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Exploring 20 Open-Source API Management Tools for Enhancing Your Technology Arsenal

Development of various customer-focused apps is being facilitated by API management platforms, allowing developers to cater to a wide range of user requirements.

List of 20 Open-Source API Management Platforms to Incorporate into Your Technical Infrastructure
List of 20 Open-Source API Management Platforms to Incorporate into Your Technical Infrastructure

Exploring 20 Open-Source API Management Tools for Enhancing Your Technology Arsenal

In the rapidly evolving world of mobile app development, managing APIs efficiently is crucial for robust backend development. Here, we explore some of the top open-source API management platforms that can support the full API lifecycle — design, security, monitoring, and scaling.

API Umbrella

API Umbrella, introduced by Red Hat, is a leading open-source platform that offers features like rate limiting, API keys, caching, real-time analytics, and an admin web interface. It is designed to manage APIs and microservices with flexible admin permissions, making it suitable for multiple organizations to operate under the same umbrella [1].

Gravitee.io

Gravitee.io is a lightweight and flexible platform that offers out-of-the-box features like rate limiting, IP filtering, Cross-origin resource sharing, and a lightweight API developer portal. Its standout feature is fine-grained reporting for API usage analytics [1].

APIman.io (by Red Hat)

APIman.io focuses on backend development needs with features like quick runtimes, policy-based governance, asynchronous capabilities, billing, analytics, REST API management, and rate limiting [1].

Apigee (by Google Cloud)

Apigee offers a comprehensive API lifecycle management platform with open components. It features an API gateway, advanced security (OAuth2, API keys, threat protection), detailed analytics, developer portal, traffic management (rate limiting, quotas), and integration capabilities. While not fully open-source, Apigee is widely used and scalable for enterprises [3][5].

Additional Considerations

When choosing an API management platform, consider your team's preferred development environment and the scale of your APIs. Open-source platforms like API Umbrella and Gravitee.io provide greater customization and no vendor lock-in, ideal for agile teams. Apigee, while powerful and enterprise-ready, may involve costs but offers superior support and features [1].

Other Notable Mentions

  • DreamFactory API Management platform: Automates the creation of APIs for mobile app development, integrating any SQL/NoSQL database, external HTTP/SOAP service, or file storage system.
  • WSO2 API Manager: A full lifecycle API management platform that enables developers to enjoy the possibility of API distribution and deployment on both on-premise and private clouds.
  • Kong Enterprise: An open-source microservice API tool offering features like availability of open-source plugins, ease of One-Click operations, common language infrastructure capability, great visualization for monitoring, regular software health checks, introspection of OAuth2.0, and wider community support.
  • Tyk.io: An open-source API gateway written in the Go programming language, offering an open source API developer portal, detailed documentation, dashboard for API analytics, rate limiting for APIs, authentication, and various other specifications.
  • KrakenD: An open-source API Gateway that aggregates many microservices into single endpoints, doing the heavy-lifting automatically for you, and offering a declarative way to create the endpoints.
  • Repose: An open-source RESTful middleware platform offering API processing facilities like authentication, API validation, rate limiting, and HTTP Request logging.
  • Fusio: An open source API management tool that lets developers create and maintain REST APIs from different data types, with efficient lifecycle management features.
  • Gloo Edge: A cloud-native API gateway that supports legacy apps, microservices, and serverless, integrating with your environment and handling ingress and egress.
  • 3Scale (owned by Red Hat): Centralizes the API program's control, offering features like a distributed cloud layer, OpenShift Integration, and full lifecycle API management.
  • Mashery: Delivers full lifecycle API management capabilities for enterprises adopting cloud-native development and deployment practices, with features like API creation, productization, security, and analytics.

In summary, API Umbrella, Gravitee.io, APIman.io, and Apigee are the top open-source or partly open API management platforms to consider for mobile app development in 2021 and beyond, with the choice depending on your project's specific needs and scale [1][3][5].

[1] https://www.programmableweb.com/news/2020-state-of-the-api-report-open-source-platforms-dominate-api-management-space [3] https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/api-management/what-is-api-management [5] https://cloud.google.com/apigee/docs/overview

Technology plays a significant role in mobile app development, particularly in managing APIs for robust backend development. Some top open-source API management platforms that can support the full API lifecycle include API Umbrella, Gravitee.io, APIman.io, and Apigee, each offering unique features to cater to various project needs and scales.

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