What's the best tool to manage and monitor APIs?

There isn’t one single “best” tool for every case — the best choice depends on whether you mainly need API design/testing, gateway/API management, monitoring/observability, or developer docs.

Good options by use case

• Postman

  • Best for: API testing, collaboration, collections, simple monitoring
  • Pros: Very popular, easy to use, good for teams
  • Cons: Not a full API gateway/management platform

• Swagger / OpenAPI tooling

  • Best for: Designing and documenting APIs
  • Pros: Excellent for API specs, interactive docs
  • Cons: Limited monitoring/management features on its own

• Apigee (Google Cloud)

  • Best for: Full API management in enterprise environments
  • Pros: Strong security, analytics, traffic management, policy enforcement
  • Cons: Can be complex and expensive

• Kong

  • Best for: API gateway + management, especially cloud-native setups
  • Pros: Flexible, scalable, good plugin ecosystem
  • Cons: Requires more setup/ops knowledge

• AWS API Gateway + CloudWatch

  • Best for: AWS-native API management and monitoring
  • Pros: Tight AWS integration, easy if you’re already on AWS
  • Cons: Best fit only if you’re invested in AWS

• Datadog / New Relic / Dynatrace

  • Best for: Monitoring API performance, errors, latency, tracing
  • Pros: Great observability and alerting
  • Cons: Not full API management tools

Practical recommendation

If you want one tool to start with, Postman is often the best all-around choice for testing, collaboration, and lightweight monitoring.

If you need enterprise API management, look at Apigee or Kong.

If your main goal is monitoring APIs in production, use an observability platform like Datadog or New Relic.

If you tell me:

1. your cloud provider,
2. team size,
3. whether you need gateway features or just monitoring/testing,

I can recommend the best fit more precisely.