APIs have been in the technology canvas for nearly two decades now, with almost all the major software vendors releasing their APIs after the year 2000. For example, Salesforce and eBay released their APIs in 2000, Amazon in 2002, and Facebook in 2006. Today, APIs are a fundamental building block in digital business and integrations.

Following their wide adoption, managing APIs has become a critical requirement. This paved the way for off-the-shelf API management products. There are proprietary products, open-source products, and API management SaaS offerings in the API management market, which was estimated at $1.1 billion in 2018.

As noted above, many organizations are looking to adopt APIs, and, during the process, they have to decide on an API management solution to suit their requirements. Selecting such a vendor/solution is not easy owing to a large number of options in the market. This guide should help organizations — particularly those that have made up their minds to offload API management requirements to a SaaS offering — to select a solution by evaluating the capabilities. The guide will not be helpful to formulate a decision on whether a company should opt for an API management product (which will be deployed in their own data center or an IaaS) or an API management SaaS offering. Deciding that is a separate process. Let’s go through each criterion in detail.