API management software allows users to monitor, control, and monetize their application programming interfaces (APIs) in a secure development environment. These tools help administrators monitor connection consistency, traffic, errors, and security for their team’s published APIs. A company’s IT department uses this tool during the post-production phase of an API’s lifecycle, taking over from developers after successful API design. From there, essentially all maintenance, monitoring, and management related to the API occurs within the API management product, including versioning, deprecation, and policy enforcement. Some API marketplace solutions contain tools for managing APIs, but those tools are less focused on managing an API and are more focused on choosing external APIs to benefit an actual product.
To qualify for inclusion in the API Management category, a product must:
Provide security, traffic, and functionality monitoring
Equip teams with operations and monetization tools