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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Azure API Management

    Score8 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft's Azure API Management supports creation of API.

    $0.04

    per 10,000 calls

    NGINX

    Score9.2 out of 10
    Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
    NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
    Pricing
    Azure API ManagementNGINX
    Editions & Modules
    Consumption
    0.042 per 10,000 calls
    Lightweight and serverless version of API Management service, billed per execution
    Developer
    $48.04
    per month Non-production use cases and evaluations
    Basic
    $147.17
    per month Entry-level production use cases
    Standard
    $686.72
    per month Medium-volume production use cases
    Premium
    $2,795.17
    per month High-volume or enterprise production use cases
    Isolated
    TBA
    per month Enterprise production use cases requiring high degree of isolation
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Azure API ManagementNGINX
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Azure API ManagementNGINX
    Considered Both Products
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    F5
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Would buy again
    30 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    26 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    30 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    90%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    18 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    26 Answers
    Features
    Azure API ManagementNGINX
    API Management
    Comparison of API Management features of Azure API Management and NGINX
    Feature
    Azure API Management
    8.0
    4 Ratings
    4% below category average
    NGINX
    -
    Ratings
    API access control8.94 Ratings00 Ratings
    Rate limits and usage policies5.44 Ratings00 Ratings
    API usage data8.94 Ratings00 Ratings
    API user onboarding9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
    API versioning8.94 Ratings00 Ratings
    Usage billing and payments5.23 Ratings00 Ratings
    API monitoring and logging9.84 Ratings00 Ratings
    Application Servers
    Comparison of Application Servers features of Azure API Management and NGINX
    Feature
    Azure API Management
    -
    Ratings
    NGINX
    7.8
    21 Ratings
    2% below category average
    IDE support00 Ratings7.210 Ratings
    Security management00 Ratings8.018 Ratings
    Administration and management00 Ratings7.018 Ratings
    Application server performance00 Ratings8.018 Ratings
    Installation00 Ratings9.718 Ratings
    Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings7.016 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Azure API ManagementNGINX
    Small Businesses
    Amazon API Gateway
    Score8.2 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Amazon API Gateway
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Oracle WebLogic Server
    Score7.5 out of 10
    Enterprises
    OCI API Management
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Red Hat JBoss EAP
    Score7.3 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Azure API ManagementNGINX
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    8.8
    (48 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.1
    (4 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Azure API ManagementNGINX
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Microsoft
    APIM is useful for the standard scenarios:
    1) Securing your back-end APIs - If you have a legacy back-end web service that has a basic authentication scheme, you can add some additional security by placing APIM in front, and requiring subscription keys. Leverage your existing firewall to ensure only your APIM instance can communicate with your back-end API, and you've basically added a layer of protection.
    2) Lift and shift - there are always going to be clients that don't want to update their clients to use a newer API; in some cases you can make a newer API look like an older one by implementing some complex policies in APIM. You can also do the opposite, making older APIs look new, such as making an XML back-end accept both JSON and XML.
    3) Centralizing your APIs - if you've acquired another company and want to make their API set look as if it's a part of the larger whole, APIM is an easy way to provide a consistent front-end interface for developers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    [NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Microsoft
    • Easy commissioning of APIs.
    • Great policies to control access.
    • Easy mock services for testing.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    • Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
    • Great at serving static content.
    • Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
    • Open-Source (no cost)!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Microsoft
    • Lack of robustness is a bit of an issue. Several other providers offer more options and capabilities, but then, they are lacking in interface ease.
    • As with anything Azure, pricing is really hard to stay on top of. I always find that you really don’t know what you’re paying for until you get the bill. Having an excellent Azure Administrator can help resolve that.
    • Integrating with app services outside of Azure can be a challenge, or at least much more challenging than just using Azure App Services.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    • Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
    • I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
    • It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
    • It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
    • I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    F5
    Great value for the product
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    F5
    Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    F5
    Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Microsoft
    Azure APIM vs Amazon API Gateway:
    1) Azure APIM was a complete package that included a developer portal.
    2) We are very Microsoft centric - so the Microsoft product suite aligned very well with our business needs.
    3) It was faster and easier to stand up Azure APIM for testing than it was for the Amazon API Gateway.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    We have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because
    • we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them
    • we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load
    • individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Microsoft
    • We can always think of positive ROI impact on business
    • It helps to easily facilitate the design, deployment, and maintenance of our APIs
    Read full review
    F5
    • Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache.
    • Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy").
    • Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    NGINX Screenshots

    Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration