Gravitee API Management (Gravitee APIM) is an Apache-2.0 licensed, Java-based open source platform for controlling who, when, and how users access an organisation's APIs, aimed at teams that need to document, discover, publish, and govern APIs on infrastructure they operate themselves.

What it is

Gravitee API Management is the open source API management platform published by the Gravitee project under the repository gravitee-io/gravitee-api-management. The README describes it as a flexible, lightweight, and blazing-fast open source solution that helps an organisation control who, when, and how users access its APIs, and that lets teams manage the full lifecycle of those APIs from documentation through discovery to publication. It ships as four cooperating subcomponents: the Gateway on port 8082, the Portal UI on :4100 acting as a catalog of APIs complete with documentation, the Console UI on :8084 as the administrative interface for managing APIs, and the APIM Backend on :8083, which exposes /portal/openapi and serves both the Portal and Console UIs. The project is written in Java and carries vertx among its listed topics.

The concrete problem it solves is the fragmentation that otherwise appears when a team tries to expose APIs to internal and external consumers. Rather than assembling a bare proxy, a separate documentation site, and a bespoke administrative interface and wiring them together, Gravitee APIM provides the gateway, the developer portal catalog, and the administrative console as one coherent deployment. Its stated purpose is access control and lifecycle management across an API estate: deciding which users may reach which APIs, at what time, and under what conditions, while giving those APIs a documented, discoverable public face. The api-gateway, api-management, and gateway topics describe that scope, and the security-scan topic indicates security scanning forms part of the project's concerns.

Key capabilities

• API gateway process listening on port 8082, providing the traffic entry point described by the api-gateway and gateway topics.
• Lifecycle management for APIs, covering documentation, discovery, and publication as described in the README.
• Policy attachment, demonstrated in the documentation path where a user creates an API and then adds a Policy.
• Developer Portal UI on port 4100, presenting a catalog of APIs together with their documentation.
• Console UI on port 8084, the administrative interface used to manage APIs.
• APIM Backend on port 8083, serving both UIs and exposing its own OpenAPI description at /portal/openapi.
• Three deployment routes for the same platform: a Helm chart, a docker-compose setup driven by make, and the hosted Gravitee Cloud offering.

Who uses it and how

• Platform teams that want the whole stack on their own infrastructure, started locally through quick-setup/mongodb and the docker compose up -d command sequence against a MongoDB database.
• Kubernetes-oriented organisations that prefer the published Helm chart over managing Docker Compose files directly.
• Teams with limited operational appetite, for whom Gravitee Cloud provides the same product as a hosted service with a free trial and no installation or configuration step.
• Licence holders running the enterprise feature set, who supply an Enterprise License either as a Base64-encoded LICENSE_KEY environment variable or as a license file placed in docker/quick-setup/mongodb/.license.
• Evaluators who want a fast look at the platform using make mongodb, which brings up the Console, Portal, and Gateway and prints default credentials of admin / admin.

Getting started

Clone the repository with git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/gravitee-io/gravitee-api-management, change into gravitee-api-management/docker, and start the stack with make mongodb or with cd quick-setup/mongodb && docker compose down -v && docker compose pull && docker compose up -d. A Helm chart and the hosted Gravitee Cloud free trial are offered as alternatives for those who do not want to run it locally.

How it compares

The facts supplied here name no comparable API management products, whether commercial or open source, so Gravitee APIM stands alone in this registry and no like-for-like contrast can honestly be drawn. Any comparison with other gateway or API management offerings will have to wait until those projects appear as entries alongside it.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster takes on operating MongoDB plus the four Gravitee services, keeping the gateway, Portal, Console, and backend ports reachable, and replacing the default admin / admin credentials before anything is exposed. Anyone unwilling to run a database and a multi-service Docker Compose or Helm deployment should look at Gravitee Cloud instead, and full feature access depends on obtaining an Enterprise License rather than the Apache-2.0 core alone. The README's own feature section is truncated, so its capability documentation is thin relative to the deployment guidance; combined with a modest community footprint of 455 stars, 119 forks, and 94 open issues, prospective adopters should verify features against the linked documentation rather than the repository front page. The last recorded push was 2026-09-16, so the codebase itself remains active.

   git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/gravitee-io/gravitee-api-management
   cd gravitee-api-management/docker

  make mongodb

   cd quick-setup/mongodb && docker compose down -v && docker compose pull && docker compose up -d