Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Apiary vs Google Cloud Endpoints: What are the differences?
Introduction
When comparing Apiary and Google Cloud Endpoints, it's important to understand their key differences to make an informed decision for integrating APIs into your web applications.
API Design Tools: Apiary provides a comprehensive platform for designing APIs, documenting them, and testing their functionality all in one place. On the other hand, Google Cloud Endpoints is more focused on providing tools for deploying, protecting, and monitoring APIs developed using Google Cloud services.
Integration with Services: Apiary allows for easy integration with various third-party services and tools for workflow automation, documentation generation, and code generation. In contrast, Google Cloud Endpoints seamlessly integrates with other Google Cloud services like App Engine, Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud Functions, making it more suitable for projects already using Google Cloud infrastructure.
Authentication and Security: Apiary offers basic authentication options but lacks advanced security features like OAuth integration out of the box. Google Cloud Endpoints, on the other hand, provides built-in support for OAuth 2.0, API key management, and service account authentication, making it a more secure option for enterprise applications requiring stringent authentication and authorization mechanisms.
Scalability and Performance: Google Cloud Endpoints are optimized for scalability and performance on Google's infrastructure, ensuring high availability and low latency for APIs hosted on Google Cloud Platform. Apiary, while capable of handling moderate traffic, may not offer the same level of scalability and performance as Google Cloud Endpoints, especially for global applications with high user demand.
Pricing Model: Apiary offers a free tier with limited features and usage quotas, with paid plans available for teams and enterprises requiring additional capabilities. Google Cloud Endpoints pricing is based on usage, with free quotas included and pay-as-you-go pricing for additional usage, making it more cost-effective for businesses with fluctuating API traffic and usage patterns.
Community and Support: Apiary has a strong community of developers and resources for learning API best practices, troubleshooting issues, and sharing knowledge. Google Cloud Endpoints benefits from Google's extensive support network, documentation, and online forums, providing technical assistance and guidance for integrating APIs with Google Cloud services.
In Summary, Apiary and Google Cloud Endpoints differ in their focus on API design tools, integration capabilities, security features, scalability, pricing models, and community support, offering distinct advantages based on project requirements and preferences.
From a StackShare Community member: "I just started working for a start-up and we are in desperate need of better documentation for our API. Currently our API docs is in a README.md file. We are evaluating Postman and Swagger UI. Since there are many options and I was wondering what other StackSharers would recommend?"
I use Postman because of the ease of team-management, using workspaces and teams, runner, collections, environment variables, test-scripts (post execution), variable management (pre and post execution), folders (inside collections, for better management of APIs), newman, easy-ci-integration (and probably a few more things that I am not able to recall right now).
I use Swagger UI because it's an easy tool for end-consumers to visualize and test our APIs. It focuses on that ! And it's directly embedded and delivered with the APIs. Postman's built-in tools aren't bad, but their main focus isn't the documentation and also, they are hosted outside the project.
I recommend Postman because it's easy to use with history option. Also, it has very great features like runner, collections, test scripts runners, defining environment variables and simple exporting and importing data.
Pros of Apiary
- Easy to use29
- Free to use19
- Traffic inspector12
- Free11
- Collaboration10
- Mock API7
- Dashboard4
- Customization3
- 30 Days Trial2
- Access Control2
- Documentation2
- Validate API Documentation2
- API explorer1
- Clean syntax1
- Provisioning1
- Shared API blueprint templates1
- Github integration helps with collaboration1
- Code auto-generation1
Pros of Google Cloud Endpoints
- Android Integration1
