Organizations use 275 software as a service (SaaS) applications on average (and enterprises with more than 10,000 employees use 660), creating thousands of API connections that most IT teams struggle to monitor or secure. As organizations increasingly invest in AI-powered services, the number of API endpoints continues to grow past thousands, creating API sprawl as never seen before.
By providing a unified platform for you to design, govern, secure, and monitor your APIs, API management enables businesses to accelerate time-to-market, scale seamlessly, and maintain compliance in zero-trust environments.
This comprehensive API Management Buyers Guide provides everything you need to evaluate platforms, compare features, confidently choose the right solution for your organization.
What Is API Management?
API management is the process of creating, publishing, securing, monitoring, and analyzing APIs through a centralized platform. APIs enable different software systems to communicate, and API management platforms provide tools to deploy APIs, monitor performance, control access, and troubleshoot issues.
Most organizations use hundreds of APIs to connect their applications. Managing them manually means APIs go unmonitored, unauthorized users can access sensitive data, and slow APIs crash applications.
By automating API governance, security, and monitoring, API management platforms help businesses maximize API value and ROI through increased revenue, improved customer experiences, innovation, and cost savings.
Why Is API Management Critical for Modern Businesses?
Organizations rely on APIs to connect cloud applications, enable digital and agentic transformation, and create new revenue streams through API monetization.
Without API management, applications break when APIs fail, developers waste time fixing connection problems, and security gaps let hackers steal customer data. Companies that manage their APIs properly can build new features faster and avoid costly outages.
Most developers use APIs daily to connect different systems. When APIs don’t work, development stops, leading to significant productivity losses.
8 Ways To Define Your Criteria for Buying an API Management Solution:
Investing in API management is an important part of maturing your data organization, and making the right investment can be the difference between leveraging more value from your data and applications, and sinking IT and developer teams under technical debt and limitations.
While discussing platform capabilities with vendor sales and engineering teams, it’s important to go into these conversations with a strong understanding of your technical needs and expectations, especially when it comes to specialized industry tools, legacy compatibility and scalability. Look for analytics capabilities that measure API business impact, not just technical metrics like response times and error rates.
1. Evaluate your current API inventory
Create a spreadsheet listing every API your organization uses, including internal APIs, third-party APIs, and legacy web services. Document which team owns each API, what applications depend on it, and how much traffic it handles. Partnering with a vendor that can automatically discover and unify all managed and unmanaged APIs is critical to gaining full control and visibility over your API inventory and avoiding security threats from shadow and zombie APIs.
2. Involve your security team early in the selection process
Security teams will eliminate vendors based on specific requirements like SAML integration, certificate-based authentication, or SOC 2 compliance. Get their requirements list before scheduling vendor demos to avoid evaluating platforms that can’t meet API security standards.
3. Check vendor financial stability and customer retention rates
Ask vendors for customer references from 2+ years ago and verify if those customers still use the platform. Speak with analysts about their forecast for the vendor’s long-term viability and success. If the vendor goes out of business or gets acquired, you’ll spend months migrating to a new platform.
4. Define a framework for API governance
Define API-related roles within the organization, and build policies for them that will support your API governance strategy. Developers should know naming conventions, test and validation protocols, and documentation requirements. API users should be familiar with your API library and understand lifecycle definitions.
5. Verify support for your compliance requirements
Know your platform security and compliance needs based on the localities and nature of the data your APIs are processing. Vendors should be able to show you exactly how their platform generates HIPAA audit reports or handles PCI-DSS data encryption. Generic compliance certificates don’t prove the platform works with your specific requirements.
6. Know Your AI Strategy
API management has been transformed by the rise of Agentic AI and LLMs. As AI agents and AI integration become more essential to business operations, the ability to manage tools like Model Context Protocol and integrate agents into your automation workflows has become an important part of maintaining a competitive edge.
7. Assess Integration Capabilities
Evaluate how well the platform integrates with existing systems, including legacy applications and third-party services. A platform that offers pre-built connectors can significantly reduce implementation time and complexity.
The Boomi Enterprise platform is a proven success: with 11 consecutive years in the upper right of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for iPaaS, platform leadership and over 25,000 customers who achieve substantial ROI through faster development cycles and reduced operational complexity.
Common Challenges of API Management Implementation
Understanding these implementation challenges before you buy helps you choose the right platform and avoid running over budget and behind schedule.
Legacy System Integration Complexity
Modern API management platforms may struggle to connect with older databases and custom applications built before REST APIs existed. These systems use different data formats, authentication methods, and communication protocols. If you don’t choose a vendor with legacy integration capabilities, your team will need to build custom adapters, install middleware software, or rewrite applications to expose their data through APIs.
Security and Governance Alignment
Security teams require multi-step approval processes and detailed access logs for API deployments. Developers want to publish APIs immediately without waiting for security reviews. Compliance auditors demand specific encryption standards and audit trails that most platforms don’t generate automatically. These conflicting requirements slow down API projects. API governance tools help security teams enforce policies within a developer’s workflow, reducing manual check time delays while ensuring best practices.
Organizational Change Management
Teams trained on ETL tools, file transfers, and direct database connections must learn API design patterns, OAuth authentication, and JSON data formats. Developers need training on new platforms, and database administrators must understand API security models. Project managers must also learn different testing and deployment processes.
Platform Selection Complexity
API management vendors use different terminology for the same features, making comparisons difficult. One vendor’s “API gateway” includes monitoring tools while another platform doesn’t. Pricing models may vary from per-API-call charges to flat monthly fees and even revenue-sharing agreements. Testing every platform with your specific requirements can take a long time.
The Boomi Enterprise Platform Solves These API Management Challenges
Boomi API Management addresses the implementation problems that cause other API management projects to fail by combining proven integration capabilities with comprehensive federated API control.
- Eliminates Legacy System Integration Complexity: Boomi’s pre-built connectors work with mainframe systems, AS/400 databases, and custom applications without requiring custom development work. The platform handles different data formats, authentication methods, and communication protocols automatically, eliminating the middleware and adapter development that slows down other implementations.
- Aligns Security and Governance Requirements: Built-in governance tools enforce consistent security policies across all API implementations while providing the audit trails compliance teams require. Security features ensure compliance across regulated industries without blocking developer productivity through automated policy enforcement.
- Reduces Organizational Change Management Burden: The low-code visual interface with drag-and-drop functionality lets existing teams build APIs without learning complex programming languages. Business users can participate in API design, reducing the training overhead that typically accompanies platform transitions. Additionally, AI agents can autonomously generate compliant, standardized OpenAPI specifications along with technical and business documentation, further reducing the effort and expertise needed.
- Enterprise API Platform: Boomi delivers complete API lifecycle management within a unified integration and automation environment, eliminating the need to evaluate and integrate multiple vendors. This comprehensive approach removes the complexity of comparing different terminologies, pricing models, and architectural approaches across dozens of vendors.
- AI-Ready Platform Tools: Is the platform prepared for how AI is going to impact API management? Integrating with LLMs and AI agents is more than an API integration.It requires giving an AI tool access to internal data and other APIs, while ensuring those APIs are trusted, discoverable, and secure for agents to use. Not only can Boomi govern and secure the APIs your agent uses, but it can also govern and secure the agents themselves, enabling successful multi-agent ecosystems.
- Proven Scale and Performance: With hundreds of thousands of endpoints supported and multicloud autonomous runtime that scales automatically based on demand, Boomi handles current and future traffic loads without becoming a bottleneck. Advanced analytics and monitoring provide real-time insights into API performance across the entire ecosystem.
API Management is key to the future of data integration and agentic transformation. Take a guided tour of Boomi API Management to see how the Boomi Enterprise Platform allows enterprise teams to manage the API Lifecycle and govern data, applications & AI agents.