Lunar.dev vs. Traditional API Marketplaces 

Lunar.dev has become the first dedicated solution designed to optimize external API consumption in production. It’s different from traditional API management solutions, so in this and the next couple of posts we’ll be looking at how it differs from a few examples that we’ve selected. In this post, we’re comparing it to API marketplaces and how these solutions differ in their features and goals.

‍

What are API Marketplaces?

‍

An API (Application Programming Interface) is like a bridge that allows different software applications to communicate and interact with each other. It defines the rules and methods for requesting and exchanging data. APIs are used to access the functionality or data of other software systems, making it easier for developers to build applications, integrate services, and enable interoperability between various technologies. They play a vital role in modern software development, providing a standardized way for applications to work together seamlessly. For example, someone wanting to add PayPal to their shopping app’s payment methods would use the PayPal API. 

‍

API marketplaces, (such as Rapid API, Zapier, Gravitee.io, APIlayer, Rakuten, and others) are used by API vendors to showcase and sell their products, and API consumers use them to discover and integrate them. Consumers can browse or search through a catalog of APIs covering a galaxy’s worth of categories like payments, messaging, location services, and e-commerce, among many others. 

‍

Each API listing comes with complete documentation that covers endpoints, parameters, authentication, example code snippets and more to help each integration go smoothly. Many API marketplaces also feature testing capabilities, so consumers can try out API calls directly, execute test queries, and preview responses with no coding required. They can also find a plain English description of what each API does, including things like its key capabilities, use cases, business benefits, support options, and service-level agreements. Another benefit of API marketplaces is their community forums, where developers discuss implementations and best practices. These can be a useful resource for helping API consumers to solve problems. 

One of the disadvantages, however, is that to use an API marketplace such as Rapid, users need to install its SDK and consume the API via that SDK. Rapid reduces the functionality of some APIs in order to establish common ground (something that Lunar.dev does not do).

What is an API Consumption Management Platform?

Let’s answer that question with an analogy. Imagine that we’re talking about the energy industry. In this scenario, all the other energy companies are electricity producers. They generate electricity and distribute it to consumers. 

‍

Lunar.dev is different. It helps those consumers switch between providers and its smart meters help homes and businesses understand how much electricity each lightbulb and appliance in the building is consuming. This level of oversight empowers them to manage their consumption by switching some off and others on. The result is that power and light get sent to where they are needed without interruption and at the lowest possible cost. Switch the resource from electricity to API, and that’s the role that Lunar.dev fulfills. 

‍

Deep Dive: RapidAPI (Marketplace)

‍

Deep Dive Example: RapidAPI

RapidAPI is one of the biggest API marketplaces. More than 3 million developers use it to discover, test and connect their software to thousands of APIs.

‍

• It provides a dashboard and a single API key for developers to manage all their APIs.
• It helps users to integrate APIs and control some aspects of their usage.
• Interacting with APIs requires its software development kit (SDK), which might limit their functionality.
• Supporting an API requires pre-work by Rapid.

‍

API Consumption Management: Lunar.dev

‍

• Lunar.dev is a management platform designed to optimize third-party API usage and intended for consumers of APIs rather than producers.
• It provides a complete overview of all APIs being used, including valuable metrics.
• It cuts usage costs and makes external API integrations more scalable and more resilient.
• It supports all API integrations and official SDKs, maintaining the original functionality by channeling API traffic from existing integrations.
• It offers deeper, more detailed usage insights, and identifies inefficient usage and irregularities.
• It offers real-time insights and controls to guarantee peak performance wherever APIs are used. 
• It requires no code changes to your application and the way it already works with the API.
• It has a generic approach – supporting all API providers by tunneling the API call, so no connectors are needed.

‍

Summary

‍

Marketplaces such as RapidAPI make APIs discoverable and easy to integrate.

Lunar.dev gives organizations complete oversight and control of their API consumption, enabling them to minimize their costs without affecting performance. For the first time, they can use a lightweight and flexible solution to monitor and control all their consumed third-party APIs. It’s easy to get up and running, so consumers quickly gain unprecedented oversight of every API they’re using. They can implement API quota management, unified throttling policies, or caching without the need to change code. 

Explore our sandboxes (they’re free and there’s no sign-up required), check out the documentation and OSS Repo, or get in touch with us to find out more.