Putting together a checklist as part of your Request for Proposals (RFP), ready to select a new API management platform? Stop. Right. Now.
An API management platform is a mission-critical part of your infrastructure. It impacts everything from your ability to innovate and accelerate to the unlocking of new income streams. Are you really going to approach that with the same sort of checkbox list you would use when buying a printer?
A checklist of features doesn’t tell you if a platform is built on the right foundations – things like open standards, long-term flexibility, and real-world support – or provide crucial context for understanding those foundations. A checkbox approach oversimplifies decisions about the complex, foundational nature of API management platforms, where feature parity doesn’t equal outcome parity.
The illusion of feature parity
Choosing an API management platform is a major strategic infrastructural decision. You’re not buying a simple commodity but something that has major implications for the interoperability and extensibility of your entire architecture.
Checklists appeal because they promise clarity, but they run the risk of delivering false confidence. Features that appear similar at first glance can often differ vastly once you dive into the detail – something that a checklist fails to do. Consider rate limiting. In one platform, it might be flexible and performant, while in another it might be brittle and hard to configure. Simply checking a rate limiting box as part of your RFP won’t tell you what you need to know. Depth, maturity, and implementation details matter massively.
The need for strategic focus
APIs, and how you manage them, are matters for long-term investment and strategic thinking. As such, decisions must account not just for your current needs but for future growth. How will your architecture evolve to embrace event-driven APIs and agentic AI? And what about whatever comes next? The API management platform you choose today will determine how capable you are of evolving your architecture to integrate the systems of tomorrow.
A checklist of features misses the context and nuance required for strategic decision-making. How “open” is open source, for example? Headline offerings can easily be misleading if you don’t dive into the detail sufficiently. As such, if you treat finding an API management platform like searching for a commodity, you miss a fundamental opportunity to future-proof your investment.
What really matters: Foundations over features
Going beyond headline features to explore the foundations of potential API management solutions means you can understand the long-term impact that such platforms could have for your business. It provides the chance to identify how and why a modern, cloud-native, decoupled architecture (like Tyk’s) is critical for your performance and scalability.
Key foundational elements include a platform’s approach to interoperability, extensibility, and open standards. These aspects of an API management platform can make a vast difference to how AI-ready you are and how easily you can accelerate, pivot, and beat the competition to market. Context and nuance are everything here. Understanding how plugin frameworks, middleware, hybrid deployments, and the like will enable the platform to grow with your business and evolve with your technical needs is crucial. And that understanding doesn’t come from a checklist.
The people behind the platform
Another aspect of an API management platform that you won’t glean from a checklist is how you gel with the team behind the tech. When you buy an API management platform, you’re entering a long-term relationship with the vendor. That means support responsiveness and quality, roadmap transparency, community engagement, and more all need to go under the microscope.
Does the platform you’re considering offer dedicated engineers who are committed to your success or gatekeeping account managers? Are you confident in the platform’s future evolution and your independence from vendor whims?
Again, a checklist won’t cut it. Ask your peers to share their candid experiences of the platforms they’re using. Jump onto Gartner Peer Insights and see which API management platforms are rated most highly. Dive into the open source community and see how active platforms’ contributor bases are. You’ll soon get a feel for which platforms provide real, developer-first support and which leave you hanging with slow and unanswered support ticket systems.
Choose a better way to evaluate API management platforms
Checklists fall short for strategic infrastructure decisions. Instead, move beyond RFPs to collaborative pilots, architectural deep-dives, and real-world use cases. Look at how a platform aligns with your long-term technical strategy and how it will contribute to achieving your business goals. Consider how transparent and responsive the team behind it is. And ensure you look at the total cost of adoption and adaptation, not just implementation.
Going deeper with your evaluation means looking at what matters years down the road, focusing on foundational principles of architecture, interoperability, and extensibility.
It’s time to throw that checklist in the trash.
Talk to Tyk
The Tyk team welcomes deep technical conversations and real-world pilots. These are crucial to serious, strategic decision-making. Why not contact us today to discuss your needs?
