Pricing Comparison - Apigee X versus Azure APIM
Who is the cheapest API Platform of all?
Well I’ll at least give you the answer between two of the most popular on-the-cloud API platforms - Google’s Apigee and Azure’s API Management.
Pricing has been a nebulous and complex task for businesses to understand how much their API Platform service is going to cost them. It’s not like this is a deliberate move by the cloud companies, in fact it IS a deliberate move by the cloud companies. If you understand the price simply, easily and quickly you may be inclined to compare the price with their dread competitors, when they would rather you look at the features and understand the value you are getting first. Once you’re hooked by the features the price becomes secondary.
The good news is that API platforms have become more commoditized over the last few years, which is largely thanks to Azure APIM who have been quite open about it’s pricing for as long as I can remember. No doubt this has helped pressure other API Platform providers to follow suit.
In this post we dive into a pricing comparison for both these heavy-weights, however keep in mind the great wisdom of Castrol that “oils ain't oils”. I won’t talk about feature comparison, however the upshot is this: Apigee is by far the better featured product, but then APIM has the Azure ecosystem on it’s side (i.e. Office 365 and Entra ID are embedded in nearly every company on the planet).
Our example setup
For the purposes of the comparison we’ll assume the following API Platform workload. This is suited to small-to-medium businesses that are likely to buy a PAYG plan.
| Platform Environments (the number of environments for developing and releasing an API) |
4 (1 production and 3 lower-class environments) |
|---|---|
| Regions (the number of locations the API platform runs in) | 1 (based in Sydney, Australia) |
| APIs (the number of production APIs running on the platform) | 10 |
| API Traffic (the total transactions per month for all environments) | 10 million |
| Developer Portal | Yes, integrated portal |
| WAF (a web application firewall to secure inbound internet-based API traffic) | Yes |
| Network (the amount of GiB of traffic outside the cloud provider’s network, to internal backends. The number of external and internal load balancers) | 2,384GiB (or 2.5TiB) external • assuming 250KiB of payload in the average request/response call • traffic inbound/outbound is split 50:50 1,668Gib (or 1.7TiB) internal • assuming 70% of external traffic External VPN connectivity from each environment to other back-ends outside of the native cloud, or to the businesses corporate network. |
PAYG Pricing Comparison
Using the above example, here we compare the PAYG pricing that is publicly available. Enterprise pricing would drastically differ and may change the game on who has the most cost effective program.
| Component | GCP Apigee | Azure APIM | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price (per month) | Details | Price (per month) | Details | |
| Platform environments
3 lower environments (dev, test and staging/preproduction). 1 production environment. Lower environments must match the capabilities of the production environment to ensure CICD compatability. |
$8,917.10 | 4 x projects (total of 4 active intermediate environments)
Intermediate environments come with Shared Flows, dev portal, API products, extensible APIs |
$220.80 (dev tier)
$4,503.60 (premium tier) |
3 x developer tier
1 x premium tier Developer and premium tiers come with dev portal, virtual network support Only 1 unit is required for the Premium tier service |
| Regions
1 region only |
- | australia-southeast1 | - | Australia East |
| APIs
10 APIs in production. |
$1,526.9 | 10 x Extensible API proxies
10 x additional Shared Flows |
- | - |
| Add Ons | $305.38 (analytics) | Analytics
API Security is not used (no easy comparison to Azure) |
- | No add-ons available |
| Network
Only 2 environments (staging/preprod and production) require external internet-facing connectivity. All environments are on their own virtual networks. All environments require VPN connectivity to a private network. |
$75.19 (Traffic and Load Balancers)
$64.89 (WAF) $303.18 (Cloud VPN, peering to another network) |
2 x External LB
2 x Cloud Armor standard (WAF) with 10 rules covering OWASP 4 x Internal LB proxies 4 x Cloud VPN |
$24.52 (VNets)
$216.24 (VPNs, with 100GiB traffic each) $8.05 (static IPs) $2173.22 (App g/w) $42.57 (LB Gateways) $124.62 (internal LB standard) $184.05 (traffic egress) $304.91 (DDoS protection) |
4 x Virtual Networks
4 x VPN Gateways 2 x Static IPs (preprod and prod) 2 x App Gateways (external facing) 2 x LB Gateways (external facing) 4 x LB standard (internal facing) 1192GiB traffic egress DDoS protection on static IPs |
| Logging
(assuming 1GiB of logs per day, retained for 12 months) |
$283.63 | Cloud Logging | $333.93 | Azure Monitor (log data ingestion and application insights) |
| TOTAL cost per month | AU$11,476.27 (US$7,610.43) |
AU$8,136.51 (US$5,395.69) |
||
Takeaways
Keep in mind that this comparison on price does not include the value of the platforms and some of their powerful features (for example Apigee’s monetization, or it’s trace/debug feature).
Apigee is the more expensive solution as all the environments are in the same tier (as they require the same features across all environments). Whereas, Azure APIM allows all features from the Premium tier on the Developer tier, which drastically lowers the price (NOTE: the Developer tier it is not suitable for non-production workloads).
An Apigee Intermediate environment is the equivalent price of an Azure APIM Premium tier. For small business deployments Apigee is very price competitive with Azure APIM, and when the Apigee features are included it becomes a more compelling offering.
Network configuration can dramatically affect the pricing outcome. This is where hidden costs can blow-out and careful planning and management of the network is important to keep costs down.
The Advanced API Security add-on for Apigee is very expensive, but there is no comparison with Azure. Due to it’s price this feature is only suitable for those businesses with deep pockets, however as cyber threats are increasing this feature will become more attractive to help reduce the risk and impact of cyber attacks.
Apigee does have advanced analytics as an add-on which provides considerable more detail on API traffic than Azure Monitor and application insights. For the minimal additional cost for these analytics it’s worth adding this to your Apigee subscription.
References
Azure APIM Pricing: API Management pricing | Microsoft Azure
Google Apigee Pricing: Pay-as-you-go pricing overview | Apigee | Google Cloud