Last week, , Per Buer about the advancements Varnish has made over the past couple years and how they continue to grow in the market of open source caching. But one topic that came up was how Varnish’s API Engine compares to the likes of legacy API Engines such as Tibco Mashery, Apigee, Kong and Tyk. Buer related how Varnish manages to stack up to these when it comes to performance, but that they may contain richer feature sets. Given the assertion, we decided to follow up with a side by side comparison of the four API Engines to shed light on the competition in the API market.

The World of APIs

Tibco Mashery

Last year in August TIBCO Software, which specialized in analytics, integration and event processing, announced that they acquired Mashery, an API management company. The goal of the acquisition, as told by the company’s , was to expand TIBCO’s API management solutions “to help enterprises transform into digital businesses, integrate more channels for new services and experiences, and empower developers to accelerate innovation.”

Mashery already had a strong track record in the world of API Management, being named the leader in Application Services Governance Magic Quadrant by . Now with TIBCO, they continue to expand on their API engine with an extensive feature set.

• Manage Multiple APIs: Tyk’s dashboard has one gateway to manage all your APIs with streamlined integration Allows you to set quotes, rate limits and manage access with fine-grained control and detailed reporting The dashboard also lets you view the usage statistics for your APIs, giving full views of your data by API Version, error type, endpoint, user and OAuth client Allows you to track API performance hour-by-hour with granular views of your data

• Customisable API Portal: Tyk’s portal makes it easy to publish your APIs to the world and allow developers to enroll for access allows for multiple portals where each enterprise gets their own portal, separating developer and team members for better organization across larger companies Comes with flexible, themeable templates based on twitter bootstrap

• Cloud, Hybrid or On-Premise Integrations:Tyk offers fully supported infrastructure through the cloud for free Auto-scaling, fault-tolerant infrastructure that keeps traffic flowing with full SSL security Full REST API to help smooth the interactions between your APIs gateway, analytics, policies, and keys

• Load Balanced: can handle up to 100 requests per second on a single node

• Configuration: Supports hot-configuration reloading without dropping any requests change the security model, blacklist, endpoints or add new API versions to your stack and load them with little downtime

• Open Source:  fully open sourced and can be forked on GitHub with no limitation. Written in Goland and has no dependencies or complicated installation procedures Offers a support plan for 99 Euros a month

Takeaways

There seems to be two separate spectrums here with the feature sets–fully integrated support or freedom with open source. TIBCO Mashery and Apigee are by far larger, with a more extensive list of features, but this comes at a higher cost compared to open source alternative like Kong and Tyk. Depending on your company and you specific API needs, certain feature might draw you in more so than others, but know that there are several options out there, more than we can profile, so there’s always an alternative to fit your needs.