2023 State of the API Report

When we asked which API tools and platforms people use, most respondents cited Postman. Datadog, SwaggerHub, and SoapUI also earned double-digit percentages.

SoapUI was used by 14% of all respondents, but that figure jumped above 20% in the government and financial services sectors.

The following solutions were used by 2% of respondents: Rapid, Akana, APIMatic, Akita, Sauce Labs, Boomi Imperva, Stoplight, AlertSite, Backstage, Eggplant, Veracode, APIsec, and 42Crunch.

The following solutions were used by 1% of respondents: Cortex, Talend, Redocly, APIwiz, OpsLevel, mabl, Runscope, Catchpoint, Salt Security, Checkly, Moesif, StackHawk, Neosec, Rest United, Restcase, Noname, Tricentis, Optic, configure8, Traceable, Seekret, Uptrends, Buf, and Cequence.

We asked which tools or platforms respondents use for source code. GitHub was the most popular choice at 64%, followed by GitLab, which was at 30%, and Bitbucket at 24%. Newer names such as JetBrains Space showed some recognition as well, especially in educational settings and among network engineers.

When it comes to deploying APIs, CI/CD pipelines were even more popular than last year, with 63% of respondents naming them as the most common tool.

API-first leaders selected their choices in roughly the same order as all respondents, and with an even greater uptake of CI/CD and in-the-cloud solutions. API-first leaders were less likely, however, to deploy using on-premise or custom-built solutions.

When asked which CI/CD solutions were favored, 50% of all respondents cited GitHub. Jenkins was a distant second at 31%.

At large organizations, it was a different story. Respondents at companies with over 1,000 developers mentioned Jenkins (53%) more often than Github (48%).

When it comes to API gateways or cloud API management tools, two solutions stood out. Half of all respondents used AWS API Gateway, and more than a quarter used Azure API Management.

This ranking was flipped in the government and manufacturing sectors, though. Both showed a slight preference for Azure over AWS.