Best API Gateways for Startups
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Compare the Top API Gateways for Startups as of July 2025
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What are API Gateways for Startups?
An API gateway is the server or node located between client and backend services or microservices endpoints. API gateways are used for API management, with the API gateway managing and processing API requests that come in via microservices. Another way to think of an API gateway is that it is the software layer that lives in front of an API interface, which handles API requests. Compare and read user reviews of the best API Gateways for Startups currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
KrakenD
KrakenD
KrakenD is a high-performance API Gateway optimized for resource efficiency, capable of managing 70,000 requests per second on a single instance. The stateless architecture allows for straightforward, linear scalability, eliminating the need for complex coordination or database maintenance. It supports various protocols and API specifications, with features like fine-grained access controls, data transformation, and caching. Unique to KrakenD is its ability to aggregate multiple API responses into one, streamlining client-side operations. Security-wise, KrakenD aligns with OWASP standards and doesn't store data, making compliance simpler. It offers a declarative configuration and integrates with third-party logging and metrics tools. With transparent pricing and an open-source option, KrakenD is a comprehensive API Gateway solution for organizations prioritizing performance and scalability. -
2
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon
Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. APIs act as the "front door" for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your backend services. Using API Gateway, you can create RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that enable real-time two-way communication applications. API Gateway supports containerized and serverless workloads, as well as web applications. API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, CORS support, authorization and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management. API Gateway has no minimum fees or startup costs. You pay for the API calls you receive and the amount of data transferred out and, with the API Gateway tiered pricing model, you can reduce your cost as your API usage scales.Starting Price: $0.90 -
3
Pliant
Pliant.io
Pliant’s solution for IT Process Automation simplifies, streamlines, and secures how teams build and deploy automation. Reduce human error, ensure compliance, and elevate your efficiency, with Pliant. Ingest existing automation and write new automation with single-pane orchestration. Ensure compliance using consistent, practical built-in governance. Pliant has abstracted thousands of vendor APIs to create intelligent action blocks allowing users to drag-and-drop blocks, rather than writing and rewriting lines of code. From a single platform, citizen developers are able to build consistent and meaningful automation across platforms, services, and applications in minutes — maximizing value across the entire technology stack in one place. With our ability to add new APIs in 15 business days, anything that is not already out of the box will be in an industry leading timeframe. -
4
Azure API Management
Microsoft
Manage APIs across clouds and on-premises: In addition to Azure, deploy the API gateways side-by-side with the APIs hosted in other clouds and on-premises to optimize API traffic flow. Meet security and compliance requirements while enjoying a unified management experience and full observability across all internal and external APIs. Move faster with unified API management: Today's innovative enterprises are adopting API architectures to accelerate growth. Streamline your work across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with a single place for managing all your APIs. Help protect your resources: Selectively expose data and services to employees, partners, and customers by applying authentication, authorization, and usage limits. -
5
Ambassador
Ambassador Labs
Ambassador Edge Stack is a Kubernetes-native API Gateway that delivers the scalability, security, and simplicity for some of the world's largest Kubernetes installations. Edge Stack makes securing microservices easy with a comprehensive set of security functionality, including automatic TLS, authentication, rate limiting, WAF integration, and fine-grained access control. The API Gateway contains a modern Kubernetes ingress controller that supports a broad range of protocols including gRPC and gRPC-Web, supports TLS termination, and provides traffic management controls for resource availability. Why use Ambassador Edge Stack API Gateway? - Accelerate Scalability: Manage high traffic volumes and distribute incoming requests across multiple backend services, ensuring reliable application performance. - Enhanced Security: Protect your APIs from unauthorized access and malicious attacks with robust security features. - Improve Productivity & Developer Experience -
6
MuleSoft Anypoint Platform
MuleSoft
Anypoint Platform by MuleSoft is a complete hybrid enterprise integration platform for SOA, SaaS, and APIs. With AnyPoint, developers can access a wide range of tools that enables them to design, build, and manage the entire lifecycle of their APIs, applications and products. Anypoint Platform is built with open technologies, with Mule as its core runtime engine. -
7
WSO2 API Manager
WSO2
One complete platform for building, integrating, and exposing your digital services as managed APIs in the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid architectures to drive your digital transformation strategy. Implement industry-standard authorization flows — such as OAuth, OpenID Connect, and JWTs — out of the box and integrate with your existing identity access or key management tools. Build APIs from existing services, manage APIs from internally built applications and from third-party providers, and monitor their usage and performance from inception to retirement. Provide real-time access to API usage and performance statistics to decision-makers to optimize your developer support, continuously improve your services, and drive further adoption to reach your business goals. -
8
Graphweaver
Exogee
Turn multiple data sources into a single GraphQL API. Features: 📝 Code-first GraphQL API: Save time and code efficiently with our code-first approach. 🚀 Built for Node in Typescript: The power of Typescript combined with the flexibility of Node.js. 🔗 Connect to Multiple Datasources: Seamlessly integrate Postgres, MySql, Sqlite, REST, and more. 🎯 Instant GraphQL API: Get your API up and running quickly with automatic queries and mutations. 🔄 One Command Import: Easily import an existing database with a simple command-line tool.Starting Price: Free -
9
SlashDB
SlashDB
SlashDB automatically generates a REST API from relational databases for reading and writing in convenient formats like XML, JSON and CSV. Additionally, using HTML it allows for simply browsing through data so users can discover available databases, tables, queries and API endpoints. SlashDB is capable of providing a central access point to multiple databases, effectively forming an all-encompassing resource-oriented architecture (ROA), serving as an API gateway to the data for users that need access. SlashDB provides a web service shell for each of your database(s) by translating relational database structures into a logical library of uniform resource locators (URL). Conforming to REST methodology, every piece of data has its own unique identifying URL regardless of whether it is a simple scalar value or a nested structure of related records.Starting Price: $200 per database per month -
10
Kong Konnect
Kong
Kong Konnect Enterprise Service Connectivity Platform brokers an organization’s information across all services. Built on top of Kong’s battle-tested core, Kong Konnect Enterprise enables customers to simplify management of APIs and microservices across hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud deployments. With Kong Konnect Enterprise, customers can proactively identify anomalies and threats, automate tasks, and improve visibility across their entire organization. Stop managing your applications and services, and start owning them with the Kong Konnect Enterprise Service Connectivity Platform. Kong Konnect Enterprise provides the industry’s lowest latency and highest scalability to ensure your services always perform at their best. Kong Konnect has a lightweight, open source core that allows you to optimize performance across all your services, no matter where they run. -
11
3scale
Red Hat
3scale is the API infrastructure to build on now, and for the future. We make it easy to manage your APIs for internal or external users. Share, secure, distribute. Control who gets access to your APIs. Implement your corporate business, usage, and governance policies from a simple console. Package APIs in the tiers of service that make sense for your business. Take advantage of a wide range of authentication patterns and credentials to create the safest interactions for your partners, customers, and users. Plan, design, implement, publish, govern, operate, analyze, optimize, and retire your APIs from a one continuous experience. Implement this lifecycle in an open standard devops pipeline. Foster a community of users with a sophisticated developer portal. Design your own systems for provisioning developers and provide the content and tools they need with a CMS out of the box. Provide interactive documentation to speed developers to productive use.Starting Price: $750 per month -
12
Alibaba Cloud API Gateway
Alibaba Cloud
API Gateway provides API lifecycle management services, including API publishing, management, maintenance, and monetization. It enables simple and fast microservice integration, front and back end separation, and system integration at low costs and low risks. You can use API Gateway to share functions and data with your partners and third-party developers. Provides API documentation, SDKs, and API version management to reduce the daily maintenance costs. API Gateway supports distributed deployment and auto-scaling to respond to large numbers of requests with low latency. API Gateway activation and API management are free of charge. You only need to pay for APIs that you have called. API Gateway supports permission management, traffic throttling, monitoring, and alarms. You can allow API Gateway to access your services in the intranet without causing any security issues.Starting Price: $0.45 per million calls -
13
ngrok
ngrok
ngrok is the programmable network edge that adds connectivity, security, and observability to your apps with no code changes. Bring security, scalability, and observability to your apps with ngrok's network edge. Put localhost on the internet securely. Introspect and replay requests for a tight feedback loop. Connect into customer networks. No time wasted on firewall rules, VPNs, or change requests. ngrok is the fastest way to put your app on the internet. We run a globally distributed reverse proxy fronting your web services running in any cloud or behind any firewall.Starting Price: $18 per month -
14
Kong Gateway
Kong
The world’s most popular API gateway. Built for hybrid and multi-cloud, optimized for microservices and distributed architectures. Get started today – download Kong Gateway for free. Kong Gateway supports hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure, and includes a Kubernetes-native ingress solution and support for declarative configuration management. Kong Gateway is part of the Konnect managed connectivity platform. Konnect delivers connectivity functionality such as API Portals and AI-based anomaly detection, while providing the flexibility of running high performance connectivity runtimes. Use one of the many plugins developed by Kong or our community to add the functionality you need. Build your own plugin with our built in, well-documented plugin development kit. Configure Gateway natively using an API, web UI, or with declarative configuration to manage updates via your CI/CD pipelines.Starting Price: Free -
15
Mindware
Mindware
Mindware is an API gateway that connects AI agents to the internet. We abstract away the coding and configuration required to interface with API services that enhance functionality, simplify real-time data retrieval, and automate workflows with a single API key. Whether you're a casual builder or shipping consumer-grade AI Agents, Mindware can help you interact with external APIs or perform specific tasks that require more than just text generation.Starting Price: $4.99 per month -
16
APIPark
APIPark
APIPark is an open-source, all-in-one AI gateway and API developer portal, that helps developers and enterprises easily manage, integrate, and deploy AI services. No matter which AI model you use, APIPark provides a one-stop integration solution. It unifies the management of all authentication information and tracks the costs of API calls. Standardize the request data format for all AI models. When switching AI models or modifying prompts, it won’t affect your app or microservices, simplifying your AI usage and reducing maintenance costs. You can quickly combine AI models and prompts into new APIs. For example, using OpenAI GPT-4 and custom prompts, you can create sentiment analysis APIs, translation APIs, or data analysis APIs. API lifecycle management helps standardize the process of managing APIs, including traffic forwarding, load balancing, and managing different versions of publicly accessible APIs. This improves API quality and maintainability.Starting Price: Free -
17
Fyno
Fyno
Liberate engineering teams from managing notification infrastructure. Empower product teams to manage notification workflows. Manage templates across all channels using a centralized interface. Get AI insights on omni-channel messaging that can directly impact engagement. Manage workflows and providers without touching the codebase. Send high-volume notifications without scaling issues. Collaborate and manage channel-wise templates for each communication in one place. Ensure 100% deliverability with smart routing flows and failover protocols. Manage your integrations, templates, routes & workflows in one place. Get real-time analytics, reports, and insights out of the box. Fyno delivers value across your organization. Fyno consolidates logs from all your channels and vendors. No need for logging into multiple platforms for data. Deploy a notification center in your applications with Fyno's in-app SDK, and customize it as per your app design.Starting Price: $249 per month -
18
Akana API Platform
Akana by Perforce
Manage the full API lifecycle, deploy across multiple clouds, support digital transformation and ensure compliance, all from one API platform. As businesses look to further connect with their partners and customers, strength in API management is increasingly part of the digital transformation. Akana provides an end-to-end, full lifecycle API management tool for designing, implementing, securing, managing, monitoring, and publishing APIs. Well-suited for large diverse enterprises and federated API partner ecosystems, Akana can be deployed natively across clouds and on-premises, enables customers to deploy securely via an integrated no-code portal, and provides detailed business analytics. Generate deep business insights from your API traffic through configurable analytic reports. Socialize and manage your communities through targeted developer portals. -
19
SecurityForEveryone
SecurityForEveryone
S4E:Shelter automatically understands the technology you have, prioritizes and performs security assessments optimized for your application without the need for technical expertise. S4E:Shelter is an automated security assessment tool that detects the tech stack of your assets and their vulnerabilities using machine learning, and offers actionable solutions to you. Your security is up to date. S4E:Solidarity is an API gateway to make the cybersecurity process easier for apps. So, developers can integrate the security process into their development cycle. S4E:Equality is a repository of more than 500 free cybersecurity assessment tools. Anyone can use these tools to detect security vulnerabilities according to their specific needs. S4E:Education is a security awareness training platform that helps you learn about the fundamentals of cybersecurity using quizzes and social engineering attacks. -
20
Xooa
Xooa
Xooa empowers users of all blockchain expertise levels to build NFT marketplaces and other blockchain apps on the cloud fast through a streamlined and easy-to-use interface. Take advantage of Xooa's low code tools, API gateway, and many other powerful features to generate up to a 10x faster time-to-app and a 95% shorter learning curve. White-Label Marketplace: Key Features and Capabilities Deploy a ready-to-use, end-to-end marketplace in just 45 seconds Appeal to crypto and mainstream audiences with fiat + crypto payments and custodial + non-custodial wallets Use low code tools like drag-and-drop forms and definable roles to customize your marketplace UX Payment management, royalties, and compliance built-inStarting Price: $100 per agent per month -
21
Oracle API Management
Oracle
Complete API Lifecycle Management solution that supports agile API development and makes it easy to keep an eye on KPIs. True hybrid API development on any cloud and on-premises that is modern and adaptable, employing the most up-to-date security protocols. Innovate quickly to increase efficiency and bump up your bottom line. Ensure the most up-to-date security policies are in place. Use the same integration tool for either cloud or on-premises deployment for full portability. Manage your cloud service using purpose-built cloud tooling for administrative operations like backup, restore, scale-out/in, or scale up/down. Full administrative access to the SOA server through a web-based administrative console, and access to virtual machines using SSH. -
22
Kusk
Kubeshop
Kusk is an Open Source API Gateway that allows you to develop, monitor and deploy your APIs in a matter of minutes. Kusk powers-up your API workflows with mocked responses and validated requests out-of-the-box and automates the deployment of the API Gateway with your favorite GitOps workflows. Have a single source of truth for your API by using the OpenAPI Standard, meaning no additional configuration files are needed!Starting Price: Free -
23
Axway Amplify
Axway
To become the hero, not the roadblock, many IT departments are investing in integration platforms that let users accomplish projects themselves, instead of waiting for an IT specialist. Whether it’s cutting the budget, struggling to get to the cloud, or tackling a growing project backlog, IT is challenged like never before. To become the hero, not the roadblock, many IT organizations are investing in platforms that let users accomplish projects themselves, instead of waiting for an IT specialist. Axway Amplify Platform is the enterprise integration platform that that can hide integration complexity, enforce IT policy, and scale at will, enabling your teams to: Stop repetitive one-off integrations, and focus on reusable integrations that can be leveraged by wider internal and external teams. Gain cloud cost savings and increase scale by moving on-premises integration silos to the cloud, or by leveraging them in place with hybrid deployment, and much more. -
24
Fusio
Apioo
Fusio is an open source API management platform which helps to build and manage REST APIs. Through Fusio you can quickly build a state of the art API, set up a developer portal and monetize your API. Fusio provides a simple to use and intuitive backend. Through the backend it is possible to control and manage the complete API. Fusio provides a ready to use developer portal app which you can use to set up your API program. This is the place where developers can register to consume your API. Fusio contains many actions which you can use out of the box to solve various tasks. I.e. to proxy HTTP requests to an internal API or generate an API based on a database table. This means you can build APIs in a Low-Code style without the need to write complex code. Fusio contains a Worker-System which allows you to develop actions in different programming languages, Fusio currently supports Java, Javascript, PHP and Python. -
25
Ceptor API Management
Ceptor
Features range from a Service Repository with built-in support for authoring APIs to full support for Ceptor's many proven authentication and authorization methods over full API Gateway functionality to a customizable API Developer Portal supporting self-registration which allows you to expose your APIs to both internal and external consumers. Where other products focus mostly on monetizing APIs, Ceptor API Management is more focused on providing flexibility to enterprising solving complex use cases that go far beyond simply publishing and subscribing to APIs. Ceptor API Management allows you to create as many API Groups as you need, you can use Ceptor's default templates or create your own. Ceptor supports various different types of APIs including OpenAPI, SOAP / WSDL and plain HTTP. You can document your APIs using the OpenAPI Specification or Ceptor’s built-in HTML editor. -
26
Traefik
Traefik Labs
What is Traefik Enterprise Edition? TraefikEE is a cloud-native load balancer and Kubernetes ingress controller that eases networking complexity for application teams. Built on top of open source Traefik, TraefikEE brings exclusive distributed and high-availability features combined with premium bundled support for production grade deployments. Split into proxies and controllers, TraefikEE supports clustered deployments to increase security, scalability and high availability. Deploy applications anywhere, on-premises or in the cloud, and natively integrate with top-notch infrastructure tooling. Save time and give better consistency while deploying, managing, and scaling applications by leveraging dynamic and automatic TraefikEE features. Improve the application development and delivery cycle by giving developers the visibility and ownership of their services. -
27
Google Cloud Endpoints
Google
Develop, deploy, protect, and monitor your APIs with Cloud Endpoints. An NGINX-based proxy and distributed architecture give unparalleled performance and scalability. Using an OpenAPI Specification or one of our API frameworks, Cloud Endpoints gives you the tools you need for every phase of API development and provides insight with Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, and Cloud Trace. Control who has access to your API and validate every call with JSON Web Tokens and Google API keys. Integration with Auth0 and Firebase Authentication lets you identify the users of your web or mobile application. Extensible Service Proxy delivers security and insight in less than 1 ms per call. Deploy your API automatically with App Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine, or add our proxy container to your Kubernetes deployment. Monitor critical operations metrics in Google Cloud Console, and gain insight into your users and usage with Cloud Trace, Cloud Logging, and BigQuery. -
28
Everest
Everest
Everest is a decentralized platform with a massively scalable payment solution, EverChain, with a multi-currency wallet, EverWallet, a native biometric identity system, EverID, a value tracking token, the CRDT, all integrated to existing infrastructure with an easy to deploy software appliance, The Everest API Gateway. Everest delivers a complete solution for a new economy. The financial services toolbox provided by the Everest platform is able to be used to solve many different value transfer, tracking, and delivery challenges that you face every day. Below are some example solutions, contact us to tailor a solution for your specific needs. Cloud Fintech platform providing a regulatory compliance and value transfer toolkit which solves a variety of identity, value transfer, audit, reporting and agent management challenges. Everest is a decentralized platform incorporating a massively scalable payment solution, EverChain, with a multi-currency wallet, EverWallet, etc. -
29
Apache Knox
Apache Software Foundation
The Knox API Gateway is designed as a reverse proxy with consideration for pluggability in the areas of policy enforcement, through providers and the backend services for which it proxies requests. Policy enforcement ranges from authentication/federation, authorization, audit, dispatch, hostmapping and content rewrite rules. Policy is enforced through a chain of providers that are defined within the topology deployment descriptor for each Apache Hadoop cluster gated by Knox. The cluster definition is also defined within the topology deployment descriptor and provides the Knox Gateway with the layout of the cluster for purposes of routing and translation between user facing URLs and cluster internals. Each Apache Hadoop cluster that is protected by Knox has its set of REST APIs represented by a single cluster specific application context path. This allows the Knox Gateway to both protect multiple clusters and present the REST API consumer with a single endpoint. -
30
Tencent Cloud API Gateway
Tencent
API Gateway can be configured in the console or through Tencent Cloud APIs so that you do not need to build additional devices for deployment. It can be quickly constructed as needed using the documentation provided by Tencent Cloud. Tencent Cloud's API Gateway features visual monitoring and a rich set of OPS capabilities such as resource management, tenant isolation, and access control, freeing you from heavy OPS workload. API Gateway can be deployed in clusters so that failover can be quickly performed for faulty gateway nodes to guarantee high service reliability. API Gateway is priced competitively and billed based on the number of API calls made and the traffic generated.
