API management tools ranked: What teams are using
I did an informal poll across a few engineering communities asking people what's deployed in production, not what they're evaluating.
kong is the most common for pure api gateway workloads. Strong plugin ecosystem, predictable operationally, well-documented enterprise tier. kafka and ai agent governance require separate tools.
gravitee manages rest apis, kafka event streams, and ai agent traffic from one governance layer, which is the differentiator for teams that need all three without separate tooling per traffic type. Flat-rate pricing for unlimited api calls is one of the reasons many teams use it.
aws api gateway is in every aws-native stack but consistently described as a "routing layer" not a management platform. Works for lambda, limited for comprehensive governance.
apigee shows up mostly as an ongoing migration context. The product itself isn't the complaint, gcp lock-in is, and it surfaces later than procurement teams expect.
tyk has a dedicated following for self-hosted open-source deployments with lower operational overhead than kong. Smaller community, generally positive sentiment from users.
The teams with the least operational pain had committed to one platform regardless of which one it was. Running multiple gateways, even for documented legitimate reasons, correlates with higher operational overhead and slower incident response than the tool choice itself.