Hi @dj1,
I don't imagine you'll get an answer other than "yes!" to your first question on here so I'll skip past that to your second question 🙂
About 18 months ago when we were making our decision on which API management platform to select, Mulesoft's Anypoint was a very close second to Apigee.
When I look back at the vendor matrix and how we scored the platforms we had 9 to start with and the final 3 were Apigee, Mulesoft and MS Azure API management.
In the end with our scoring, there was just half a point in favour of Apigee over Mulesoft.
We considered API Product/Package, Analytics (both admin and developer), policy support, Mobile BaaS, development language support, documentation and community, other features, and of course, cost (although we didn't have cost data for either apigee or mulesoft at the time we made a decision).
What separated the two was BaaS, although we didn't have an immediate use case, and ease of development.
- Ease of development was really the deciding factor:
- I opened an Azure account and deployed a simple SOAP service and then set about attempting to proxy the service from our final 3 options. I only needed an afternoon to get something up and running in Apigee because of the UI and the documentation. It was a basic test but it gave us a good feeling that we had a powerful tool at our disposal (and I'd say that's been borne out over the last 18 months - as we learn we are seeing more depth to the Apigee "ecosystem" than we were aware of at the time).
- One other factor is what we termed "other features" and in our case that was Apigee-127.
- As we didn't have Apigee at the time we couldn't get connected easily to our SAP system. I knocked up a simple front end going through apigee-127 to a service exposed by SAP that we used to demo at our parent company HQ in Japan - this allowed us to show something that felt "real" to colleagues more familiar with SAP and also show analytics and so on.
Again, looking back at the notes, we never managed to get as successful a test with Anypoint.
There are some other lesser reasons, Anypoint being more than "just" an API management platform and we didn't want another ESB/integration tool, our java skills - not sure about now but at the time Mulesoft required some java for custom work whereas apigee offered nodejs and javascript.
So for us our decision making about what apigee had that mulesoft did not was probably quite subjective, although we tried to apply some objectivity by attempting to build some demos.
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