What Is an API Portal?

Your API portal enables adoption. After creating an API, you need to make it easy to find and adopt. It doesn’t do any good if it isn’t shared with the community, whether internal or external. That’s where an API portal comes into play.

What Is an API Portal?

API portals connect the API product to the community. In fact, API portals bridge the gap between API providers (e.g., your internal developers) and API consumers (e.g., your customers or partners). So, the API portal is where developers publish APIs and customers consume APIs. It's also your API marketplace.

An API portal can also be known as a developer portal or an API management portal. Whatever name you call it, the portal is just one of the API basics you need to master.

Why API Portals Are Important

API portals are important because they allow you to engage your community and drive business forward. They give providers an opportunity to share, promote, and monetize their APIs. And they enable consumers to access and use the APIs. 

Selecting the right API portal is important. After all, not every API portal is the same. For instance, when most vendors say API portal, they mean the internal developer portal. They don't mean the external portal — often known as an API catalog or API marketplace. 

Akana's API portal is a unique all-in-one integrated solution.

How to Go From API Portal to Thriving API Marketplace

Your API portal is more than just your internal developer portal. Watch this webinar to learn how to transform your portal into a thriving API marketplace. 

At Akana, we refer to our API portal as Community Manager. Community Manager is a sophisticated API portal that acts as an interface between an API and its stakeholders. This is a single portal interface that can be branded and customized within our API management platform. 

In fact, a multinational banking corporation chose Akana for its flexible API portal. Learn their story >>

The portal allows API providers to publish, document, promote, and support their APIs. App developers can use the portal to find, consume, and get support for the APIs their apps use. Essentially, it provides a hub to engage a partner ecosystem and build new revenue channels for your business.

API Portal vs. API Gateway

What's the difference between an API portal vs. API gateway? An API portal is where developers find and use APIs. An API gateway allows developers to access backend services, such as the APIs. 

It's important to have an integrated API portal and API gateway as part of your API management platform. This ensures that you build the right APIs, build them right, and in conjunction with an API gateway ensure they are running right.

API Portal Benefits With Akana

With Akana, you'll experience the following API portal benefits. 

Engaging Developers and Partners

With an API portal, you can create a social channel to manage and promote your APIs within the API community. A portal also facilitates consumer and partner onboarding. This helps them find the right API and manage approvals.

Capabilities of the Akana API portal include:

• Support: API developers can request help for an API or app by opening a ticket, and then follow updates on ticket status.
• Collaboration: API developers can contribute, discuss and provide feedback, enriching the community and your API.
• Stay Informed: API developers can follow an API and/or app and see an activity stream of all activity related to that item.

API Documentation and Testing

Providing documentation on an API’s functionality is an integral component in the onboarding process. This documentation contains the API's technical content, including instructions on how to effectively use and integrate APIs. In addition, documentation contains info on version control, retirement, and ongoing API updates.

With the Akana Community Manager, dynamically generated documents allow administrators to more easily upload and manage API documentation.

Capabilities of the Akana API portal include:

• Supporting multiple countries through multi-language support.
• Controlling visibility of documents and document elements via licensing.
• Providing a console where developers can test APIs.

API Monetization

An API portal affords API providers the opportunity to monetize their APIs through customized licensing packages for partners and developers. Revenue can be maximized by offering service levels for each consumer’s unique business needs.

Akana API portal capabilities include:

• Creating unique packages for different business needs.
• Showing or hiding documents or elements based on license grants.
• Enforcing quotas and service levels based on license types.

Personalized Dashboard and Notifications

Tying into the monetization aspect, an API portal also provides developers and partners with analytics tools that allow them to track business metrics for their APIs. These metrics can help identify areas for API optimization, growth, and new capabilities. You can use API monitoring to:

• View real-time API performance, usage metrics, and API health.
• Monitor medium and long-term trends.
• Build alert management, monitoring, and distribution.

Integrated API Lifecycle Management

With integrated API lifecycle management, you can guarantee consistent and accurate API production through all environments and stages of the software lifecycle. Built-in approval workflows ensure quality, which reduces the need for management and rework.

The Akana Community Manager can be configured to establish workflow processes with optional approval and activation steps for app and API administrators. The default workflow has the following settings:

• Automatic approval and activation of requests to a sandbox API endpoint.
• API administrator approval required for access to production endpoints.
• App administrator activation required for production access.
• API administrators can suspend and reactivate, or even cancel an app’s access to their API.

Managing the API lifecycle is important. 

Experience the Akana API Portal

See how easy it is to create, document, test, publish, and market your APIs in the Akana API platform. Start your free 6-month trial today. 

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Explore additional resources: 

• API Basics
• API Lifecycle