2021 State of the API Report

Postman State Of The API Report Postmanauts researching ontop of graphs. Illustration.

Global Growth of APIs

Over the last 12 months, the global growth of the entire API ecosystem—from the number of practitioners to the number of countries represented to the number of API requests being sent—has been impressive.

API activity is growing

Since the 2020 State of the API report was released, the Postman API Platform saw significant upsurges that indicate trends across the API ecosystem:

  • Users: 17 million

  • Collections created: 30 million (up 39%)

  • Requests created: 855 million (up 56%)

APIs are global

Who are the top geographic regions creating collections and sending requests? We wanted to know, and we wanted to compare those to the rest of the world. Here's how it breaks down:

Number of Collections Created
Top ten:
1,5,1,41,,233
Rest of world:
9,5,27,,172
USA:
4,4,38,,537
India:
3,5,45,,412
China:
2,3,78,,307
Brazil:
1,1,40,,704
UK:
8,29,,607
France:
6,21,,960
Germany:
6,20,,548
Russia:
5,64,,676
Canada:
5,12,,374
Indonesia:
4,89,,108
Number of Requests Created
Top ten:
48,0,3,91,,365
Rest of world:
31,5,6,43,,567
USA:
14,4,5,84,,371
India:
11,7,7,33,,814
China:
5,8,0,56,,796
Brazil:
3,1,4,49,,899
UK:
2,8,0,30,,423
Germany:
2,2,1,63,,293
France:
2,1,3,00,,992
Indonesia:
2,0,8,06,,505
Vietnam:
1,8,4,00,,021
Russia:
1,7,8,65,,251

Country-by-country API growth

We dug deeper into growth to understand which countries are growing the fastest, and here's what we found:

Year-over-Year Comparison in Collections Created
Rest of world: 147%
Russia: 160%
India: 151%
Brazil: 150%
Germany: 145%
France: 142%
Indonesia: 141%
Canada: 130%
United Kingdom: 124%
United States: 121%

Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Year-over-Year Comparison in Requests Created
Rest of world: 157%
Germany: 181%
Russia: 181%
India: 167%
Brazil: 159%
Vietnam: 157%
France: 156%
Indonesia: 139%
United Kingdom: 137%
United States: 135%

Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

The API Platform Landscape

The global growth of APIs is also driving an ever-evolving landscape of tooling for APIs and development in the API Platforms category. We've observed that there are many vendors in this landscape serving a broad range of needs across the API lifecycle, from design to testing to security. Additionally, we see vendors offering repositories for source code, API gateways, application performance monitoring, and CI/CD—all of which should integrate with API platforms to achieve optimal results from API initiatives within an organization.

Here is our view of the landscape today:

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