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Explore these 7 popular API gateway tools

By Twain Taylor

APIs are the connective tissue of modern software, linking everything from cloud workloads to IoT devices to AI-driven microservices. As a result, for organizations that juggle hybrid clouds, legacy systems and real-time data demands, the API gateway has evolved from a simple traffic router to a mission-critical orchestrator. These tools centralize critical functions including authentication, rate limiting and request routing to eliminate the chaos of managing hundreds of discrete endpoints.

This increased role and need for additional functionality has created a flood of API gateway tool options in the market, and teams are drowning in choices. Do you bet on a cloud vendor's managed service, or embrace open source flexibility? How do you future-proof against AI-generated API attacks? And when every millisecond of latency costs revenue, can your gateway keep up?

In this article, we'll cut through the noise and dissect seven leading tools that can balance innovation with much-needed practicality.

How we selected the tools for this list

In 2025, selecting API gateways can't be merely a checkbox exercise. Organizations must align tools with their technical DNA. To that end, enterprises should focus on the following list of evaluation criteria:

• Real-world scalability. Each tool was examined based on its documented performance under high-demand scenarios, including published benchmarks for seasonal traffic spikes and high-volume data processing capabilities.
• Security post-2024 breaches. Zero-trust capabilities and AI-powered anomaly detection have come to the forefront, particularly after the July 2024 hacking incident involving Twilio and Authy.
• Multiprotocol agility. REST is table stakes, and GraphQL, gRPC and WebSocket are essential.
• Total cost of ownership. Beyond licensing fees, minimizing the time spent on upkeep and troubleshooting is critical.

The final lineup below, arranged in alphabetical order, includes proprietary and open source options. The former category was evaluated based on cloud-native integrations, AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities, and total cost of ownership, while the latter was vetted against extensibility, community support and operational overhead. Let's explore how each contender stacks up.

Proprietary gateways

API gateways from major cloud platform providers shine brightest when an organization's infrastructure already lives and breathes in a provider's ecosystem. Enterprises can use a different API gateway for workloads outside that platform via HTTP endpoints, but will face latency and data residency challenges and extra costs. So, if you're already all in on a specific cloud platform, it's likely best to opt for that platform's API gateway.

Here are our top four proprietary API gateway tools.

Amazon API Gateway

Designed for serverless architectures, AWS' offering automatically scales to handle millions of requests without manual intervention, which is ideal for unpredictable workloads such as mobile app back ends or IoT data pipelines.

Here's what is under the hood:

• Cold start mitigation. Authentication mechanisms including AWS identity and access management (IAM) policies, Lambda authorizer functions and Amazon Cognito user pools provide flexible security options for API access control.
• IAM deep dive. Granular permissions let you micromanage who can invoke which endpoints, though some argue that there is a steep learning curve to master it.
• Cost efficiency. Pay-per-call pricing -- $3.50 per million REST requests -- aligns expenses with usage, though high-traffic workloads might benefit from tiered discounts, which kick in at 300 million requests per month.
• Security. Amazon Cognito and IAM provide built-in OAuth 2.0 and JSON Web Token (JWT) validation, though to customize policies, you'll be forced to navigate AWS' complex permission matrix.

Summary: Opt for Amazon API Gateway if you're all in on AWS and prioritize serverless scalability over multi-cloud flexibility.

Google Cloud Apigee

Google Cloud's Apigee delivers enterprise-grade API management with sophisticated analytics capabilities. Its ML engine, rebooted in 2024, goes beyond flagging anomalies and can predict potential performance degradation before users experience disruption. For organizations that already operate within Google Cloud's ecosystem, Apigee provides native integration advantages with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services, creating a unified environment to develop, secure and optimize APIs at scale.

Notable features include the following:

• AI-powered OpenAPI specs. Apigee's May 2024 release includes enhanced AI capabilities that analyze API traffic patterns and existing documentation to automatically generate standardized OpenAPI specifications.
• Multiprotocol support. Support for REST, gRPC and GraphQL makes it a fit for both legacy modernization and real-time applications.
• Customizable developer portal. Customizable portals streamline API onboarding, with analytics that show which endpoints are underused or error-prone.

Summary: Apigee is ideal for enterprises that are investing in AIOps or managing diverse API portfolios across hybrid clouds. However, licensing costs will soar for small teams. And like all data-driven systems, the ML features require high-quality input data to produce meaningful insights, so organizations should implement proper governance practices.

Microsoft Azure API Management

Azure API Management bridges the gap between legacy systems and modern API-driven architectures. Its unified approach to API governance, security and scalability should appeal to enterprises undergoing digital transformation. A core strength of this service is its ability to abstract complex back-end systems and present them as streamlined, well-documented APIs to internal and external consumers.

Here are some noteworthy features:

• Azure ecosystem integration. Azure's API gateway provides native connections to Azure Monitor for observability, Key Vault for certificate management and Application Insights for end-to-end tracing.
• Self-hosted flexibility. Deploy the gateway anywhere with the containerized self-hosted gateway option, running in the same environments as your APIs.
• Multi-tier architecture. A serverless Consumption tier bills per execution, while an enterprise-grade Premium tier offers advanced security features and a 99.99% service-level agreement.
• Developer engagement. Customizable developer portals streamline API discovery and onboarding for internal and external consumers.

Summary: Azure API Management shines within Microsoft's ecosystem, but organizations heavily invested in AWS or Google Cloud might face integration challenges. The Consumption tier includes the first 1 million calls per subscription with additional charges for higher volumes, making it approachable for organizations just starting their API journey. The Premium tier serves enterprises that need maximum reliability and advanced features.

MuleSoft Anypoint Flex Gateway

Salesforce's MuleSoft targets a glaring pain point for many organizations: integrating monolithic systems with modern APIs. Its integration platform enables organizations to transform traditional enterprise applications such as mainframes or SAP into standardized REST APIs, which can be a major help in regulated industries such as banking.

Key features include the following:

• Prebuilt connectors. These accelerate integrations with legacy databases, such as Db2 or Oracle, and SaaS platforms like ServiceNow.
• Compliance cop. HIPAA and GDPR templates autogenerate audit trails, though of course legal departments still should triple-check every field.
• Hybrid deployment. MuleSoft runs on-premises or in the cloud, with particular strengths in hybrid integration scenarios involving legacy systems. While its containerized deployment capabilities continue to evolve, its primary value proposition remains connecting traditional enterprise systems.
• Low-code limbo. The low-code development environment simplifies initial API implementation, but complex scenarios involving data transformations often require technical expertise beyond the drag-and-drop interface.

Summary: It's a great choice for large enterprises juggling legacy tech debt and aggressive digital transformation goals. However, pricing, which is available on request, and the Salesforce-centric roadmap might deter smaller teams on a budget.

Open source API gateway options

Cost-effective scalability, freedom from vendor lock-in and the ability to customize core functionality -- these are only some of the advantages of open source API gateway tools. If your organization possesses strong technical capabilities and has specific compliance or customization requirements, open source is the way to go. Many open source products offer an enterprise version as well for organizations that want to pay for certain functionalities and support.

Let's take a look at some of the open source contenders.

Apache APISIX

Built on Nginx and etcd, APISIX delivers exceptional performance metrics with documented benchmarks showing submillisecond request processing times. This performance efficiency makes it particularly suitable for high-throughput applications where latency directly affects user experience. Naturally, it's a favorite for high-frequency trading and gaming platforms.

More APISIX benefits include the following:

• Dynamic upstreams. While several gateways provide cross-cloud capabilities, APISIX emphasizes connection persistence during transition events to minimize disruption during failover scenarios. Its ability to shift traffic between AWS and GCP clusters without dropping a packet makes it a great fit for multi-cloud failovers.
• Plugin ecosystem. There are over 100 plugins for capabilities ranging from Kafka logging to OpenAI-based content filtering.
• Kubernetes kinship. APISIX provides comprehensive Kubernetes integration through its dedicated ingress controller with native compatibility with service mesh implementations such as Istio. This integration enables teams to manage routing rules, traffic splitting and security policies through standard Kubernetes custom resource definitions (CRDs).

Summary: One tradeoff here is that the etcd dependency adds operational complexity, and YAML-heavy configurations tend to frustrate newcomers. So, opt for APISIX if raw speed and extensibility outweigh ease of use.

Kong Gateway

Kong straddles the open source/commercial divide. The community edition covers the basics, but enterprises can pay for desirable functionality including AI autoscaling and virtual private cloud peering. It's also built on top of Nginx's HTTP proxy server and written in the Lua language.

Ecosystem highlights include the following:

• Kubernetes-native. Kong Gateway manages Istio service mesh integrations and ingress controls via CRDs, so making declarative configs feels natural.
• Portable security. Plugins including OpenID Connect and Mutual TLS work across clouds without reconfiguration.
• Observability or bust. Grafana dashboards show every API hiccup, but correlating logs across clouds is a premium feature.

Summary: The free tier lacks advanced analytics, and Lua scripting isn't everyone's cup of tea. That said, Kong's API gateway is a solid choice that scales from startup workloads to enterprise-level deployments.

KrakenD

KrakenD's stateless design aggregates API responses on the client side, which slashes back-end calls -- a big benefit for mobile apps on shaky networks.

Simplicity capabilities include the following:

• Zero-dependency deployment. KrakenD's single binary file means simplicity. There's no Docker, no systemd and no command-line tool like apt-get to troubleshoot.
• JSON configs. KrakenD uses human-readable JSON configuration files that simplify version control and review processes, whereas some other API gateways require proprietary formats or complex YAML structures with strict indentation requirements.
• Aggregation angst. Client-side response aggregation effectively reduces back-end processing requirements, but can introduce complexity in error handling. Without proper implementation, individual service timeouts can silently propagate through the system.

Summary: KrakenD is a good option for startups or SMBs that need a set-and-forget API gateway with minimal upkeep, although its limited plugin support and no built-in service mesh might deter DevOps-heavy teams.

Make-or-break factors to choose an API gateway

Organizations and teams vetting a choice of API gateway tools should prioritize the following factors:

1. Is hybrid cloud a priority? If your servers span three clouds and a dusty data center, go for Kong or APISIX. If you're all in on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, embrace those providers' ecosystems.
2. Identify necessary protocols. REST APIs, created and popularized in the early 2000s, are arguably the backbone of the internet. However, modern gateways must juggle GraphQL for data flexibility, gRPC for microservices chatter and WebSocket for real-time dashboards. When evaluating protocol flexibility, consider your specific requirements. Kong provides strong multiprotocol support, while Amazon API Gateway is great for real-time applications.
3. Security in the AI crosshairs. Assume every API is a target. Prioritize tools with baked-in OAuth 2.0, JWT validation and DDoS protection. For data-sensitive industries such as healthcare, look for FIPS 140-2 compliance or secrets management integrations.
4. Match the tool to your talent. Think about whether a tool has dependencies you'll need to account for with in-house expertise, such as Apache APISIX's etcd dependence. Meanwhile, a tool with a low-code facade might not be a good fit for seasoned Java developers.
5. Cost realities. Open source isn't free -- don't forget to factor in $150,000-per-year engineers to manage it. Moreover, cloud gateways tend to scale elegantly until they suddenly don't, and costs will soar to solve even a temporary problem. Run load tests against production-grade traffic before you sign any contracts.
   Looking for alternatives? Nginx is a solid choice for simple proxies, but it lacks API lifecycle chops. Service meshes such as Istio handle east-west traffic, but won't replace a true north-south gateway.
6. Plan for the future. Your gateway choice today dictates your architectural flexibility tomorrow. Pick a tool that grows with your ambitions and not one that handcuffs you to yesterday's decisions.

Twain Taylor is a technical writer, musician and runner. Having started his career at Google in its early days, today Taylor is an accomplished tech influencer. He works closely with startups and journals in the cloud-native space.