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Gravitee

Fast, flexible platform to design, secure, and monitor APIs

A lightweight, high‑performance solution for registering, securing, documenting, and analyzing APIs with a customizable portal and extensive policy library.

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Overview

Overview

Gravitee API Management (Gravitee APIM) is aimed at development teams and enterprises that need full control over their API lifecycle. It offers a web‑based console for administrators, a developer portal for publishing APIs, and a powerful gateway that enforces security, rate‑limits, and transformation policies.

Core Capabilities

The platform ships with over 50 pre‑built policies, a searchable portal with theming options, and built‑in analytics dashboards. Users can register applications, define secured plans, and integrate external monitoring tools such as Grafana or Kibana. An enterprise license unlocks additional features via a simple environment variable or license file.

Deployment Options

Gravitee APIM can be run on‑premises using Docker Compose, Helm charts for Kubernetes, or tried instantly via the Gravitee Cloud SaaS offering with a free trial. The quick‑setup includes a MongoDB instance and exposes the portal (4100), console (8084), gateway (8082), and backend (8083) ports. Documentation, community links, and contribution guidelines are available on the official website.

Highlights

50+ pre‑built policies for traffic shaping and security
Customizable developer portal with theming and full‑text search
Built‑in analytics dashboards plus Grafana/Kibana integration
Lightweight gateway supporting rate limits, quotas, and plans

Pros

  • Lightweight and high‑performance architecture
  • Rich library of ready‑to‑use policies
  • Comprehensive UI for both administrators and developers
  • Multiple deployment methods (Docker, Helm, SaaS)

Considerations

  • Enterprise‑only features require a paid license
  • Quick‑start relies on MongoDB, limiting DB choice initially
  • Documentation assumes some API‑management background
  • Community support may be slower than commercial alternatives

Managed products teams compare with

When teams consider Gravitee, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.

Amazon API Gateway logo

Amazon API Gateway

Fully managed service to create, publish, and secure APIs at any scale for backend access

Azure API Management logo

Azure API Management

Fully managed multicloud API management service for publishing, securing, and monitoring APIs across environments

Google Apigee API Management logo

Google Apigee API Management

API management platform to publish, secure, and analyze APIs

Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.

Fit guide

Great for

  • Teams needing a self‑hosted API gateway with full UI
  • Enterprises that want to extend functionality with custom policies
  • Developers looking to publish APIs via a branded portal
  • Organizations preferring container‑based deployments

Not ideal when

  • Projects requiring out‑of‑the‑box API monetization
  • Teams without Docker or Kubernetes expertise
  • Small hobby projects that need minimal setup
  • Users seeking only a simple proxy without management UI

How teams use it

Internal microservice exposure

Secure internal APIs with rate limits, authentication, and audit logging

Public API marketplace

Publish APIs to external developers through a customizable portal

Legacy system integration

Apply transformation policies to modernize legacy endpoints without code changes

Compliance monitoring

Leverage analytics dashboards to track usage, enforce quotas, and generate reports

Tech snapshot

Java68%
TypeScript26%
HTML4%
SCSS1%
FreeMarker1%
JavaScript1%

Tags

gatewayapi-managementsecurity-scanapi-gatewayvertxjavaapi

Frequently asked questions

How can I try Gravitee APIM quickly?

Use the Docker‑compose quick‑setup with `make mongodb` or the provided Docker commands to launch the console, portal, gateway, and backend.

Is there a SaaS trial available?

Yes, Gravitee Cloud offers a free trial that can be started from the website.

Which database does the quick‑start use?

The default quick‑setup uses MongoDB, but other databases can be configured in the gateway settings.

How do I enable enterprise features?

Export your license key as the `LICENSE_KEY` environment variable or place the license file in `docker/quick-setup/mongodb/.license`.

Project at a glance

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LicenseApache-2.0
Repo age10 years old
Last commit3 hours ago
Primary languageJava

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