Gartner Reprint 11/3/21, 11:13 AM

Licensed for Distribution

Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API

Management
Published 28 September 2021 - ID G00735998 - 59 min read

By Shameen Pillai, Kimihiko Iijima, and 4 more

Demand for APIs, fueled by new business models, application development

trends and the urgency of modernization, is directing software engineering
leaders to the diverse, evolving market for full life cycle API management
products. This research assesses 17 vendors to help you make the right choice.

Market Definition/Description
Gartner defines the full life cycle application programming interface (API) management market as
the market for software that supports all stages of an API’s life cycle, namely planning and design,
implementation and testing, deployment and operation, and versioning and retirement.

Central to full life cycle API management offerings’ capabilities is support in the following
functional areas:

■ Developer portals: A self-service catalog of APIs for enabling, marketing to, and governing
ecosystems of developers who produce and consume APIs.

■ API gateways: Runtime management, security and usage monitoring for APIs.

■ Policy management and analytics: Security configuration, API mediation and API usage
analytics.

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■ API design and development: A meaningful developer experience and tools for designing and
building APIs, and for API-enablement of existing systems.

■ API testing: From basic mock testing to advanced functional, performance and security testing
of APIs.

As noted in the following assessments within this Magic Quadrant, some vendors specialize in
subsets of the API life cycle, such as runtime API gateways and API testing, while others focus on
the entire life cycle.

Magic Quadrant

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Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management

Source: Gartner (September 2021)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. It offers Amazon API
Gateway, which is frequently used in conjunction with AWS Lambda and the AWS suite of
container services. Amazon API Gateway supports both REST APIs and “HTTP APIs,” the latter

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being simpler, less expensive and lower-latency alternatives. AWS continues to invest in improving
its developer portal, administration interface and Kubernetes integration.

AWS’s operations are geographically distributed. AWS focuses on use cases involving APIs that
integrate with other AWS components.

Strengths
■ Marketing strategy: AWS positions Amazon API Gateway as a simple, high-performance and
secure service for APIs built on the AWS cloud. This focus naturally appeals more to existing
users of AWS than to those of other cloud platforms.

■ Offering strategy: Amazon API Gateway is well integrated with many other AWS products. This
enables developers to deliver APIs efficiently in front of their AWS-based applications and
services.

■ Pricing: Amazon API Gateway customers pay only for the API traffic they use. This pay-as-you-
go approach is cost-effective for organizations with modest amounts of API traffic, but Gartner
clients report that costs can quickly mount as usage scales up.

Cautions
■ Product strategy: Amazon API Gateway is a less suitable choice for organizations with both
cloud and on-premises applications, and for organizations with hybrid and multicloud APIs, as it
can be deployed only in AWS environments.

■ Industry strategy: Amazon API Gateway provides only a limited number of prebuilt accelerators
to support industry-specific use cases like open banking and Fast Healthcare Interoperability
Resources (FHIR).

■ Innovation: Amazon API Gateway lags behind competing offerings in terms of features and
innovation. Its developer portal does not support API ecosystems and marketplaces. It provides
only indirect support for some advanced capabilities, such as API monetization.

Axway
Axway is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It offers the Amplify API Management Platform, which
includes Amplify Catalog, Amplify Marketplace, API Portal, the low-code API Builder, Amplify
Analytics, and agents for discovery, subscription and traceability. Axway also provides Amplify

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Integration Builder, Amplify Streams for event-driven capabilities and the Istio-based Axway Mesh.
Axway’s offering can be deployed on-premises and in private, public and hybrid clouds. It is also
available as SaaS and in an Axway-managed cloud.

Axway’s operations are worldwide. Its clients tend to be based in Europe, the Americas, Australia
and Asia.

Strengths
■ Market understanding: Axway aims to deliver a broad product set that can manage and govern
APIs across multiple cloud environments and competitors’ gateways. To achieve this, Axway
has built functionality to integrate with other vendors’ API gateways, starting with AWS’s
Amazon API Gateway and Microsoft’s Azure API Management.

■ Product strategy: Axway offers a diverse portfolio of products that address a wide range of
deployment models and use cases, from traditional integration requirements to
transformational initiatives. Axway complements its robust API management capabilities with
the expertise of its Catalyst strategy team and Catalyst customer engagements to help
organizations advance their API strategy.

■ Business model: Axway uses its OEM and reseller partners to improve its visibility and provide
greater choice and flexibility to customers. Its partners include Cloud Elements (owned by
UiPath), Ping Identity, SmartBear, Stoplight, API Fortress (owned by Sauce Labs) and — most
recently — Cloudentity (for its consent management module).

Cautions
■ Sales execution: Although Axway secured some big deals and had a healthy average deal size
in 2020, Gartner estimates that Axway’s API management revenue grew by slightly less than the
market average in the same year. However, Axway is transitioning to subscription-based pricing
across its portfolio and working to normalize its pricing models to simplify the sales and
adoption cycle.

■ Marketing execution: Axway’s bold vision for its product has yet to translate into effective
marketing execution. Analysis of the competitive scenarios faced by users of Gartner’s client
inquiry service indicates that the Amplify API Management Platform is considered by relatively
few organizations. Although awareness is growing, many prospective customers still perceive
Axway as being primarily a traditional integration vendor.

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■ Customer experience: During Gartner client inquiry sessions, some Axway customers have
expressed concerns about the complexity of its UI. Reliance on third-party partner software can
result in a more cumbersome user experience, although Axway’s partners do provide customers
with greater flexibility and best-of-breed technology.

Boomi
Boomi is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its API management offering is offered as part of
the AtomSphere solution. AtomSphere also includes integration platform as a service (iPaaS),
master data management (MDM), workflow, data catalog and low-code development capabilities.
It supports hybrid/multicloud and on-premises/private cloud deployments of the Atom runtime
with cloud-based administration.

Boomi’s operations are geographically distributed. Most of its clients are midsize or large
organizations.

On 2 May 2021, Francisco Partners and TPG Capital entered into a definitive agreement to acquire
Boomi from Dell Technologies. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of 2021, subject to
conditions.

Strengths
■ Operations: Boomi has mature operational practices and complies with major security
standards, such as Service Organization Control 1 and 2 (SOC 1 and SOC 2), Payment Card
Industry (PCI), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), FedRAMP and
the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Its SaaS offering runs primarily on AWS
infrastructure and is available in multiple regions. It also offers managed services for private
deployments on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

■ Sales execution: Boomi’s API management revenue grew by well above the market average in
2020. Boomi uses its strong reputation as an enterprise iPaaS provider to expand its API
management customer base. Boomi offers short- and long-term trials, and a pay-as-you-go
offering for lightweight usage.

■ Geographic strategy: In 2020, Boomi expanded its sales operations both within the U.S. and
beyond. It continued to expand its direct sales presence in North America, Western Europe,
Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, India and Japan. It has a strong, growing network of more

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than 320 global and regional partners.

Cautions
■ Product suitability: Boomi’s API management capabilities focus on APIs built or used in the
context of its integration platform. This means that Boomi’s offering is less suitable for use
cases that a general-purpose API management platform supports.

■ Product roadmap: Although Boomi recently added support for some much-needed features,
such as JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication and IP-based filtering for internal APIs, its
product still lacks features commonly found in competing offerings. These include enhanced
filtering and chargeback mechanisms for the developer portal, IP address-based filtering for the
gateway, and support for cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).

■ Postacquisition strategy: As Francisco Partners and TPG Capital move to complete their
acquisition of Boomi, prospective customers should stay informed about any associated
changes that would affect Boomi’s corporate strategy, partnerships and services. Although a
downsizing of key product lines appears unlikely, given that Francisco Partners and TPG Capital
have previously invested in the growth of companies within their portfolios, prospective
customers should check that Boomi’s strategy and roadmaps remain aligned with their goals.

Broadcom

Broadcom is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its Layer7 API Management platform is
focused on the company’s API gateway, but also includes API Hub (a developer portal), CA Live
API Creator (for creating APIs from databases), CA Mobile API Gateway (and SDK), OAuth Toolkit,
CA Rapid App Security, BlazeMeter (for API testing) and AIOps (for operational intelligence and
application performance monitoring). BlazeMeter and AIOps are for SaaS deployment. All other
offerings are available for SaaS, customer-managed cloud or on-premises deployment.

As a global supplier of semiconductor and infrastructure software products, Broadcom’s

operations are geographically diversified. The company focuses on its top 2,000 global
enterprises and public sector agencies with a portfolio licensing model. A strong team of partners
supports smaller organizations.

Strengths
■ Business model: Broadcom has broad geographic coverage and takes a highly consolidated

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approach to addressing its top global accounts, to which it sells portfolio license agreements
for its products. This solid business model provides customers with unlimited access to its
products at a fixed subscription price, which helps drive adoption.

■ Product offering: Broadcom aims to make security the focus of the Layer7 API Management
platform. Following Broadcom’s acquisition of Symantec, the Layer7 product organization is
tightly aligned with, and intended to be further integrated with, Symantec’s offerings for identity
management and security.

■ Geographic strategy: About 40% of Layer7 API Management sales are made outside
Broadcom’s home region of North America, and the platform continues to expand its presence
around the world. All Layer7 components support non-English character sets at both design
time and run time.

Cautions
■ Customer experience: Since Broadcom acquired CA in 2018, CA’s API management customers
have experienced changes in terms of customer focus and licensing models. Some customers
are still dealing with these changes. Feedback from users of Gartner’s Peer Insights platform
and client inquiry service indicates a desire for improvements to the support Broadcom
provides and its relationships with customers.

■ Product strategy: Layer7 API Management still lacks fundamental features that are common in
competing offerings, such as a standard developer experience. Furthermore, many features on
Broadcom’s product roadmap (such as custom workflows, support for GraphQL and AsyncAPI)
are already available in competing products.

■ Innovation: Reflecting its portfolio-based sales model that targets the largest organizations
worldwide, Broadcom’s offering focuses on the needs of the company’s top global accounts,
rather than the more innovative requirements of smaller, more dynamic companies.

Google (Apigee)

Google (Apigee) is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Apigee is a feature-rich API management
solution that is available for deployment in a public cloud on GCP, in a private cloud or in a data
center. Apigee hybrid is a deployment option at the Apigee Enterprise and Enterprise Plus levels.
Apigee hybrid enables a customer managed runtime, which may be on Azure, AWS, GCP or a
private cloud that uses the Google Anthos platform and an Apigee-managed control plane on GCP.

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In February 2021, Google launched Apigee X, a GCP-based SaaS deployment that combines
Apigee with other GCP products, such as Cloud Armor and reCAPTCHA.

Google also offers two separate API gateways: Google Cloud Endpoints, a low-end API gateway
(based on NGINX) for GCP customers; and Google Cloud API Gateway (based on Envoy) for
managing API calls to GCP’s serverless offerings.

Google’s operations are geographically distributed. Its API management clients are mostly in the
Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and India.

Strengths
■ Product strategy: Google’s vision for Apigee is differentiated by its focus on helping
organizations use APIs to achieve digital ambitions. Gartner clients report that Apigee’s
strategic services and support for the creation of external-facing API products are particularly
strong. Apigee’s highly customizable API developer portal options, data monetization
capabilities and strong industry focus, especially on the financial services/banking, retail and
healthcare sectors, resonate well with its core audience.

■ Pricing: Google has a simple pricing model for Apigee that accommodates a high volume of
APIs and does not limit the number of individual APIs or users.

■ Industry strategy: Google provides a strong set of industry API accelerators, including an open
banking solution called Apigee Open Banking APIx. It provides support for open banking, as
required by the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) in Europe and the Consumer Data Right
(CDR) in Australia, including a banking-specific developer portal with API documentation.

Cautions
■ Market understanding: Apigee is primarily designed for API management use cases and does
not come with an integration platform.

■ Customer experience: Apigee is a feature-rich and sophisticated solution, but implementation

of Apigee hybrid, in particular, requires significant levels of configuration and customization.

■ Product offering: To access some of Apigee’s features, such as Advanced API Ops (which
applies artificial intelligence [AI] and machine learning [ML] technologies to API operations),
Apigee Sense (for AI-based API security) and API monitoring, customers need to use Apigee

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public cloud or Apigee hybrid.

IBM

IBM is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It offers IBM API Connect, which enables organizations to
manage their APIs across integration, cloud-native microservices and developer ecosystem
scenarios. It is available as a SaaS service, and as a customer- or IBM-managed deployment in a
hybrid environment. API Connect is also provided as part of the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, a
packaged offering based on Red Hat OpenShift.

IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019, but Red Hat operates and markets its 3scale API Management
offering independently. We therefore evaluate Red Hat separately in this Magic Quadrant.

IBM’s operations are geographically distributed. Its customers are mostly midsize and large
organizations in the banking, retail and public sectors.

Strengths
■ Product capabilities: IBM API Connect has strong security capabilities, including support for a
wide range of security standards, including OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, as well as older
standards such as Kerberos, SAML and Web Services Security (WS-Security). API Connect also
provides a built-in OAuth authorization server and supports electronic IDentification,
Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) certificates for open banking, as well as integration
with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

■ Product strategy: IBM has added support for GraphQL (including security of GraphQL), as well
as support for event-driven APIs as a part of its multiform API management strategy. IBM API
Connect supports hybrid, multicloud and on-premises deployments, as well as deployments on
Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift instances.

■ Offering strategy: The inclusion of IBM API Connect within the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration
helps organizations use API Connect with other IBM integration technologies, such as App
Connect, MQ, Event Streams and Aspera.

Cautions
■ Sales execution: Gartner’s analysis and estimates indicate that IBM’s revenue growth from API
management sales in 2020 was below the market average, as it was the year before.

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■ Customer experience: Some IBM API Connect customers have expressed concerns about the
complexity of upgrading and patching, depending on the product versions and gateway policies
used. Upgrading from API Connect version 5 to the latest version has been a particular concern.

■ Deployment flexibility: Users of Gartner’s client inquiry service have expressed concerns about
the deployment flexibility and complexity of IBM API Connect in container-based environments,
which IBM is, however, committing additional investment to improve.

Kong

Kong is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Kong’s API management offering is Kong Konnect, which
includes Kong Gateway, a commercial version of its open-source Kong API Gateway based on
NGINX with the OpenResty plug-in, the Kong Developer Portal, and the Insomnia tool for API
design and testing. Kong also offers Kong Mesh, a service mesh based on its open-source Kuma
project, which uses Envoy. Kong Vitals for monitoring and Kong Immunity for anomaly detection
are also provided as part of Kong’s platform, which is available both on-premises and in the cloud.

Kong’s operations are geographically distributed. Kong has clients in many industries, notably the
financial, services and technology sectors.

Strengths
■ Market understanding: Kong takes a developer-focused, “less is more” approach, which makes
it attractive to the growing number of customers wary of offerings that they perceive to be
complex and “heavy duty.” Kong’s investments in development and testing, as well as its service
mesh and distributed gateway, resonate well with this audience.

■ Product strategy: Kong offers strong deployment flexibility, which is especially valued by
software engineers and API management users. It supports deployments to AWS, Azure, GCP,
Docker and Kubernetes, and directly to Linux.

■ Operations: Kong’s API gateway has a small footprint and delivers high performance. In
contrast to heavyweight, centralized API management solutions, users can configure and
deploy it as either a lightweight API gateway or an enterprise gateway.

Cautions
■ Marketing strategy: Kong’s emphasis on its service mesh and API gateway appeals strongly to

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developers, but, compared with vendors of more fully featured solutions, Kong has limited
appeal to business users aiming to productize APIs or create API marketplaces.

■ Industry strategy: Kong’s accelerators for open banking and FHIR (healthcare) lag behind some
of its competitors’ offerings. It lacks, for example, specific out-of-the-box support for the U.S.
Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information (ONC) regulations, specific services
for open banking and support for eIDAS certificates.

■ Pricing: Kong offers a free version of its open-source “headless” (no UI) gateway and a 30-day
free trial of Kong Plus, its full set of enterprise capabilities. But unlike some providers, Kong
does not offer licenses based only on the number of API calls; it also charges a fee per service
defined, which may be confusing to customers and potentially limit the APIs that they define.

Microsoft
Microsoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It offers Azure API Management, which is
predominantly used within the Microsoft Azure cloud. Its gateway and portal components can
also be installed in a hybrid fashion using Azure Arc or directly to Kubernetes.

Azure API Management is part of Microsoft’s Azure Integration Services offering and available in
five main pricing tiers: Consumption, Developer, Basic, Standard and Premium. Users are charged
a fixed hourly fee based on their resource usage and feature set. The Premium tier supports
multiregion deployments. Consumption pricing is based on the number of API calls.

Microsoft’s operations are geographically diversified. Azure API Management is available in Azure
public cloud regions and for use by the U.S. government and Department of Defense.

Strengths
■ Product offering: Microsoft Azure API Management provides a relatively simple and intuitive
administrator interface. Discussions with users of Gartner’s client inquiry service and analysis
of reviews on Gartner’s Peer Insights platform indicate strong product satisfaction scores for
Azure API Management.

■ Geographic strategy: Microsoft demonstrates a strong global strategy for Azure API
Management by offering it across all Azure regions and availability zones. The Azure portal is
available in 18 languages and provides documentation in more than 50 languages.

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■ Business model: Azure API Management is the default choice for many Microsoft Azure
customers. As Azure benefits from the growth in cloud adoption, the user base of Azure API
Management will continue to grow.

Cautions
■ Marketing execution: Microsoft’s marketing and go-to-market activities for Azure API
Management are delivered primarily in the context of other Azure Services. Prospective API
management customers might overlook Azure API Management because of its limited visibility.

■ Sales strategy: Azure API Management is adopted almost exclusively in conjunction with other
Azure services. It is rarely sold as a stand-alone product.

■ Customer experience: Gartner client inquiries and Peer Insights reviews indicate that some
clients find Azure API Management relatively expensive for the level of functionality provided,
due to the provisioning commitments required for some tiers.

MuleSoft
MuleSoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. MuleSoft, which is owned by Salesforce but operates
as an independent unit, offers the Anypoint Platform, which combines API management and
integration capabilities. MuleSoft provides an API-management-only package. It also offers
Anypoint API Community Manager, which enables creation of an ecosystem of API consumers
and drives adoption of API products, and Anypoint Exchange, a central hub for sharing APIs and
integration-related assets within an organization.

MuleSoft’s operations are geographically distributed, primarily in North America, Europe, Australia
and New Zealand. Its customers are mostly midsize and large organizations.

Strengths
■ Product strategy: MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform provides a broad set of capabilities for both full
life cycle API management and integration. This unified platform strategy, combined with
MuleSoft’s global network of strategic partners, resonates strongly with a core segment of
organizations that require both integration and API management.

■ Marketing execution: MuleSoft demonstrates thought leadership in API strategy through its
white papers, blogs and events. Its global API strategy team of API industry champions and

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solution consulting experts advise customers on the adoption of MuleSoft technology for API
programs.

■ Planning and design: MuleSoft and its implementation partners work closely with customers to
set up what MuleSoft calls Center for Enablement teams. These teams help customers
implement and use MuleSoft’s platform and API use cases.

Cautions
■ Pricing: MuleSoft customers often express concerns about the high cost of using its platform;
this is especially the case with organizations with simpler use cases that do not require
integration. Concerns include core-based pricing, potential price increases at renewal and
suitability for on-demand workloads. MuleSoft’s strategy is to release pricing models that
provide more flexibility and choice in order to address these concerns, but they are not yet
available.

■ API monetization: MuleSoft offers limited capabilities for creating subscription plans and
supporting sophisticated API monetization strategies. Organizations with commercial APIs may
find MuleSoft’s monetization features limited to providing connectivity to billing providers.

■ Customer experience: MuleSoft customers who use Gartner’s client inquiry service and Peer
Insights platform have expressed desire for improvements to its approach to contract
negotiation, its flexibility, its support responsiveness and the availability of skills. This desire
has been especially common among customers outside MuleSoft’s core markets of North
America, Western Europe, Singapore and Australia.

Postman
Postman is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. A new entrant to the Magic Quadrant, Postman is
well known as an API testing vendor and as the creator of Postman Collections, which are a way
to organize APIs for development and testing. In addition, Postman now offers the Postman API
Platform, a SaaS platform that focuses on API design, API testing and creation of API developer
portals. In late 2020, Postman hired the maintainers of AsyncAPI, which shows the importance of
asynchronous APIs to Postman.

Unlike many vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Postman does not offer an API gateway, but instead
partners with API gateway providers.

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Postman’s operations are mostly in the U.S., the U.K., India and Germany. It has clients in all
industries and geographies.

Strengths
■ Market understanding: Postman’s API platform has particularly strong support for developers,
including for API design and testing. This demonstrates Postman’s strong understanding of
developers’ requirements for internal and external API portals, API testing and API design.

■ Sales execution and pricing: Postman’s platform is only available as SaaS, in four tiers,
including a free tier for developers. There is no metering, and pay-as-you-go options exist for
extra services, such as API mocking. Reviewers on Gartner’s Peer Insights platform have
expressed a high level of satisfaction with Postman’s pricing.

■ Innovation: The uniqueness of the collections and workspaces features of the Postman API
Platform provide users with an internal and external collaborative development environment.

Cautions
■ Product offering: Postman views API gateways as commodity components that most
organizations already have. The Postman API Platform can suit users of multiple cloud
providers’ API gateways, but it is not designed to support clients that primarily need a single API
gateway.

■ Customer experience: Postman is well known for its strong API testing capabilities, but its API
management features are less robust. Postman does not provide many critical capabilities
primarily associated with runtime and operational management of APIs.

■ Marketing execution: Awareness of Postman’s brand is strong among developers, but Postman
lacks visibility to executive audiences. Its thought leadership for API strategy resonates with
developers, but has limited reach to business users.

Red Hat

Red Hat is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. It offers Red Hat 3scale API Management as one
of its Red Hat Integration solutions. Red Hat 3scale API Management is typically deployed within a
hybrid architecture, along with on-premises low-footprint API gateways based on NGINX, and
cloud administration. It can also run on-premises on Red Hat’s OpenShift container management
platform.

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Red Hat also offers a fully managed Red Hat OpenShift API Management offering that is based on
3scale API Management.

Red Hat’s operations are geographically distributed. Red Hat has clients worldwide.

IBM owns Red Hat, but Red Hat operates and markets 3scale API Management independently.
Red Hat is therefore evaluated separately from IBM in this Magic Quadrant. Red Hat did not
respond to our requests for information. Our analysis is based on other credible and accepted
public sources.

Strengths
■ Sales strategy: Red Hat has a strong presence in the application infrastructure market. Its
3scale API Management product is a key part of the Red Hat Integration set of products, which
includes Red Hat Fuse (a code-based integration platform) and AMQ (a messaging platform).

■ Product strategy: Red Hat 3scale API Management is integrated with the OpenShift container
platform to support multicloud and hybrid cloud solutions.

■ Geographic strategy: Red Hat has a global presence. Red Hat 3scale API Management
supports multiple languages, including Japanese.

Cautions
■ Product strategy: Red Hat was once a Leader in this market, but is now a Niche Player. Its
product capabilities have improved little during the past three years, relative to the competition.

■ Marketing execution: Red Hat’s marketing for 3scale API Management is mainly targeted at
developers. Its reach and appeal to business users is limited.

■ Overall viability: IBM has an overlapping API management offering, IBM API Connect, which
provides more advanced capabilities. Red Hat and IBM currently operate as separate
companies with distinct product roadmaps, and there are no indications that this will change.

SAP

SAP is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. It offers SAP API Management as a capability of the
SAP Integration Suite, which is part of the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). BTP is a
broad PaaS that also has integration, portal, mobile app development and data management

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capabilities. SAP uses an OEM version of Google’s Apigee Edge API gateway as the runtime
component within its cloud-only offering. SAP has built its own full life cycle API management
capabilities around this gateway, including analytics and an API developer portal (called API
Business Hub Enterprise). SAP API Management is available to all customers, regardless of
whether they have a prior relationship with SAP; however, its customers are predominantly existing
SAP clients.

SAP’s operations are geographically distributed. SAP has customers in all industries.

Strengths
■ Product offering: SAP provides a capable API management solution, which is available on
multiple cloud providers, in combination with SAP’s larger product offerings in its BTP. SAP’s
product provides good security, versioning and retirement, and monetization features.

■ Customer experience: SAP offers a diverse set of policy templates for download from the SAP
API Business Hub, a central catalog of APIs from SAP and its partners. It complements these
templates with API consultancy to help users quickly set up and scale their API programs.

■ Operations: SAP markets its API management offering worldwide as part of the SAP BTP. It
provides many integrations with the wider SAP ecosystem, analytics, billing services, identity
services and SAP Integration Suite (an iPaaS).

Cautions
■ Sales strategy: SAP aims to sell its API management solution to existing SAP customers as
part of its larger digital transformation platform. Since SAP API Management is sold as part of
the SAP Integration Suite, Gartner rarely sees customers invest in SAP API Management
without having larger investments in SAP’s application and platform capabilities.

■ Offering strategy: For some components of its API management offering, SAP relies on other
vendors: Google (Apigee) for the API gateway, Cloud Elements (which has been acquired by
UiPath) for integration adapters, Solace for messaging and events, and Hasura for GraphQL
support. Prospective customers should ensure they are comfortable with the levels of influence
and control that SAP can provide over those aspects of its platform.

■ Innovation: SAP has recently delivered a number of solution improvements and has others in
development — for example, to support API products, offer a low-footprint gateway (as part of

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its API mesh) and create APIs from data resources — but many of its competitors already
provide such features.

SmartBear

SmartBear is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. It offers SmartBear SwaggerHub, SmartBear
ReadyAPI (for testing, security, performance testing and virtualization) and SmartBear AlertSite
(for API monitoring). These commercial products incorporate the open-source Swagger Editor (for
API design) and SoapUI tool (for API testing), based on the open-source communities Swagger.io
and SOAPUI.org, which SmartBear sponsors.

SmartBear focuses on the API development life cycle. Although it does not offer an API gateway,
its product set integrates with a wide range of API gateways, including AWS API Gateway, IBM API
Connect, Microsoft Azure API Gateway and Google Apigee. SmartBear’s API management
products are offered on-premises and as SaaS, but most customers use the SaaS option.

SmartBear’s products are offered worldwide. SmartBear has offices in the U.S., Europe, Australia
and India.

Strengths
■ Product strategy: SmartBear SwaggerHub provides a strong set of collaboration features to
enable development teams to use, and integrate with, repositories (including Git, GitHub, GitLab
and Bitbucket), build tools (such as Jenkins) and DevOps tools (Azure DevOps Services) for
parallel workstreams for API developers and testers.

■ Product offering: SmartBear has significant mind share among developers, aided by the open-
source SoapUI and Swagger Editor tools, which both have tens of thousands of downloads
monthly. SmartBear aims to capitalize on this mind share when shaping its commercial
products.

■ Marketing strategy: SmartBear donated the Swagger specification to the Linux Foundation in
2015 to help form the OpenAPI Initiative. As a result, SmartBear has established itself as a
thought leader on API specifications, one with a strong connection to the market.

Cautions
■ Business model: SmartBear does not offer an API gateway, as its strategy is to integrate with

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API gateways from other vendors. SmartBear’s product set is not designed for organizations
seeking a single-vendor API management solution that includes an API gateway.

■ Market understanding: SmartBear provides a strong technical foundation for API design,
enabling an “API design first” strategy, but lacks features for creating API products and
supporting API product managers, such as grouping of APIs by business capabilities and API
monetization.

■ Vertical strategy: SmartBear provides horizontal technology that can be used by any industry.
However, it does not provide prepackaged accelerators for any particular industry. Instead,
customers can use its products, such as SwaggerHub, to define industry-specific APIs including
data definitions, taxonomy and semantics.

Software AG
Software AG is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It offers the webMethods API management
platform (for on-premises deployment) and the webMethods.io API (for the cloud). This vendor
focuses on enabling API-based integrations and managing ecosystems around API products.
Available as a stand-alone offering, Software AG’s API management platform is often used in
conjunction with its enterprise iPaaS, webMethods.io API, and/or its Cumulocity IoT platform.

Software AG’s operations are geographically distributed. Its customers are mostly large
enterprises in the banking, retail, manufacturing and government sectors.

Strengths
■ Market understanding: Software AG’s API management offering addresses the diverse
priorities of users, including integration, API-product-led digital business, B2B ecosystems and
microservices-based application modernization.

■ Product offering: Software AG’s API management platform is functionally rich, with support for
importing and creating OpenAPI Specification (OAS) 2.0/3.0 APIs (in addition to others such as
RESTful API Modeling Language [RAML], Web Services Description Language [WSDL] and Open
Data Protocol [OData]). It also supports WebSockets. Its webMethods AppMesh platform and
microgateway enable support for introspecting and securing Istio and Kubernetes-based
microservices, which is important for customers building APIs using a modern microservices
approach.

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■ Developer portal customization: Software AG provides users with the ability to customize the
developer portal with point-and-click configuration, HTML coding, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
and JavaScript (which requires programming skills) to help customers create differentiated
developer experiences. Its portal has capabilities for creating and managing API communities
and includes prebuilt dashboards for API producers and API consumers.

Cautions
■ Marketing execution: Software AG has invested heavily in rebranding itself as an API-first
solution vendor, but Gartner sees fewer clients evaluating it in competitive bids for stand-alone
API management, compared with other Leaders.

■ API design and implementation: Software AG has limited support for designing GraphQL or
AsyncAPI. Its support for defining and validating organizational design policies is spread across
different products. These provide good capabilities to automatically create APIs in front of
existing databases or applications.

■ Industry strategy: Unlike many vendors, Software AG does not provide accelerators to support
open-banking, FHIR or open-government initiatives. It primarily relies on its partner network to
provide these accelerators.

TIBCO Software

TIBCO Software is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. TIBCO’s API management offering is
TIBCO Cloud Mashery, an integrated solution within the TIBCO portfolio that is available as a fully
on-premises, hybrid or cloud service offering. TIBCO Cloud Mashery includes capabilities for API
modeling and API mocking, a developer portal, a control center, analytics, a microgateway and API
proxy apps (Node.js and Flogo). TIBCO’s broad portfolio includes products for API-led integration,
event-driven applications, MDM, an in-memory data platform and analytics.

TIBCO’s operations are geographically distributed. Its customers are mainly midsize and large
organizations, which are located all around the world.

Strengths
■ Geographic strategy: TIBCO has a strong global presence, with sales offices in more than 30
countries and a partner ecosystem including more than 1,500 system integrators and value-
added resellers (up from 900 partners in 2020). Additionally, it significantly expanded its

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footprint in Asia/Pacific during 2020.

■ Marketing execution: TIBCO’s marketing draws on its strong reputation as a vendor of an iPaaS
available on major cloud providers, an offering based on event-driven architecture, and its
diverse partner ecosystem, which includes marketplaces.

■ Operations: TIBCO maintains strong operational capability by offering high availability with
disaster recovery and a wide variety of deployment choices across regions. It provides
enhanced monitoring capabilities across hybrid and multicloud deployments for its platform.

Cautions
■ Industry strategy: Although TIBCO offers industry accelerators for multiple sectors, including
financial services, insurance, government and healthcare, its accelerators for API management
are primarily focused on open banking and healthcare.

■ Innovation: TIBCO Cloud Mashery trails competing offerings in terms of product features and
innovation. It does not offer advanced features such as native service mesh support, API design
and implementation, API testing and API monetization.

■ Market responsiveness: While TIBCO reprioritized its roadmap to respond to the changed
needs of its customers during the pandemic, some of its roadmap items took a backseat.
TIBCO did not deliver some of the features it had planned for 2020, including support for Envoy
and WebAssembly, which is still unavailable.

Tyk
Tyk is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. It offers an open-source API gateway, API analytics, a
closed-source developer portal and an API management dashboard. It focuses on enabling cloud-
native microservices, governance of APIs across diverse development teams and API-based data
integrations using GraphQL.

Tyk is a “remote first” company with global operations and sales hubs in the U.S., the U.K. and
Singapore. Its customers are mostly midsize and large organizations, the majority from the
financial services, retail and telecom sectors.

Strengths
■ Market understanding: Tyk has demonstrated vision by offering deep support for GraphQL,

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including the Universal Data Graph for creating and managing complex GraphQL APIs. Tyk
offers complete support for the OAS 3.0 specification and plans to expand its portal to manage
APIs across multiple API gateways.

■ Microservices and service mesh: Tyk offers robust support for mediating microservices. It
provides a Kubernetes operator that acts as an ingress controller to perform uptime tests,
implement circuit breakers, and enable detailed tracing and monitoring of microservices in
distributed environments.

■ Sales strategy and pricing: Tyk attracts developers with a free, open-source gateway, as well as
a free, limited-use SaaS version. Tyk offers flexible licensing models for its enterprise version,
including an unmetered pricing model for customer-managed deployments. Its pricing for SaaS
and managed deployments is based on scaling factors, such as the number of gateways,
environments and regions in which users deploy the product.

Cautions
■ Overall viability: Tyk is not as large as some of the other vendors in this Magic Quadrant by
revenue. Although it is growing fast and aiming to be capital-efficient, Tyk will need to sustain
growth rates well above the market average to maintain its competitiveness, visibility and mind
share among prospective customers, especially in the large-enterprise segment.

■ Developer portal customization: As a provider of a developer-focused platform, Tyk provides

limited features for establishing API-based ecosystems. Its bootstrap-based developer portal is
basic; it has limited ability to define API monetization plans and capture business metrics for
API products.

■ Product strategy: Tyk’s services mainly focus on technology to enable faster onboarding of
customers to its platform. With its focus on developer self-service, it largely depends on
partners to provide implementation- and API-related consulting services and workshops.

WSO2

WSO2 is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. It offers WSO2 API Manager, an open-source API
management solution. Additionally, in 2021, WSO2 launched Choreo, a cloud-based API
management solution with a traditional PaaS subscription model. WSO2’s API Manager Analytics
functionality is offered as a service built on Microsoft Azure.

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WSO2 combines integration and API management in both WSO2 API Manager and Choreo. This
enables integrations to be exposed as managed APIs across cloud, on-premises, container-native
and hybrid architectures. WSO2 also provides the ability to use two integration options in WSO2
API Manager, Micro Integrator (for microservices scenarios) and Streaming Integrator (for
extraction, transformation and loading, and streaming) as stand-alone solutions, as well as a
stand-alone identity management platform (WSO2 Identity Server).

WSO2 offers its products worldwide. Most of its users are in emerging markets, including South
America, South Asia and the Middle East.

Strengths
■ Innovation: WSO2 has shown leadership in implementing new API technologies, including
support for publishing event-based APIs in its API developer portal offering using AsyncAPI.

■ Industry strategy: WSO2 has demonstrated strong support for industry-specific solutions,
especially in its top three vertical markets, namely banking, financial services and insurance, the
government and public sector, and telecommunications and IT. WSO2 provides an Open
Healthcare solution that focuses on healthcare interoperability, and an Open Banking offering
and services to help its banking clients, either directly or through its partners, meet financial and
regulatory requirements.

■ Partnerships: WSO2 has a strong ecosystem, thanks to the many partners that use its open-
source offering. Integration and reseller partners in over 75 countries generate awareness and
sales opportunities for WSO2.

Cautions
■ Business model: WSO2 is expanding its focus from on-premises, open-source products to
include a cloud-based iPaaS platform, Choreo. But this platform has only just been released, so
the extent of its market adoption remains to be seen.

■ Product strategy: WSO2’s API management offerings are strongly associated with its
integration and identity management offerings. This can lead to product dependencies when,
for example, WSO2 Identity Server is used for API access control in conjunction with WSO2’s
API management offerings.

■ Market understanding: WSO2’s products lack specific support for API product managers, such

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as the ability to create and manage API products and to measure them based on business
value. WSO2 focuses on the technical aspects of API product management, such as the
gathering of technical metrics on API performance usage, but beyond tracking API
monetization, it does not track business metrics.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of
these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's
appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we
have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and,
therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added
■ Postman

■ SmartBear

Dropped
■ F5 (NGINX)

■ Perforce (Akana)

■ Sensedia

■ Torry Harris

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, all vendors had to:

■ Actively market, sell and support at least two of the following five functional areas to support
full life cycle management of APIs:

■ Developer portals

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■ API gateways

■ Policy management and analytics

■ API design and development

■ API testing

■ Have made the qualifying offering generally available as of June 2020.

■ Have a comprehensive, general-purpose offering not specific to one industry or limited to an

adjacent market (such as iPaaS or application security). This offering had to be available either
directly from the vendor or via publicly announced agreements with partners.

■ Have generated revenue of at least $30 million (or the equivalent in other currency) from full life
cycle API management in 2020.

■ Vendors providing an open-source or open-core product offering had to have generated

revenue of at least $8 million (or the equivalent in other currency) per year from full life cycle
API management. These figures include revenue from software, cloud-managed services,
support and professional services relating to the full life cycle API management offering.

■ Have had at least 150 paying customers for full life cycle API management in 2020.

■ Have a reasonably wide geographic presence for sales, support and availability of services, with
no more than 90% of their full life cycle management revenues for 2020 coming from one
specific region.

Honorable Mentions
Gartner tracks more than 70 full life cycle API management vendors, several of which are new
entrants to the market. New entrants often succeed at finding a niche audience and position their
product as a better alternative to the leading vendors’ offerings in one or more aspects of full life
cycle API management.

We recognize six vendors with honorable mentions. Although they did not meet the inclusion
criteria for this Magic Quadrant, they have an active presence and operations in the market. Their

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API management offerings serve as alternatives that may solve unique challenges for some
prospective customers. The six vendors are:

■ Ambassador Labs: Ambassador Labs offers Ambassador Edge Stack. Built on the open-source
Envoy Proxy and Emissary-ingress API gateway, it can be useful for organizations seeking a
scalable and secure gateway for Kubernetes environments, primarily for traffic management
and ingress control. Edge Stack also includes a developer portal, a service catalog, and tooling
for API development and testing (Telepresence). Ambassador Labs did not meet the inclusion
criteria for revenue and number of paying customers.

■ Constellant: Constellant offers a digital platform engine (dpEngine) that provides full life cycle
ecosystem management to create, manage and scale API ecosystems and API marketplaces.
dpEngine enables custom developer portals, as well as broader platform business models and
application ecosystems through its Publisher, Developer, Partner and Marketplace modules.
Constellant did not meet the inclusion criteria for revenue and number of paying customers.

■ Gravitee.io: Gravitee.io offers Gravitee.io API Management, Access Management, Cockpit (a

distributed control plane and a visual API designer) and Alert Engine. Gravitee.io API
Management’s core features are an API gateway, an API management console and an API
portal; the product can be combined with the company’s other offerings to extend its
functionality. We believe it can be useful for organizations focused on cloud-native
development. Gravitee.io did not meet the inclusion criteria for revenue and number of paying
customers.

■ RapidAPI: RapidAPI offers RapidAPI Enterprise Hub, the aim of which is to provide one place for
all APIs in an organization. This can be useful to create an internal API hub, a partner API hub,
or a federated API architecture with multiple API gateways, including those from other vendors
and cloud providers. This vendor also offers RapidAPI Client (following its acquisition of Paw,
an API development tool, in 2021) and RapidAPI Testing for automated functional API testing.
RapidAPI did not meet the revenue requirement for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant.

■ Solo.io: Solo.io offers Gloo Edge (an API gateway) and Gloo Portal (an API portal) as part of its
API management suite. It also offers Gloo Mesh, an enterprise service mesh that supports
multicluster and hybrid clouds. Solo.io supports API design and development with continuous
integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). It can be useful for organizations looking to use Istio-
and Envoy-based service mesh solutions with Kubernetes environments. Solo.io did not meet
the inclusion criteria for revenue and number of paying customers.

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■ Stoplight: Stoplight offers the Stoplight Platform for API Management, which includes Stoplight
Studio — a tool for API design, publishing and collaboration, as well as linting, mocking, visibility
and documentation. Stoplight also offers open-source tools such as Spectral (for API validation
and linting), Prism (for API mocking) and Elements (for interactive API documentation).
Stoplight’s core feature is its strong support for API design — it can be useful for organizations
looking to design and collaborate. Stoplight did not meet the revenue criterion for inclusion in
this Magic Quadrant.

Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Gartner analysts evaluate vendors on the quality and efficacy of the processes, systems, methods
and procedures that enable them to be competitive, efficient and effective, and to positively
impact their revenue, customer retention and reputation.

We used the following criteria to assess vendors’ Ability to Execute:

Product or Service: This criterion concerns core goods and services that compete in or serve the
defined market. It considers current product and service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills
and so on. Goods and services can be offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships,
as defined in the market definition and detailed in subcriteria.

Specifically, we evaluated vendors’ capabilities using subcriteria relating to the four stages in an
API’s life cycle:

■ Planning and design

■ Implementation and testing

■ Deployment and operation (“deploy and run”)

■ Versioning and retirement

Additionally, for the 2021 assessment cycle, Gartner placed greater emphasis on product scores

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in the Magic Quadrant by using the Critical Capability assessment scores each vendor received for
the critical capabilities defined in the companion Critical Capabilities for Full Life Cycle API
Management.

Overall Viability: Our evaluation of overall viability included assessment of vendors’ overall
financial health, as well as the financial and practical success of the relevant business units. It
also included evaluation of the likelihood of vendors continuing to offer and invest in their
products, as well as the products’ positions within current portfolios.

For this market, we considered:

■ Vendors’ relative size (in terms of customers, revenue, and the scale, strength and resilience of
their ecosystem)

■ The impact of past acquisitions and the potential for future acquisitions

■ The financial stability and continuity of offerings in this market

■ The ability and effectiveness of partnerships to improve viability

■ The size and quality of each vendor’s active user community, relative to its target market

■ The availability and effectiveness of professional and consulting services

Sales Execution/Pricing: This criterion concerns vendors’ capabilities in all presales activities and
the structures that support them. Included are deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales
support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

More specifically, for each vendor we considered:

■ Revenue and customer growth

■ The number and business impact of the projects it has implemented, and whether (and how)
professional and consulting services have eased implementations

■ The clarity and predictability of pricing models — on-premises, cloud, multicloud and hybrid —
and their changes over time

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■ The ability to handle large and complex deals, including support and flexibility for volume
growth, seasonality and predictability

Market Responsiveness/Record: This criterion concerns vendors’ ability to respond, change

direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act,
customer needs evolve, and market dynamics change. It also considers each vendor’s history of
responsiveness to changing market demands.

More specifically, we assessed vendors’ ability to:

■ Quickly adapt and offer meaningful solutions in light of the dynamic nature of API programs
and the furious pace of change that digital transformations increasingly demand

■ Respond well to rapidly evolving conditions in the full life cycle API management market

■ Respond and deliver superior alternatives to competitive trends, even if they do not lead those
trends

■ Support clients during unforeseen and business-disrupting events, such as the COVID-19
pandemic

Marketing Execution: This criterion concerns the clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of
programs designed to deliver a message that will influence the market, promote a brand, increase
awareness of products and establish a positive identification in the minds of customers. This
“mind share” can be driven by a combination of promotional activity, thought leadership, social
media activity, referrals and sales activity.

We assessed the degree to which vendors have:

■ Captured mind share, demonstrated thought leadership and gained a solid reputation in this
evolving and growing market

■ Effectively devised and executed go-to-market strategies with substantial results

■ Appeared on competitive shortlists for full life cycle API management bids

■ Executed marketing and partnership programs to expand their influence

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Customer Experience: This criterion concerns products, services and programs that enable
customers to achieve anticipated results with the products evaluated. It also concerns the quality
of supplier-buyer interactions, technical support and account support. Additionally, it addresses
ancillary tools, customer support programs, the availability of user groups, service-level
agreements (SLAs) and so on.

For this criterion, we specifically considered for each vendor:

■ The specificity and quality of domestic and international support contracts and SLAs for the
availability of full life cycle API management offerings

■ Its track record of resolving customers’ issues

■ The customer experience offered through acquisitions and partnerships

■ Support outside the vendor’s home market

■ The reach and availability of service implementers, and efforts to expand these, such as training
and certification programs

Operations: This criterion concerns the ability of a vendor to meet its goals and commitments.
Factors include the quality of the organizational structure and the skills, experiences, programs,
systems and other vehicles that enable a vendor to operate effectively and efficiently.

More specifically, for we considered each vendor’s:

■ Track record of meeting SLAs and its privacy certifications

■ Scope in terms of, for example, people and data centers

■ Reliability in relation to its hosted service platforms (for cloud offerings), and scalability and
adaptability in relation to its software platforms (for on-premises deployments)

■ Use of, and adherence to, metrics for efficiency, speed of change, implementation of new
features and scale

Note on Weightings: In this 2021 edition of the Magic Quadrant, the weightings for Overall Viability,

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Market Responsiveness/Record and Marketing Execution have changed to better reflect the current
market.

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability High

Sales Execution/Pricing High

Market Responsiveness/Record Medium

Marketing Execution Medium

Customer Experience High

Operations High

Source: Gartner (September 2021)

Completeness of Vision
Gartner analysts evaluate vendors on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements
about the market’s direction, innovation, customer needs and competitive forces, and how well

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these statements correspond to Gartner’s view of the market.

We used the criteria below to assess vendors’ Completeness of Vision.

Market Understanding: This criterion concerns vendors’ ability to understand customer needs and
to translate that understanding into products and services. Vendors with a clear vision of the
market listen to and understand customers’ demands, and can shape or enhance market changes
with their vision.

We assessed vendors’ understanding of (among other things):

■ Customers’ present and future priorities, use cases and challenges

■ The evolution of these priorities and use cases

■ The role of APIs and API management in digital transformation, modernization, composability,
innovation, productization and advancement of business

■ General, geographic and industry-specific market opportunities

Marketing Strategy: For this criterion, we looked for clear, differentiated messaging, consistently
communicated internally, and externalized through social media, advertising, customer programs
and positioning statements.

More specifically, we looked for a strategy for (among other things):

■ Clear articulation of an offering’s value proposition in the context of the customer’s business

■ Top-line and differentiated messaging by buyer persona

■ Competitiveness

■ API evangelism, conferences, industry leadership, thought leadership and partnerships

Sales Strategy: For this criterion, we looked for a sound strategy for selling that uses appropriate
networks, including direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communication networks.
Partners may extend the scope and depth of a vendor’s market reach, expertise, technologies,

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services and customer base.

More specifically, we looked for:

■ The right balance of direct and indirect sales vehicles

■ Targeting of the right mix of small and midsize businesses

■ Sales in specific geographies and to specific industries, such as the financial services and
healthcare sectors

■ A sound business plan and an effective strategy that uses presale work, API champions,
activities that demonstrate thought leadership, and professional and consulting services

Offering (Product) Strategy: This criterion concerns vendors’ approach to product development
and delivery, with emphasis on market differentiation, functionality, methodology and features in
relation to current and future requirements.

Specifically, we assessed:

■ Offering plans and roadmaps (with dates)

■ Track record, future maturity and completeness

■ Offerings’ overall design concepts and architectures

■ How seamlessly and effectively partners’ offerings are used (where applicable) to extend and
enhance a vendor’s offerings

Business Model: This criterion concerns the design, logic and execution of vendors’ business
propositions with a view to achieving continued success.

Specifically, we examined:

■ How vendors’ target or maintain profitability

■ Pricing models and sales strategy, and how these work in relation to cloud, multicloud, hybrid

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and on-premises offerings

■ Partnerships, their effectiveness and viability, from a user perspective

■ Vendors’ professional and consulting services, how they recognize revenue and capitalize on
investments in research and development, and their growth strategies (including mergers and
acquisitions) across geographies

Vertical/Industry Strategy: This criterion assesses vendors’ strategies to direct resources (sales,
product, development), skills and products to meet the specific needs of individual market
segments, including industries.

Specifically, we examined:

■ The industries that vendors focus on, the industry-specific solutions (if any) that they offer, and
how successful or differentiating these solutions are (or are likely to be)

■ Industry-specific blueprints, accelerators, support for API standards and starter kits (if there are
any)

■ Support for specific industries in which regulatory or business transformations are occurring
around the world

Innovation: This criterion looks for direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of
resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or preemptive purposes.
Innovation is essential for survival in the full life cycle API management market.

More specifically, we assessed:

■ How vendors plan to innovate in terms of technology, business, industry and customer service

■ How effectively and systematically innovative ideas are filtered and funneled through product
development

■ Vendors’ track records of anticipating or leading new trends in the market

■ Novel and unique approaches, solutions and products resulting from or likely to result in

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transformative change in the market

Geographic Strategy: This criterion concerns vendors’ strategies to direct resources, skills and
offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside their “home” or native geography,
either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for the geography
and market.

Specifically, we looked for the ability to:

■ Identify and engage with the most fertile locations for vendors’ capabilities

■ Expand into geographies not explicitly addressed at present

■ Fulfill nondomestic projects via support centers, sales offices and partner networks

■ Support complex international requirements and features such as regional-specific compliance

with local laws and regulations

Note on Weightings: In this 2021 edition of the Magic Quadrant, the weightings for Marketing
Strategy, Vertical/Industry Strategy and Geographic Strategy have changed to better reflect the
current market.

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy High

Sales Strategy High

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Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model High

Vertical/Industry Strategy Medium

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Medium

Source: Gartner (September 2021)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders
Leaders are vendors that execute strongly and that lead and influence the market. Recent entrants
to this market that have a limited record of execution are less likely to be Leaders. The same
applies to strongly executing vendors that are overly risk-averse or that do not effectively exploit
innovation trends.

The most distinctive attribute of Leaders is that they address the widest variety of API use cases:
multiexperience architecture, integration using APIs, internal API management, productization of
APIs and open banking. Leaders make sure their offerings can help clients thrive in a dynamic
environment.

Vendors can become Leaders in this market by:

■ Acquiring another well-positioned vendor, integrating its technology into a wider application
infrastructure offering and keeping up with the pace of API management innovation.

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■ Addressing digital transformations, regulatory demands and modernization initiatives and their
challenges head-on, with thought leadership and product functionality, and by offering widely
deployable, well-supported API management solutions for a number of industries and
geographies.

Leaders understand the market trends that will benefit them and their clients’ business strategies
by enabling them to restructure their business operations or advance digital transformations.
Leaders see the business potential of API programs, communicate this potential to business units
and help their clients realize that potential.

Challengers
Challengers generally execute well for the types of work for which they offer functionality, but they
have a blurred or incomplete view of the market’s direction, sometimes due to a lack of innovation,
marketing and sales focus on API management.

The future of these providers depends on how aggressive and proactive they are in addressing
their current shortcomings. If they innovate to fulfill the pressing requirements of today’s API
programs, and market their offerings effectively, it is likely that they will become Leaders.
Otherwise, they may become Niche Players or Visionaries, or drop out of the Magic Quadrant.
They may also remain Challengers, but this market’s strong dynamics and fast evolution over the
past 18 months indicate that even maintaining their current position will require them to evolve.

Visionaries
Visionaries approach this market from an innovative angle. Although they are typically smaller, in
terms of revenue and market share, than Leaders and Challengers, and may offer an incomplete
set of functionalities, they have the power and mind share to grow their capabilities, often in a
different way from established Leaders.

2020 was a relatively quiet year of stabilization and growth in the full life cycle API management
market. As a group, but with some notable exceptions, Visionaries did not come up with
compelling visions in this market. In fact, some faced substantial market pressures due to the
pandemic and found it challenging to remain Visionaries.

Visionaries generally make good acquisition targets for established, larger players that want to

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buy their way into the Leaders quadrant. Acquisitions are continuing, but the number of vendors
with effective vision is reducing.

Niche Players
Niche Players focus on a segment of the market. That segment is typically defined by a specific
application or application infrastructure ecosystem, or by another characteristic, such as industry,
client size (and spending power), geographic area or open-source orientation. Niche Players either
have an effective strategy but a focus on a particular market niche, or they become Niche Players
because of shortcomings in terms of execution or a lack of innovation.

Within their niche, these vendors’ offerings may be more functional than those of Leaders. An
improved position on the Magic Quadrant might indicate that a Niche Player is maturing or that it
is extending its offering.

Niche Players’ Ability to Execute is limited to their focus areas and is assessed accordingly. Their
ability to innovate and survive in this market is limited by their narrow focus, but they often tend to
move much faster than vendors in other quadrants. Niche Players can progress to other quadrants
by improving their marketing strategy and fostering innovation.

Context
Although the global pandemic has forced CEOs to rethink their priorities in much of the world,
most anticipate a healthy economic recovery, rather than stagnation. Executives continue to focus
on digitalization as a top priority for returning to growth (see 2021 Gartner CEO Survey: The Year
of Rebuilding).

APIs play a crucial role in enabling digitization. They provide the foundation for modernization and
help organizations build successful business ecosystems (see Hype Cycle for APIs and Business
Ecosystems, 2021). The number of APIs within organizations is growing rapidly in IT departments
and in lines of business. APIs form the connection points between platforms and ecosystems.
Every connected mobile app, every website and every application deployed on a cloud service
uses APIs. Software engineering leaders must develop a systematic approach to manage and
govern the use of APIs across the organization by using a full life cycle API management offering.

Full life cycle API management involves the planning, design, implementation, testing, publication,

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operation, consumption, maintenance, versioning and retirement of APIs. Full life cycle API
management platforms have matured considerably in the past few years, with the emergence of,
among other things, improved API security features (see API Security: What You Need to Do to
Protect Your APIs). These platforms can also work with, and take advantage of, microservices in
mesh app and service architectures (see Ensure Your API Management Solution Supports Modern
API Trends Such as Microservices and Multicloud).

Full life cycle API management platforms have also emerged as key components of successful
business-driven automation initiatives. The 2021 Gartner Hyperautomation Survey found 11% of
the responding business technologists indicating that API management platforms were among
the three tools they used most (based on frequency and volume) to support automation initiatives
1
during the prior 12 months.

Packaged software applications — such as iPaaS, low-code application platforms and application
security products — may offer capabilities for creating and exposing APIs. However, these
capabilities are often limited to enabling a specific set of APIs and are not suitable for managing a
comprehensive API strategy. The API features of packaged software applications can serve as
complements to full life cycle API management platforms, but they are not substitutes for them.
Software engineering leaders should use this Magic Quadrant and its companion Critical
Capabilities report as a guide to finding the vendor offering best suited to their API management
needs.

Market Overview
The full life cycle API management market grew by 24% in 2020, expanding to $2.1 billion, despite
a challenging year (see Market Share Analysis: Full Life Cycle API Management, Worldwide, 2020).
It remains the third-fastest growing segment of the application infrastructure and middleware
market. Full life cycle API management technologies and practices are enabling all organizations
— regardless of size, region or industry — to accelerate their growth.

Market dynamics: 2020 was an active year for mergers and acquisitions and investor funding of
full life cycle API management vendors. Two private equity firms, Francisco Partners and TPG
Capital, acquired Boomi in May 2021 for $4 billion, a development that is expected to influence
this market positively. RapidAPI, an emerging vendor, acquired Paw, an API design vendor. Other
vendors, including Kong, secured substantial series funding throughout 2020.

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Full life cycle API management remains a dynamic and thriving market with substantial potential
for both investors and vendors looking to create and manage APIs as add-ons to their offerings.
Gartner expects this market to continue its strong double-digit growth for at least the next five
years. End users can expect increased choice, a healthier market and more viable partnerships as
they look to revamp their API strategies and API-based business models.

Despite the overall 24% revenue growth and strong M&A activity, 2020 was a tough year in some
regions. This has disproportionately affected vendors with go-to-market strategies for specific
regional markets, which has resulted in some vendors falling below the increased revenue
thresholds for qualification for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant.

What buyers should know: This 2021 Magic Quadrant represents a more mature and stable field
of vendors, compared with the lineup in 2020. However, end users’ expectations and needs have
also become more demanding (see Top 10 Things Software Engineering Leaders Need to Know
About APIs). The gap between full life cycle API management offerings’ capabilities and
customers’ expectations continues to widen. As a result, prospective buyers must pay closer
attention to product details, especially in the following areas:

■ Support for API life cycle stages: Not all vendors support all four life cycle stages (planning and
design, implementation and testing, deployment and operation, and versioning and retirement)
equally well. For example, some vendors do not offer an API gateway but support integration of
a few third-party gateways to which customers must purchase or subscribe. Some vendors
provide nominal developer portals and offer weaker support for development of APIs.
Customers must review this aspect in light of the critical capabilities (described in the
companion Critical Capabilities for Full Life Cycle API Management) to ensure alignment with
their organization’s API management needs.

■ Market segmentation: Vendors in this Magic Quadrant tend to cater to three major segments of
buyers: (1) Organizations looking to advance their digital strategies by adopting API products
and business models based on APIs; (2) Organizations looking to build foundational
capabilities by addressing legacy, system, process and business integration; (3) Organizations
that are more engineering-savvy and looking to use APIs to build modernized architectures
(including microservices and service meshes). Although the capabilities required for these
three buyer segments differ, vendors do not always make these distinctions clear in their
marketing messages. As a result, buyers may find it difficult to assess which offering best suits
their needs, especially when their organization falls into more than one of the three segments.

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To select the best-fit full life cycle API management offering, buyers must develop a good
understanding of their API strategy, identify their specific needs and gain consensus among
stakeholders in their organization.

■ Multicloud API management: Cloud vendors (such as AWS, Microsoft [Azure] and Google) and
their native offerings deeply influence vendor choices for prospective buyers. Cloud API
gateways provide strong operational capabilities and access to serverless and other cloud-
native services. These gateways are attractive for many organizations (and essential for some).
However, customers who adopt these offerings often need to procure multiple API
management solutions to support on-premises and/or multicloud scenarios. Although vendors
have improved their capabilities, no one vendor provides strong support for both multicloud and
multiproduct API management.

Evidence
Corporate Transaction Notification: Boomi

1
The 2021 Gartner Hyperautomation Survey was conducted online during March 2021 among
558 business technologists from North America (n = 226), Europe (n = 146), Latin America (n =
78) and Asia/Pacific (n = 108).

To qualify to answer the survey, respondents needed to:

■ Have created, built or code analytics or technology capabilities on their own or with input from
others in the past 12 months.

■ In the same time period, have used at least one of the tools to produce analytics or technology
capabilities for work. Twenty-one tools were considered in four categories: application
development tools, automation tools, integration tools, and data science and AI tools.

The results of this survey do not represent global findings or the market as a whole. They reflect
the views of the respondents and companies surveyed.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

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Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This
includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether
offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and
detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the
financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business
unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the
state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that
supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the
overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve

competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and
market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver
the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase
awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and
organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity,
promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be

successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive
technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support
programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include
the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and
other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing
basis.

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Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to
translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen
to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added
vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated

throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs
and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and
indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth
of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that
emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current
and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet
the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or

capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through
partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

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