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OpenLegacy vs WSO2 API Manager 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

OpenLegacy
Ranking in API Management
35th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
WSO2 API Manager
Ranking in API Management
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of OpenLegacy is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WSO2 API Manager is 4.9%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1042905 - PeerSpot reviewer
The biggest advantage is how simple the technology was.
I'd like to see OpenLegacy develop its low-code/no-code (LCNC) solutions. They've expanded somewhat their horizons for integration beyond mainframe CICS, which is their sweet spot. They have some tooling in that area, but it's not as good as it needs to be. OpenLegacy handles the bread-and-butter TP monitoring stuff, but I am working for one of the six banks in the United States still using the Hogan mainframe, which has a slightly proprietary mechanism. But OpenLegacy currently doesn't have a connector for Hogan. So it would help if they could build one. That would appeal to financial institutions that still use Hogan, like US Bank, Wells Fargo, KeyBank, and Vanguard.
VishalSingh14 - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to deploy APIs and easy to manage CORS configuration
I have used WSO2 Store and WSO2 API Manager at the architecture level. I worked on two versions, namely WSO2 API Manager 2.6.0 and 5.7.0. I have also worked with WSO2 Identity Server versions 5.7 and 5.11. There are certain things that Apigee handles better than WSO2 API Manager. The user interface of WSO2 API Manager is much easier than that of Apigee. The scope of flexibility was much greater in Apigee. In WSO2 API Manager, we had little flexibility and were restricted to a specific software or tool. On the other hand, we had the scope of customization in Apigee.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The biggest advantage of OpenLegacy was how simple the technology was. We were able to build out the OpenLegacy parts very quickly. We put together a couple hundred APIs in six months."
"Opens the door to connect modern web products to an old legacy system."
"OpenLegacy provides a way to go from the outside world to the legacy mainframe, to move the old standard application to a REST API application. New digital services can be created in a few clicks and this can be done easily by COBOL programmers."
"It is possible to connect a service to a mainframe program or back transaction in a matter of minutes or hours at the most."
"It is possible to solve larger legacy API issues on an enterprise level with this product."
"OpenLegacy produces a war file which includes everything you need to deploy a Tomcat server."
"Using OpenLegacy, the exposure of services is far easier and quicker. In many cases, exposure of services requires just a few clicks and takes only minutes. In very complex cases, it still only takes half a day. Without OpenLegacy, it would take us several months to create the same services."
"Using mainframe programs (not screens), the OpenLegacy services do not require any changes by the mainframe programmers, thus reducing development cycles."
"I think the best part about WSO2 API Manager is that it's highly customizable because it's open-source. The partnership model is quite lucrative for us, it helps us to go and pitch to our customers. You can build a lot of business models yourself that you want to use. You are able to do a lot of the solutions."
"Helped us to quickly publish our Microservice APIs and enforcing different policies against them, it comes up with features like Security, Throttling policy and it provides complete access to customize API's which actually saves development effort and time."
"We use the vanilla version of the WSO2 API Manager and integrate additional features ourselves. The basic features of the API Manager, such as blacklisting and whitelisting, are very helpful. We also created dashboards."
"One of the great things about WSO2 API Manager is that it is so easy to adopt. And because it's an open source solution, we're able to extend the implementation any time to suit our company needs better."
"The capability to define processes and seamless integration with APIs enhances our operations."
"We could easily deploy APIs on WSO2 API Manager, and CORS configuration was easy to manage."
"There are a lot of tools to help the manager. WSO2 is very easy to install. It has all the principal functionalities that you think about when you want to put up the management solution. It's a very friendly tool."
"WSO2 is very stable."
 

Cons

"I'd like to see OpenLegacy develop its low-code/no-code (LCNC) solutions. They've expanded somewhat their horizons for integration beyond mainframe CICS, which is their sweet spot. They have some tooling in that area, but it's not as good as it needs to be."
"Customer support for the product is slow and not very good. It makes using the product difficult if you need help quickly."
"We would also be more than happy if the product had the option to work in the opposite direction – the ability to consume REST/SOW services in the outer world from the mainframe."
"Debugging and logging for programmers could be better."
"I would like to see SSL out-of-the-box. OpenLegacy certainly does SSL, but it was not the default for our use case. We are currently working with OpenLegacy to cross the SSL bridge and suspect that most users will want to do the same."
"The pricing of the solution could be more flexible and allow for once-off payment versus annual licensing. This would be more appealing to companies in Latin America."
"I would like to see improvements in the speed of the solution as it can be a bit slow compared to other platforms along with addressing memory issues would be beneficial."
"The stability is pretty good, but it could be improved."
"Based on our recent large scaling project, the latency needs to be improved."
"I would like it to be a more convenient development platform with the ability to write orchestrations and so on. Our problem with this product is that in my country, we are the only enterprise that has been using this product. We're missing a lot of knowledge from colleagues to consult with, and we also aren't able to recruit people with relevant skills. It is a big problem. The small team that is maintaining this product is the only team that can actually relate to any technical issue. The support that we're getting from the company is not great. There is also a cultural gap there because they're from Sri Lanka, and it is not easy. They're putting in a lot of effort, but they are not meeting our expectations."
"From what I have experienced from the versions I have tried, they could improve on the multi-tenant environments to allow some kind of SSO single sign-on between tenant."
"WSO2 API Manager can be improved a lot relating to usability"
"The interface needs to be modernized and made more user friendly so the product continues to have a growing community of users."
"WSO2 API Manager could improve by adding external API security features, which is one area where there is room for enhancement. Internally, API security is strong, and all other necessary features are already available. It has a solid marketplace, supports both Docker and standalone setups, and offers great enterprise integration. The developer portal has greatly improved the user experience, making it simple and user-friendly wherever we’ve implemented it. Overall, it’s not as complicated as other API gateways."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of the solution could be more flexible and allow for once-off payment versus annual licensing. This would be more appealing to companies in Latin America."
"WSO2 API Manager is an open-source solution."
"For our projects, we found the pricing to be a little high."
"I am using the free version."
"We have not opted for the paid version of WSO2 but we have implemented the free and open source WSO2 software to a great extent and it is working as per our expectation."
"It is costly, around ten thousand per year, per instance"
"The challenge is the increasing pricing, which has led some customers to consider alternatives, like using Spring Boot solutions instead. The rising costs, especially as cores and usage increase, have been a concern, prompting some to migrate to other products."
"It's not expensive, but it could be cheaper."
"WSO2 API Manager is quite an expensive tool. I rate the product's pricing a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is low and ten is high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
18%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about WSO2 API Manager?
It is possible to scale up and scale down with the solution...I can say that I have not seen any issues related to scalability.
What needs improvement with WSO2 API Manager?
We have encountered some concerns with concurrency. Our integrations do not handle high-volume transactions, and when benchmarking, some issues arose with concurrent testing. It is uncertain whethe...
What is your primary use case for WSO2 API Manager?
We use WSO2 API Manager ( /products/wso2-api-manager-reviews ) to integrate our telecom products with third-party REST APIs. We are orchestrating services where our business process defines the int...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Many of openLegacy's global customers are among the Global 100 companies. Review case studies in these industries: Agriculture, Airport Authority, Automotive, Auto, Finance, Insurance, Government, Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Retailwww.openlegacy.com/case-studie...
1. eBay 2. StubHub 3. Cisco 4. Verizon 5. T-Mobile 6. Vodafone 7. Orange 8. BT Group 9. Telstra 10. Deutsche Telekom 11. Swisscom 12. AT&T 13. Sprint 14. Telefonica 15. O2 16. British Airways 17. Lufthansa 18. Emirates 19. Qatar Airways 20. Etihad Airways 21. Air France 22. KLM 23. American Express 24. Visa 25. Mastercard 26. PayPal 27. Western Union 28. Citibank 29. HSBC 30. Barclays 31. Santander 32. Goldman Sachs
Find out what your peers are saying about OpenLegacy vs. WSO2 API Manager and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,451 professionals have used our research since 2012.