If your API platform decision is critical to your product, partners, and future, don’t stop at the brochure. After all, most API management platforms look similar in brochures: secure, fast, feature-rich, and so on.
Use this practical five-point checklist, based on what experienced buyers evaluate, to achieve the depth of insight you need. Go beyond feature checklists to discover how a platform will deliver a real-world fit for your business and contribute to achieving your goals.
1.Open standards and future-proofing
When evaluating API management platforms, look at your future needs as well as your current ones. There are three important elements to consider here: open standards, multi-protocol support, and independence from vendor lock-in.
Open standards give you flexibility, interoperability, and predictability – a powerful combination when it comes to being future-ready. Looking at how an API management platform approaches OAS, OAuth, Open Policy Agent, and OpenTelemetry can therefore reveal much about how agile your business will be when it comes to adding future technologies.
Support for multiple protocols – REST, GraphQL, gRPC, SOAP, Async, etc. – is also fundamental. This provides you with architectural flexibility, again levelling up your future-readiness.
Flexibility comes in the form of avoiding vendor lock-in, too. Being tightly tied to a specific vendor means doing things their way and waiting on their roadmap for new features. Vendor independence delivers the freedom to choose the right products to fit your needs and timescales.
2.Platform extensibility and ecosystem
Do you want an API management platform that you can easily tailor to your workflows, or do you want to try and bend your workflows to fit rigid platform requirements? If it’s the former you’re after (and why wouldn’t you be?!), then dive deeply into extensibility and ecosystem features, and support when evaluating API management platforms.
Thinking about a platform’s plugin architecture, custom middleware support, event hooks, webhooks, and automation support can do much to ensure your API operations are easier to scale and automate. Look for native extensibility in multiple languages and a thriving open ecosystem for maximum flexibility.
3.Team and support quality
Diving into a platform’s potential also means thoroughly evaluating the quality of its support service. There’s little more frustrating than ticket systems that create bottlenecks and hold you back from innovating and scaling at your desired pace. Such delays have a cost implication too, making it doubly important to ensure you choose a platform that provides access to real engineers when you need support.
Access to high-quality support helps with everything from architectural guidance to onboarding. Expert human insight means you can accelerate implementation while avoiding early (and costly) missteps.
When evaluating a platform’s support, remember to consider community activity, too. Open source products with a global user base can deliver invaluable insights and experiences via engaged online communities.
4.Developer experience and integration story
Peer insights are hugely revealing when it comes to understanding what you can expect from an API management platform, particularly when it comes to developer experience and integration expectations. The best place to start is Gartner Peer Insights, which provides access to candid reviews and platform comparisons.
In terms of features to dive into when evaluating platforms, look at how API portals, docs, and sandboxes contribute to easy onboarding for developers, as well as smooth CI/CD integration. A language-agnostic platform with developer-friendly tooling can shorten your time-to-market and time-to-value considerably, driving adoption both internally and with partners. Tyk’s lightweight platform, with its DevOps-ready tooling, customizable developer portal, and seamless GitOps support, showcases the real-world value of this.
5.Outcomes, not just features
An outstanding API management platform doesn’t just run your APIs, it fuels innovation, growth and competitive advantage – both now and in the future. To achieve this, your API platform needs to help you drive API adoption and usage while providing actionable analytics that underpin improved decision-making. It needs to deliver real-world scalability and the ability to iterate on monetization, SLAs, and partnerships.
Focusing on goals and outcomes when you evaluate platforms can enable you to understand which of the solutions you’re looking at will help you grow, not just launch.
Find the right fit
When APIs are core to your business, real-world fit matters more than feature checklists. Use demos, pilots, and peer insights to dig deeper into platform qualities. Be diligent in asking the hard questions, running a pilot specific to your needs, and talking to a platform’s existing users about their experiences, successes, and pain points.
Why not start by discovering what your peers think of Tyk?
