On this page we try to compare Fusio with different products in the API ecosystem. We explain our understanding of each tool category and how Fusio fits into this category. It should give you a better overview of available solutions and whether Fusio can be useful to solve your business case. Please keep in mind that no technology is perfect and every product has its pros and cons.
An API gateway acts as a single entry point for clients to access various backend services or APIs in a unified manner, common features of an API gateway are: Request Routing, Load Balancing, Authentication, Rate Limiting, Monitoring and Transformation and Aggregation.
Fusio provides out-of-the-box these common API gateway features, in addition it has also a focus to simplify onboarding new users by providing a ready to use developer portal and an advanced SDK generator, which can help integrating your API in different environments.
Backend as a Service (BaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides developers with a way to outsource backend infrastructure and services, allowing them to focus more on building the frontend and application logic. In a BaaS model, the cloud service provider manages and hosts the backend infrastructure, databases, server-side logic, user authentication, and other common backend functionalities, while developers interact with these services through APIs or SDKs.
Fusio can be used as alternative to such BaaS providers, but it only simplifies backend development. It is open-source, self-hosted and targets developers who like to build and host its own backend. This has some advantages like data sovereignty and vendor independence but it comes with a little bit more complexity.
An API builder is a tool which can automatically generate ready to use REST APIs based on various data sources. Most times an API builder simply offers a REST API on top of a database, so that your frontend application can directly work with the exposed tables.
Fusio provides a generator to automatically generate a complete API based on various databases. Besides this it has the advantage that you can easily customize each endpoint and operation and add additional logic which is often not possible with simple API builder tools.
A Headless CMS is a content management system that provides an interface for creating, managing, and organizing digital content, but it differs from traditional CMSs in that it does not dictate how content is presented or delivered to users. Instead of generating HTML pages for display, a headless CMS stores content in a structured format (typically JSON) and exposes it via an API for retrieval by client-side applications or presentation layers.
Fusio can be used as a light weight headless CMS, most notable it has an entity generator which allows to create complete CRUD APIs for an entity definition. Note Fusio does not provide a backend like most headless CMS products where a user can manage the content, it only helps to implement custom domain APIs.
The major cloud providers offer API Gateway products as part of their suite of cloud services. These API Gateway products provide a managed solution for building, deploying, and managing APIs in the cloud.
Fusio should be not seen as an alternative to these cloud providers but since they also provide an API Gateway offering we list them here for completion. Those API Gateways are more infrastructure gateways and you would run Fusio behind such a gateway.
