Considering IBM API Connect alternatives?

Utilizing a managed cloud service that handles your critical API traffic should not require you to utilize only certain cloud providers or regions. The service should adapt to your needs and preferences to ensure you can meet things like organizational guidelines and GDPR requirements for your data in the cloud.

IBM

• IBM API Connect Multi-Tenant SaaS service is only available on AWS with managed gateways (multi or single tenant) in the same region as the control plane. No hybrid / multi-cloud solution is provided.
• IBM Reserve Instance (dedicated SaaS on IBM Cloud) and software support hybrid / multi-cloud but only with clients managing the remote gateway infrastructure.

Kong

• Kong’s managed cloud gateways can be deployed in AWS, GCP, or Azure across a variety of regions. Kong Konnect (control plane) can be deployed in the US, EU, ME, IN, and AU, with the ability to easily change regions in the console. Additionally, Kong supports serverless gateway deployments for rapidly standing up low-cost infrastructure in dev and testing environments.

For mission-critical deployments, you need the capability to modify gateway deployments by controlling underlying resource allocation to meet your performance requirements and have full observability capabilities if any issues arise.

IBM

• IBM API Connect-managed SaaS autoscales based on the subscription/utilization. This is not visible to customers of this platform. Logs can be downloaded from the control plane, and Analytics and Traces are provided in the dashboard and/or offloaded to third-party systems.
• The Gateway (DataPower) when deployed in Kubernetes or OpenShift does support either Horizontal or Vertical Pod Autoscaling, but this must be done at that operator level configuration. VMware, Linux, and hardware do not provide any autoscaling support.
• For all non-SaaS, the gateway will output logs, metrics, and traces in legacy and OTEL formats. Analytics offload is also provided back to the control plane.

Kong

• Kong’s managed cloud gateways support autoscaling and allow for custom configuration of underlying nodes resources and number of gateway replicas on a per-region basis. Additionally, cloud gateway deployments can be modified by supplying environment variables, just like you would with a local deployment. Cloud gateway runtime logs are viewable directly in the control plane along with API requests-related logs and analytics. Optionally, cloud gateways can export analytics to observability tooling through the OTEL standard.

API gateways are often responsible for proxying and securing core services with highly confidential data. Therefore, for managed cloud deployments, it is critical that gateways can maintain a secure and private connection.

IBM

• IBM API Connect does provide support for encrypted connections (TLS and mTLS) over the public internet across all form factors.
• Only IBM API Connect SaaS Premium adds support for AWS Private Link.

Kong

• Kong supports both encrypted connections over the public internet and private networking between cloud gateways and your backend services. Private networking is supported with AWS Transit Gateway and Azure VNET Peering, depending on your cloud provider of choice.

Supporting managed global deployments is more than just allowing gateways to be deployed in a particular region. You need to have an intelligent DNS that can route consumers to the gateway with the lowest latency based on their location and the status of the gateways.

IBM

• IBM API Connect (SaaS) does not provide multi-region deployments. The control plane and data plane are deployed to the same region, and IBM does provide a regional DNS. Clients can bring their own vanity or global host but must manage the DNS independently. Any DNS services must be procured and managed independently of the IBM API Connect offering.

Kong

• Kong has support for a smart Global DNS that provisions a DNS address that can communicate with all the clouds and regions where you’ve deployed cloud gateways. The smart DNS then automatically chooses the best region to use for each API request based on real-time performance and latency affinity. This means that implementing multi-cloud and multi-region connectivity is as easy as sending requests to the Smart Global DNS. Kong will also provision a DNS record per region if you need to selectively target a region.

As you continue to invest in and grow your APIs, your API platform needs to be able to scale with you. Large-scale deployments require syncing a massive amount of configuration (e.g., services, routes, plugins, etc.) to your data planes, which can become a prohibitively slow process if not properly optimized.

IBM

• IBM does not support incremental sync from the manager to the gateway. When publishing a change (Product:APIs[1-n]) to the gateway, all of the configurations for that Product are resynced regardless of the change scope. Changes to the gateway are processed by FIFO, which can cause a backup when publishing multiple Products. 

Kong

• Kong supports incremental sync, which means only the relevant change — instead of the entire configuration — is synced to the data plane, resulting in significantly less data being transmitted, reduced memory and CPU usage, and much faster propagation of configuration changes.

Many API platforms allow you to extend their capabilities to meet your needs through custom plugins. Therefore, it is important to be able to easily deploy and update these custom plugins on all your runtimes, including managed cloud gateways, in a self-service manner.

IBM

• IBM API Connect supports custom policies in the form of either User-Defined Policies or Gateway Extensions. These are both limited to scripting (proprietary DataPower GatewayScript or legacy XSLT). Sample policies / extensions are provided, but there is no support provided and no marketplace for vetted third-party capabilities.

Kong

• Kong supports custom plugin streaming, which allows you to upload a custom plugin to the control plane and automatically push that plugin to your cloud gateway(s).
• Kong provides a marketplace for both OSS, supported, and third-party plug-ins.

An Admin API is typically the first place organizations start when automating their API management operations. Without a properly documented, fully-featured Admin API, infrastructure and platform teams will struggle to implement APIOps effectively.

IBM

• IBM API Connect Admin REST API is provided for all platforms. All of the operations provided in the Admin API are mirrored in the toolkit CLI. Certain gateway specific operations must be done using the DataPower Management Interfaces (REST, XML, or Web) which is completely separate from the API Connect Admin interface.
• Official documentation is extremely limited.

Kong

• Kong's Admin API works for all supported versions of Kong control planes and data planes, is well-documented, and easy to start with.

While Admin APIs are where many organizations start, declarative config is generally seen as an easier, safer, and more resilient automation offering.

IBM

• A limited set of capabilities is provided. Only when deployed as part of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration does API Connect have support for declarative automation for the deployment and lifecycle of Products and APIs assets. 

Kong

• Kong was built from the ground up for declarative configuration and automation. Kong offers support for declarative config via our Gateway operator (Kubernetes Operator) for Kube-native teams or our decK CLI and/or Terraform provider for non Kube-native teams.

For teams that want to manage their API platform declaratively — just like they do the rest of their K8s infrastructure — a Kubernetes Operator is essential. However, if the operator does not support all of the platform’s critical functionality, Kubernetes teams will never be able to make their APIOps truly Kube-native.

IBM

• IBM API Connect does provide Operators for deployment, upgrade, rollback, and backup/restore of the different components of API Connect (Manager, Analytics, Portal, and Gateway). 
• IBM API Connect does not provide Kubernetes Operator support for deployment of the API Gateway (DataPower) as an ingress controller.

Kong

• Kong’s Gateway operator is fully compliant with Kubernetes’ successor to the Ingress API, the Gateway API. By using the Kong Gateway Operator with the Gateway API, you are able to fully automate the lifecycle management of the Kong Gateway and Ingress Controller within Kubernetes.

While declarative config via the Kubernetes Operator is one way to do declarative management, it’s not the only way. Many teams have not migrated to Kubernetes or simply do not need the capabilities offered by Kubernetes. However, many of these organizations are still interested in APIops.

IBM

• IBM API Connect can be configured in a declarative style using the Admin API or CLI. All of the gateway configuration assets (APIs, Products, etc.) can be managed as YAML or JSON but require extensive use of the Admin API/CLI to publish and lifecycle these assets.  
• Due to required additional scripting and lack of documented support, this can only be seen as a partial solution.
• Full declarative service deployment is only documented with IBM Cloud Pak for Integration at this point in time.

Kong

• Kong has been built from the ground up to make declarative configuration management a first-class citizen. Kong’s comprehensive CLI tool, decK, allows non-Kubernetes teams to still incorporate APIops for gateway entities.
• Additionally, Kong has an official Terraform provider that integrates seamlessly with decK and allows you to manage every aspect of Konnect platform declaratively.

Terraform’s declarative, cloud-agnostic IaC model — combined with a robust ecosystem of providers — allows organizations to manage infrastructure consistently across any environment with predictability, automation, and collaboration.

Your API platform vendor should offer Terraform support for teams that leverage this increasingly ubiquitous approach to IaC.

IBM

• IBM does not provide any official Terraform pipeline scripts. Samples are provided, but no official support is offered.

Kong

• Kong has an official Terraform provider that integrates seamlessly with decK and allows you to manage every aspect of Konnect platform declaratively.

An API platform must integrate with existing access management tools and allow for granular levels of access control to support the end goal of self-service capabilities with guardrails.

IBM

• IBM API Connect provides a predefined and customizable RBAC over the whole platform. Users can be defined as part of an embedded local user registry or integrated with third-party identity providers via OIDC, Auth URL, or LDAP.

Kong

• Kong provides comprehensive RBAC over its platform for managing user permissions and provides full integration with third-party identity providers for SSO and access control.

One of the key advantages to a federated APIM platform is providing a single pane of glass into all runtimes and backend services to ensure compliance across the organization and reducing mean time to resolution when an issue does occur.

IBM

• IBM API Connect has a built-in analytics component with a collection of pre-built dashboards and reports. The content of these dashboards and reports are not customizable. Analytics data can also be offloaded to third-party systems in IBMs analytics format. Different levels of logging (meta, meta+header, meta+header+payload) can be configured at service publication but can not be adjusted without redeployment of the Product/API.

Kong

• Kong has built-in, detailed analytics on standard API traffic and AI-specific traffic like tracking token counts, costs, and latency. Kong can also integrate directly with third-party analytics and monitoring tools and supports the OpenTelemetry standard. Additionally, Kong’s active tracing lets you generate on demand tracing sessions for viewing all the span data for an API request directly in the console.

In the world of microservices, maintaining an up-to-date registry of all services and their compliance with engineering best practices is critical for the overall security and reporting on the health of the organization.

IBM

• IBM API Connect has a fragmented service discovery story. 
• In SaaS and software, IBM provides an API discovery feature focused on finding unmanaged APIs from sources limited to GitHub, OpenTelemetry, and DataPower Proxy. These APIs once discovered can be copied into the standard API Connect lifecycle for management.
• For Software (not SaaS) a Backstage plug-in for IBM API Connect is provided to allow for Products and APIs to be socialized in Backstage.

Kong

• Kong’s Service Catalog offers an automated solution for generating a comprehensive catalog of all services running in your organization. By integrating with both Konnect-internal applications, like Gateway Manager and Mesh Manager, as well as external applications like GitHub and PagerDuty, Service Catalog provides you with a 360 overview into each of your organization’s services. It presents you with information that includes who the service’s owner is, its upstream and downstream dependencies, its code repositories, its CI/CD pipelines, and whether it is fronted by an API gateway or is part of a service mesh.

Scorecarding is becoming a central component of governing APIs and services, as scorecards can be used to automatically measure and manage API and service-level compliance with organizational best practices around security, prod-readiness, regulatory compliance, etc.

IBM

• IBM API Connect as part of API Governance provides a basic scorecard. This scorecard is solely based on the results of the linting rules (spectral-based).

Kong

• Kong’s Scorecards let you measure and enforce API and service compliance. Set security, reliability, and quality benchmarks, apply them to your services, and track compliance across your organization.

An API developer portal or API catalog provides a centralized location to understand, find, and use APIs effectively — reducing friction for developers. This is often a self-service and user-friendly interface where APIs can be discovered, subscribed, and tested before writing any code.

IBM

• IBM API Connect provides an integrated developer portal experience, either in the form of the "Consumer Catalog" focused on internal users and the fully customizable "Developer Portal." Both interfaces provide the ability to sign-up and register users, manage apps and subscriptions, browse, test, and subscribe to bundles of APIs known as products. Both interfaces provide analytics scope for the consumer. The "Developer Portal" also adds integrated Forums, Blogs, Stripe for Monetization, and custom content blocks not tied to the Product or API.

Kong

• Kong’s Developer Portal offers multi-portal flexibility with support for distinct identity providers, enabling tailored experiences across business units. It combines highly customizable, branded content using markdown components with fine-grained visibility controls powered by RBAC and IdP integrations. Developers benefit from modern, auto-generated OpenAPI and AsyncAPI docs with built-in “try it” functionality, while integrated analytics provide actionable insights across APIs, versions, developers, and applications.

API specifications and documentation must be made available to API consumers so that developers and AI agents are able to better understand how to leverage an API.

IBM

• IBM API Connect places all of the documentation either in the Product or API YAML file. External documentation can be linked but must be managed separately. 
• IBM API Connect supports GraphQL, OAS, and AsyncAPI spec format.

Kong

• You can use Kong Insomnia to design APIs and API contracts, import specs via Kong decK for Gateway service creation, and then publish APIs along with their documentation in the Konnect Developer Portal. The Portal leverages the Kong spec renderer, which supports both OAS and AsyncAPI spec rendering.

API design, testing, and debugging is a crucial component of the larger API lifecycle.

IBM

• IBM API Connect provides embedded unit testing capabilities in the API Editor for the Provider and the Developer Portal/Consumer Catalog for the API Consumer. Each test is ephemeral and manually entered.
• IBM API Connect does provide several API testing tools such as AutoTest Assist for randomly generated Fuzz Testing and API testing with Smart Generation for AI-assisted test suite generation. These tools are limited to REST-based APIs and do not support GraphQL, AsyncAPI, WebSocket, gRPC, etc.

Kong

• Kong Insomnia is a best-in-breed API design, debugging, and testing solution. You can use it for design-first API design, as an HTTP client for testing REST, WebSocket, and gRPC APIs. Insomnia also integrates into the Konnect platform — giving API consumers a testing tool for testing self-serve APIs that they might discover in the Konnect Developer Portal.
• Important to note, Insomnia differs from other popular API testing tools in its support for local storage of test collections and credentials, which makes it a much more secure alternative to a tool such as Postman.