, even if they are not developers. I taught my business analyst to use it. I just showed them once, and it was easy for them to understand. For example, I gave them the URL and request format and asked them to test independently. They were able to use it on their own and do their testing as well. It was a good experience, especially for generally smart people, like those we usually hire in our company. It is pretty easy to explain, and learning it is not complex.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Insurance Company
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
How does Postman compare with Apache JMeter?
Postman lets you easily define variables, which then get updated automatically. This is a huge time-saver and makes processes very efficient. We can also export the test cases we create and share t...
What do you like most about Postman?
The product is easy to implement.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Postman?
Postman is much cheaper than the other tools. I am not aware of the current pricing for Postman because that's taken care of by the client; we just pay and they simply create options. On a per-pers...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Heineken, Tine, Finologee, Axis Bank
PayPal, Shopify, Microsoft, Adobe, Atlassian, Twitter, BestBuy, Coursera
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM API Connect vs. Postman Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.