How to choose between common A vs B options—using decision briefs that show who each product fits, what breaks first, and where pricing changes behavior.
If you only have 2 minutes, do this sequence. It’s designed to get you to a confident default choice quickly, then validate it with the few checks that actually decide fit.
Start with your non‑negotiables (latency model, limits, compliance boundary, or operational control).
Pick two candidates that target the same abstraction level (so the comparison is apples-to-apples).
Validate cost behavior at scale: where do the price cliffs appear (traffic spikes, storage, egress, seats, invocations)?
Confirm the first failure mode you can’t tolerate (timeouts, rate limits, cold starts, vendor lock‑in, missing integrations).
Governance depth vs developer velocity: Enterprise governance platforms win when policy modeling, auditability, and centralized controls matter across many teams. Developer-first gateways win when teams need to ship and operate APIs quickly without an org-wide governance program.
Cloud lock-in vs portability: Cloud-native gateways optimize for speed inside a single cloud (identity, networking, billing). Neutral gateways optimize for portability and consistent policy across environments—but require you to own more of the platform lifecycle.
Cost behavior at scale (per-call pricing, gateway sprawl): Gateway pricing can look small at prototype stage and become dominant at scale—especially with per-call pricing, multiple environments, and microservice proliferation. The cost driver is often not compute, but number of gateways, requests, data transfer, and managed add-ons.
Internal platform APIs vs external partner/public APIs: Internal API platforms prioritize developer velocity, observability, and consistent routing. External APIs prioritize security, quotas, monetization/tiers, and partner onboarding. Some products are optimized for one and awkward for the other.
This is an editorial collection page. Each link below goes to a decision brief that explains why the pair is comparable, where the trade‑offs show up under real usage, and what tends to break first when you push the product past its “happy path.”
It is not a feature checklist and it is not a “best tools” ranking. If you’re early in your search, start at the category page first; if you already have 2 candidates, this hub is the fastest path to a confident default choice.
Pick Apigee when you need enterprise governance outcomes (central policy ownership, auditability, external developer onboarding) and can staff an API program. Pick Kong when portability and consistent gateway behavior across environments is the constraint and you can own gateway operations and policy templates. The real decision is operating model: vendor-managed governance vs platform-owned gateway standardization.
Pick AWS API Gateway if you’re AWS-first, want managed speed, and your governance needs are moderate—then model per-request cost early and prevent gateway sprawl. Pick Apigee if you need enterprise governance outcomes across many teams or external consumers and can staff policy ownership and rollout workflows. The decision is cloud-native convenience vs governance program maturity.
Pick AWS API Gateway if you’re AWS-first, want managed speed, and accept AWS coupling—then model per-request cost and avoid gateway sprawl. Pick Kong if you need portability across clusters/clouds and are willing to own gateway operations and policy templates. The decision is lock-in vs portability plus who owns the gateway layer.
Pick Azure API Management if your org is Azure-first and Microsoft identity/procurement/ops alignment is a hard constraint. Pick Apigee if your governance program is anchored in GCP or you need a governance model that spans environments in a way that matches your operating model. In practice, the winning choice is the one that your platform team can actually standardize and operate across teams without policy drift.
Pick AWS API Gateway if you’re AWS-first and want the managed default gateway—then model per-request cost early and avoid gateway sprawl across accounts/environments. Pick Azure API Management if your org is Azure-first and you need enterprise governance patterns (policies, portal workflows, compliance alignment). The real decision is which cloud is your operating system and whether cost mechanics and policy ownership scale cleanly.
Pick MuleSoft if your program is integration-led (connectors, enterprise integration governance, business-unit rollout) and the buyer is the CIO/platform org. Pick Apigee if your program is API-first (external/partner APIs, governance policies, portal + analytics) and you can staff policy ownership and rollout discipline. This is mostly an operating-model decision: which platform your org will standardize and fund long-term.
Pick Azure API Management if your org is Azure-first and enterprise governance/compliance alignment is the hard constraint. Pick Kong if you need portability across clusters/clouds and can own gateway operations and standardized policy templates. The decision is Azure alignment vs portability—and who owns the platform layer that prevents policy drift and sprawl.
Pricing and availability may change. Verify details on the official website.