Azure API Management
Azure API Management is a fully managed cloud-native platform for securing, governing, and scaling APIs across their entire lifecycle.
Our verdict
Who it's for
Secure, govern, and scale REST, GraphQL, WebSocket, and AI APIs
Who should look elsewhere
No free tier available making it expensive for small teams
Pros
- +Unified management of traditional APIs and AI endpoints in a single platform
- +Enterprise-grade security with built-in OWASP and Defender threat protection
- +Hybrid and multi-cloud support with self-hosted gateway options
- +Massive proven scale handling 2 million APIs and 3 trillion monthly requests
- +AI-assisted policy authoring reduces manual configuration
Cons
- −No free tier available making it expensive for small teams
- −Consumption-based pricing is opaque and hard to predict
- −Steep learning curve for policy authoring and federated deployments
- −Self-hosted gateway adds significant operational responsibility
- −Tight coupling to the Azure ecosystem limits portability
Key features
- ✓Polyglot API gateway supporting REST, GraphQL, WebSocket, OData, and gRPC
- ✓AI gateway with token limit enforcement, cost attribution, and semantic caching
- ✓MCP server enablement converting existing APIs for AI agent consumption
- ✓Central API catalog with compliance scorecards and semantic search
- ✓Federated management balancing team autonomy with enterprise governance
- ✓OWASP API Top 10 threat protection with Microsoft Defender integration
- ✓Self-hosted containerized gateways for on-premises and multi-cloud deployment
- ✓Real-time dashboards tracking usage, latency, errors, and token consumption
- ✓GitHub Copilot integration for API specification generation
- ✓Built-in developer portal with API documentation and testing
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Billing | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consumption | $0 | month | Pay-per-call: first 1M calls/month free; ~$3.50 per additional million calls; Serverless, auto-scales with demand |
| Developer | $50 | month | Non-production use only (dev and test); 1 scale unit, billed ~$0.07/hour (approx); No SLA included |
| Basic | $150 | month | Entry-level production tier; ~$0.21/hour per unit (approx monthly ~$150); Up to 2 scale units, 50 MB cache |
| Standard | $700 | month | Mid-volume production workloads; ~$0.96/hour per unit (approx monthly ~$700); Up to 4 scale units, 1 GB cache |
| Premium | $2795 | month | Enterprise-scale and multi-region deployments; ~$3.83/hour per unit (approx monthly ~$2,795); Up to 12 scale units per region, 5 GB cache |
| Basic v2 | $150 | month | Modern v2 platform, faster provisioning; Includes 10M API requests/month; Up to 10 scale units with autoscaling |
| Standard v2 | $700 | month | Production-ready v2 tier with SLA; Includes 50M API requests/month; Up to 10 scale units with autoscaling |
| Premium v2 | $2801 | month | Enterprise v2 tier on dedicated infrastructure; Full VNet injection (no public IP exposed); Up to 30 scale units, availability zones |