2023 State of
the API ReportTable of contents
Key findings

3

Global growth of APIs

7

Who works with APIs

12

A day, week, or year in the life

17

API-first and other strategies

23

Executing on APIs

30

APIs and monetization

39

APIs and generative AI43Tooling for APIs and development

46

API technologies

50

The outlook for APIs and more

53

Methodology

56

Postman 2023 State of the API ReportKeyfindings

Key findings
Introduction
For the fifth year, the State of the API is the world’s largest and most comprehensive
survey and report on APIs. More than 40,000 developers and API professionals haveshared their thoughts on development priorities, their API tools, and where they see APIs
going.
Our survey-takers range from CEOs and customer success managers to full-stackdevelopers. Some work at small startups, others at companies with over 5,000
developers. They come from financial services, technology, healthcare, and othersectors. What unites them is their interest in APIs as the building blocks of modern
software.
We've expanded this year’s report to cover API monetization and generative AI. Until
now, developers have primarily designed APIs for apps used by humans. Going forward,
designing APIs for machines will become increasingly important as AI becomes more
embedded in software interfaces.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report

4Seven key findings
APIs are a moneymaker for most
Almost two-thirds of respondents said their APIs generate
revenue. Of those respondents, 43% said APIs generateover a quarter of company revenue. In the financial
services and advertising, API revenue was closely
measured. It was judged the second-most important
metric of public API success, just after usage.

API pricing increasingly matters
When deciding whether to integrate with an API, 47% of
respondents said price is a consideration. That’s up from
41% in each of the previous two years. While other factors
ranked higher than pricing, this finding may reflect amore cost-conscious API consumer in the wake of tech’s
economic contraction.

The outlook for API investments
has brightened
Ninety-two percent of global respondents say investments in
APIs will increase or stay the same over the next 12 months,
up from 89% last year. This increase may reflect a sense insome quarters that the worst of tech’s economic contraction
has passed. At the same time, fewer respondents say they
expect to cut investments into APIs this year.

Most API professionals are using AI
to help code
Sixty percent of API professionals say they’re using
generative AI in their job. More than half of those use AI
tools to find bugs in their code, and over a third rely on AI
to generate code a computer will understand. When asked
what type of project most excites developers in the coming
year, the top answer was building AI-powered apps, which
was chosen by over a third of respondents.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report5Seven key findings (cont)Number of API-first leaders swells byalmost halfThis year, 11% of respondents defined themselves as APIfirst leaders, up from 8% in each of the previous two years.
This elite group excels in almost every metric. For instance,
API-first leaders produce APIs faster and report fewer
failures. And when an API fails, most API-first leaders canrestore it in less than an hour—a feat that only a minority of
respondents can match.

When API developers exit, they leavea big hole
Software engineers have experienced the largest portion oftech layoffs so far in 2023. What does their absence meanfor companies? Our findings indicate that companies withdisorganized and poorly documented APIs may discoversurprise problems when developers exit. Survey-takers
said the top concerns were outdated documentation,
zombie APIs, and loss of institutional memory.

API security is improving, but some
sectors have work to do
API security improved for most respondents, with thefrequency of incidents down in 2023. But some sectors
fared worse than others. Survey-takers said monthly
incidents occurred at higher rates in the automotive,
education, and retail sectors than average.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report6Global growthof APIsGlobal growth of APIs
Growing ecosystem
The global growth of the API ecosystem has been strong, from the number ofpractitioners and countries participating to the number of requests created. Here’s
where things stand as of late May 2023.
Postman Users:		

Over 25 million

Collections created over all time:

121 million

Requests created in past year:

1.29 billion

25 M
121 M
1.29 B

Postman 2023 State of the API Report8APIs are global
Which countries are creating the most collections and requests? We wanted to know, and we
wanted to compare them with the rest of the world. Here’s how it breaks down.
Countries and geographic areas: Over 235, including almost every country in the world—and even
Antarctica.

Collections created over all time Top ten:
73.9 million Rest of world:
46.7 million

Requests created in past year

 Top ten:
779.4 million Rest of world:509.5 million

USA: 21.6 million

India: 256.2 million

India: 18.3 million

USA: 216.3 million

China: 10.7 million

Brazil: 52.4 million

Brazil: 5.45 million

China: 50.3 million

UK: 4.00 million

UK: 44.1 million

France: 3.00 million

Indonesia: 35.3 million

Russia: 2.94 million

France: 33.5 million

Germany: 2.92 million

Russia: 31.4 million

Indonesia: 2.48 million

Germany: 30.4 million

Canada: 2.48 million

Canada: 29.6 million

Postman 2023 State of the API Report9Most popular APIs
We looked across the Postman Public API Network, the world's largest public API hub, to see which
API collections were forked most over the past year. Here's what we found.

PayPal's Public Postman Collection is in the top
10 most requested APIs in terms of popularity andquality. We're committed to investing in this next
generation of technology.”
Dan Schulman, President and CEO, PayPal

Postman 2023 State of the API Report10The 2023 API Platform LandscapeAs more companies recognize APIs as the building blocks of modern software, API tools andservices are evolving to meet their needs. These offerings span the API lifecycle, including design,
testing, and security. They also include repositories for source code, API gateways, application
performance monitoring tools, and CI/CD pipelines—all of which must integrate with API platforms
to achieve optimal results.
Navigating this landscape requires careful thought. Here’s our view of the API Platform
Landscape today:

Postman 2023 State of the API Report11Who works
with APIs

Who works with APIs
Primary job function
The influx of non-developers into the API world is accelerating. In 2023, 53% of the people who took oursurvey were non-developers. That’s up from 50% in 2020.
This year, we saw increased representation by chief technology officers, managers, and directors, toname a few non-developer roles.
Developers still comprised the largest percentage of respondents, whether they were full-stack,backend, or frontend. But over 21,000 non-developers were generous enough to share their opinions.
We’re grateful for their—and everyone’s—input into the 2023 State of the API survey.

Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report13

Industry
We asked about individuals’ industries, and the results were clear: Technology remains the mostrepresented sector, followed by business/IT services, financial services, and healthcare.

Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Number of developers in the organization
In past surveys, we’ve asked, “How many developers are in your organization?” The most common
answer has always been “More than 500.”
This year, we wanted to know more about this segment. Just how many developers were we talking
about?
What we discovered surprised us. Once you get above 250 developers, the most common company
size in our survey were ones with thousands of developers. These large organizations are mostheavily represented by the financial services, tech, and automotive sectors.

Number of developers in organization
Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report14Years of experience
We asked how many years of API development experience people had. Like last year, the mostcommon answer was three to five years.
The share of people working with APIs for the first time remained steady this year, after jumping
last year. One in seven people had less than a year of API development experience, but certain
professions had an even higher share of newcomers. About one in three business analysts, network
engineers, and UX/UI designers had less than a year of API experience.

Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Generation
The bulk of survey respondents this year again identified themselves as Millennials, followed by
Gen X, Gen Z, and finally, Baby Boomers.
All job functions are predominantly performed by Millennials, with the exception of CIO roles. Fiftyseven percent of survey-takers in this role are members of Gen X.

Due to rounding, percentages
may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report

15

Gender
Like much of the tech sector, the world of API professionals skews male. Eighty-seven percent of
all survey-takers were men, while 8% were women. The remainder were non-binary or chose not toanswer.
Some tech roles had a greater share of women than 8%. Women made up 30% of technical writers,
16% of quality engineers, and 15% of business analysts in our survey.
What role was rarest among women? Chief technical officer. Just 1% of the 1,200 CTOs in our
survey were women. CEOs had a higher share of females at 5%.
The gender disparity in tech has been persistent, both in our yearly surveys and as measured
elsewhere. It underscores the need for investments, from early STEM education through workplace
programs that support women in the highest ranks of tech.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report16

A day, week,or year in
the lifeA day, week,or year in the life
Hours spent with APIs
When it comes to measuring time spent working with APIs, the figures on 2023’s chart are similar tolast year’s: 26% of respondents spend over 20 hours a week working with APIs.
When we drill down, though, we can see that people in one industry spend more time than others:
financial services. There, 32% of respondents spend over 20 hours a week working with APIs.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report18API time: present and ideal state
We asked how people spend their time working with APIs, and how they’d prefer to allocate thattime. The biggest portion of their API time—an average of 31%—is spent coding, which matches
their ideal state.
Time spent coding APIs seems to have an inverse relationship with company size. For example,
people in organizations with fewer than 10 developers spend a greater-than-average 37% of their
API time writing code.
But as the number of developers grows, people spend less of their API time coding. The 37% figure
drops to a below-average 28% once an organization hires more than 50 developers. And it stays at
28% all the way up through mega-companies with over 5,000 developers.
Why is this? One reason may be that as development teams grow and projects scale up, moreproduct managers and project managers are needed. Larger teams can require more meetings,
which may leave less time for coding.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report19API development effort
Overall, 49% of respondents said most of their organization’s development effort was spentworking with APIs. That number can vary, depending on the industry.
In financial services, 57% of respondents said most of their organization’s development was
focused on APIs, the highest number in the survey.
At the other end of the spectrum was manufacturing, where only 34% of respondents said amajority of their company’s development efforts were spent working with APIs.

Percentage of development effort spent on APIs
Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report20

Public, private, or partner
We asked respondents what percentage of their APIs were public, private, or partner. For the firsttime in three years, organizations are adding private APIs at a faster rate than public and partner
APIs. Sixty-one percent of businesses’ APIs are for internal use only, up from 58% in each of theprior two years.
The emphasis on private APIs underscores the need for tools that help teams catalog, document,
and collaborate on their internal APIs.
Meanwhile, public APIs constituted a smaller share this year, at 14% of organizations’ APIs.
Interestingly, API-first leaders reported a higher percentage of public APIs than average.

Due to rounding, percentages
may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report21

When developers leave
When API developers leave, what are the top concerns for an organization? Respondents told us thebiggest issue by far is outdated documentation. This finding dovetails with data elsewhere in thesurvey. For example, lack of documentation is cited as the primary obstacle to consuming an API.
The second biggest concern when developers leave is zombie APIs. These APIs have no owner,oversight, or maintenance—and are sometimes forgotten by the company. At worst, zombie APIspose a security risk; at best, they deliver a poor consumer experience.

Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Didn't even think about that ‘zombie APIs’ one until
now, so...thanks? Sigh...one more sleepless night forme...LOL.”
Survey respondent

Postman 2023 State of the API Report22API-firstand otherstrategies

API-first andother strategies
Embracing API-first
This year, more respondents embraced a thorough API-first approach to development: 11% ranked themselves as
highly API-first. That’s up from 8% in each of the prior two years.
We call this group “API-first leaders.” They rate themselves a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale.
What characterizes an API-first approach? It prioritizes APIs at the beginning of the development process,positioning APIs as the building blocks of software. This involves developing APIs before writing other code,
instead of treating them as afterthoughts.
What are the benefits of being an API-first leader? As discussed elsewhere in this report, this elite group produces
APIs faster and encounters fewer failures than average. And when an API does fail, these leaders can restore it
faster—usually in under an hour.
While 11% of all respondents were API-first leaders, their representation rose with company size. At companies
with 1,000 developers or more, 15% of respondents rated themselves API-first leaders. Among industries, financial
services had the highest API-first representation, also at 15%.

API-first approach, as self-rated 1 to 10
Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report24

It pays to be API-first—especially if you’re scaling up
We asked about the benefits of an API-first approach to development. Over 75% of respondents
somewhat agreed or strongly agreed that developers at API-first companies are more productive,
create better software, and integrate faster with partners.
When we drilled down into the results, we found that the benefits of API-first become more apparent
as a company adds developers.
At small companies with 100 developers or fewer, 32% of respondents strongly agreed that API-firstcompanies onboard faster. But as developer headcount rose above 100, that figure steadily climbed.
By the time a company reached 5,000 developers, 42% of its respondents strongly agreed with thestatement. We see similar increases across almost all metrics when answers are sorted bycompany size.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report25

Development priorities
We asked respondents to identify the priorities for their development teams and organizations.
The number one choice this year remained the quality of applications, programs, or services
developed, cited by 79% of survey-takers. Reliability, agility, and security were the next mostimportant priorities.
“Reducing costs” remained low on the list, but 35% of survey-takers indicated that it was important
this year, compared with 31% last year.
This focus on costs is reflected elsewhere in the survey. For instance, pricing is a stronger
consideration this year when developers evaluate whether to integrate with an API.

Multiple choices allowed.

Measuring success of public APIs
We asked how people measure the success of their public APIs, and the top answer was API usage.
After that, the answer depended on the respondents’ job role and industry.
For executives, directors, and managers, the second-best indicator of public API success wasrevenue. For engineers and developers, it was the number of active API users.
The number of active API users was also chosen as the second-best measure of success acrossindustries, with three exceptions: financial services, retail, and advertising. There, API revenue wasconsidered the second-most important metric.

Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report26

Microservices, monoliths, and in between
When asked to categorize the architectural style of APIs in their organization’s portfolio,
respondents said microservices were the dominant share at 42%.
After that, monoliths and “mesoservices”—right-sized API services—each represented alittle over 20% of organizations' services.
Additionally, survey-takers said more than 10% of APIs at their organization powered
microservices that had grown large and unwieldy, which we have termed macroservices.

Due to rounding, percentages may not
add up to 100%.

API integration: Price is a growing concern
What factors do people evaluate before integrating with an API? Respondents said performanceand security were the top two factors, as they were last year.
But one factor saw a jump in importance this year: pricing. It was cited as a consideration by 47%
of respondents. That’s up from 41% in each of the past two years.
This focus on price may reflect a more cost-conscious API consumer in the wake of tech’s
economic contraction. Executives were particularly likely to say pricing is important, with 60%
citing it as a factor to consider before integrating with an API.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report27Consuming APIs: internal integration is key
What factors go into an organization’s decision to consume an API? For a second year, the mostpopular answer was how well the API integrates with internal apps and systems. It was chosen
by 67% of respondents.
In manufacturing, internal integration was cited more often than in any other sector: 73% of
respondents there called it important.

Multiple choices allowed.

Producing APIs: internal integration is paramount
What factors do organizations consider when evaluating whether to produce an API? Integration withinternal apps and systems was by far the top choice, for a second year.
That makes internal integration the top consideration when both producing and consuming an API.
This priority has implications for API design and documentation, as well as the full development lifecycle.
For almost all industries, the second-most important consideration when producing an API was integratingwith external apps and systems. The exception was the gaming, entertainment, and media sector. There,
the second-most important consideration was the ability to add functionality to internal apps and systems.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report28

'Doing more with less'Over 200,000 U.S. tech jobs have been lost since the start of 2023, and the largest share of thosehas been in software developer roles. Many teams are expected to do more with less. We wanted
to know: can APIs help achieve this goal?
Respondents told us yes. Almost three-fourths said APIs allow them to leverage existing code
rather than build an app from scratch. More than half cited APIs’ automation abilities, including
scheduling and triggering specific events and setting tasks and workflows into motion.
The more developers a company had, the likelier respondents were to acknowledge APIs’ ability
to help developers do more with less.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report

29

Executing
on APIsExecuting on APIsTime to production
We asked survey participants how long it typically takes to conceive, implement, test, anddeliver an API to a production environment. The results were largely unchanged from last year.
Some industries were faster at producing APIs than others. In education, 18% of respondents
said they required a day or less. In financial services, only 11% of survey-takers said the same.

Due to rounding, percentages
may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report31Deployment frequency
We also asked participants how frequently they deploy APIs to production. The mostcommon response? One-third said they deploy between once a week and once a month.
Just 6% of respondents deployed between once per hour and once per day. But among
API-first leaders, the percentage was higher: 10% deploy that frequently.

Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Deployment failures
How often do API changes fail when pushed to production? Not often. Fewer than one in
20 API changes fails, according to half of respondents.
Healthcare claimed the best rate, with 55% of respondents stating that fewer than one in 20 API
deployments failed. Education was at the other end of the spectrum; only 43% of respondents
there said their failure rate was that good.
Interestingly, education was also the sector likeliest to skip API testing. Eight percent ofrespondents there said their teams don’t test their APIs. That was double the average 4% rate forall respondents.
API-first leaders were less likely to encounter failures than all respondents, with 60% statingthat failures occurred less than one time in 20.

Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report32Time to recovery
When an API fails, how quickly can it typically be restored? We’re happy to say that this figure has
improved steadily over the years. Today, 41% say they can restore the API in less than one hour.
That’s an improvement from 38% last year and 34% the year before that.
API-first leaders reported the fastest recovery times: 53% indicated they could be back up in
less than an hour.

Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Frequency of API security incidents
In 2023, global survey-takers reported fewer API-related security events: 56% said incidents
happen less than once a year, an improvement on last year’s 52%.
When we break out the results by country, we see some stark differences. Incidents were rarest in
the U.S., with 67% of respondents saying API security events occur less than once a year.
In Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, only 57% of respondents could make that claim. In the
Asia-Pacific and Latin America, the figure was lower still, with only 47% saying API security events
happened less than once a year.

Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report33

Greatest security risks
We asked respondents to identify which API security risks posed the greatest concern for
their organization.
Their top choice was “Improper authentication, authorization, or access control,” cited by an almost
two-to-one margin over other risks.
CEOs, CTOs, and developers were aligned on this view, with about 30% of each group acknowledging
it as a key hazard. But some job roles were less likely to recognize improper access as a key risk: just
21% of product VPs and 26% of data engineers/analysts cited it as a top concern.

Multiple choices allowed.

The greatest security risk? Humans. Always thelargest attack vector.”
Survey respondent

Postman 2023 State of the API Report34

Obstacles to consuming APIs
When we asked about obstacles to consuming APIs, 52% of respondents said lack of documentation
was the biggest problem. Other top barriers included difficulty discovering APIs (32%) and lack oftime (27%).
API-first leaders, on the whole, were less likely to cite any obstacles to consuming APIs—with one
exception. They were more likely to mention difficulty reusing APIs or microservices. Twenty-one
percent of API-first leaders cited this pain point, compared with just 19% of respondents overall.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report

35

Obstacles to producing APIs:
A unique challenge for big companies
In this year’s survey, a lack of time and people were again named as the biggest obstacles to
producing APIs.
But when we filtered by large companies with over 5,000 developers, a different top problem
emerged. Respondents at these mega-companies cited a lack of API design skills as the biggest
obstacle to producing APIs.
Interestingly, respondents at these large companies were also more likely to say that “Managing
too many APIs or microservices” was an obstacle to producing APIs. Thirty-one percent of these
respondents said so, compared with just 23% of all survey-takers.
It’s possible the lack of API design skills is making it more difficult to manage APIs and microservices
at the largest companies.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report36Collaborating on APIs
When we asked respondents to cite the different ways they collaborate on APIs, their mostcommon answer was working with API artifacts on a collaboration platform such as Postman (50%).
Next up was publishing API artifacts to GitLab, GitHub, or Bitbucket, which was chosen by 39%
of respondents.

Multiple choices allowed.

Change management
When it comes to change-management practices, there was a new preferred method: using Git
repositories. This practice earned the most mentions in 2023, just edging out versioning APIs,
which was the most popular choice in the previous two years.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report37API testing
When it comes to API testing, users employed a wide variety of practices, although functional
testing (67%) and integration testing (64%) dominated the answers. No other testing practice camewithin 10 percentage points of those two choices.
As in prior years, one in 25 respondents said their team doesn’t test its APIs.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report38APIs andmonetization

APIs and monetization
APIs as products
We asked for the first time, “Do you view your APIs as products?” Almost 60% of respondents said
yes, while 26% said no. A further 15% weren’t sure.
Companies with a large developer headcount were the likeliest to view their APIs as products, with
68% answering yes. Among industries, people working in financial services were the most likely toconsider APIs products.

Due to rounding, percentages
may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report40Revenue streams
When asked whether their APIs generate revenue, 65% of respondents said yes. Of thoseanswering in the affirmative, 43% said their APIs generate more than a quarter of the business’s
total revenue.
For a handful of companies, APIs generated more than 75% of total revenue. These companies
were almost twice as likely to be in financial services as other sectors.
The 35% of respondents whose APIs generated no revenue tended to work at smallerorganizations. As company size grew (as measured by developer headcount), it wasincreasingly likely that respondents would say their APIs produced revenue.

Respondents
Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report41

Discovering public APIs
We asked survey-takers how consumers discovered their public APIs. The most common answer
was through their website, followed by a developer portal.
When we filtered answers by company size, we found the answer varied. Small companies reliedprimarily on websites. But as the company size grew beyond 500 developers, developer portals
became the top source of API discovery.
What was the third most popular answer? “Our APIs are hard to discover.” This was chosen by 20%
of all respondents. This number highlights the importance of focusing on the developer experienceand making it easy for consumers to discover one’s APIs, whether through a search engine,company website, or developer portal.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report42APIs andgenerative AI

APIs and generative AI
AI as an assistant
We asked survey-takers whether they were using generative AI tools, and if so, how. Sixty percent
of respondents said they were employing these tools. The most common uses were finding
mistakes in code, producing code, and coding instruction.
Senior API developers were much less likely to use AI tools than junior developers, except togenerate documentation and comments. Here, their usage rates were similar.
Among industries, government and defense were least likely to use AI tools, with just 51% of
respondents there adopting them. Some respondents cited security risks and corporate bans on
sharing data with third-party AI tools.
Education had the highest rate of uptake, with 65% of survey takers there saying they used AI tools.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report44

AI-powered apps
What apps are developers most excited about building over the next year? It may come as no
surprise that generative AI-powered apps took the top spot. This sentiment was strongest in the
education sector.
Internet-of-things apps placed second overall, except in manufacturing. There, IoT apps wereviewed equally as exciting as AI apps.
Fintech apps placed third overall, except in financial services, where respondents deemed fintech
apps twice as exciting to build as AI-powered ones.

Multiple choices allowed.

AI as a productivity enhancer
What sort of productivity benefit do API professionals expect from tools like ChatGPT and Copilot
to deliver to development over the next two years?
There was wide agreement that AI will deliver a boost in developer productivity, with the largest
share of respondents forecasting improvements of 10% to 25%.

Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report45

Tooling forAPIs anddevelopment

Tooling for APIs
and development
API platforms and tools
When we asked which API tools and platforms people use, most respondents cited Postman.
Datadog, SwaggerHub, and SoapUI also earned double-digit percentages.
SoapUI was used by 14% of all respondents, but that figure jumped above 20% in the government
and financial services sectors.

Multiple choices allowed.
The following solutions were used by 2% of respondents: Rapid, Akana, APIMatic, Akita,
Sauce Labs, Boomi Imperva, Stoplight, AlertSite, Backstage, Eggplant, Veracode, APIsec, and42Crunch.
The following solutions were used by 1% of respondents: Cortex, Talend, Redocly, APIwiz,
OpsLevel, mabl, Runscope, Catchpoint, Salt Security, Checkly, Moesif, StackHawk, Neosec,
Rest United, Restcase, Noname, Tricentis, Optic, configure8, Traceable, Seekret, Uptrends,
Buf, and Cequence.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report47

Source-code tools
We asked which tools or platforms respondents use for source code. GitHub was the most popular
choice at 64%, followed by GitLab, which was at 30%, and Bitbucket at 24%. Newer names such as
JetBrains Space showed some recognition as well, especially in educational settings and among
network engineers.

Multiple choices allowed.

Deploying APIs
When it comes to deploying APIs, CI/CD pipelines were even more popular than last year, with 63%
of respondents naming them as the most common tool.
API-first leaders selected their choices in roughly the same order as all respondents, and reported
an even greater uptake of CI/CD and in-the-cloud solutions. API-first leaders were less likely,
however, to deploy using on-premise or custom-built solutions.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report48

CI/CD tools and platforms:
Jenkins and GitHub square off
When asked which CI/CD solutions were favored, 50% of all respondents cited GitHub. Jenkins wasa distant second at 31%.
At large organizations, it was a different story. Respondents at companies with over 1,000
developers mentioned Jenkins (53%) more often than Github (48%).

Multiple choices allowed.

API gateways and cloud API management:
AWS, then Azure (for most)When it comes to API gateways or cloud API management tools, two solutions stood out. Half of all
respondents used AWS API Gateway, and more than a quarter used Azure API Management.
This ranking was flipped in the government and manufacturing sectors, though. Both showed aslight preference for Azure over AWS.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report

49

API
technologies

API technologies
Architectural style: SOAP slips
While REST remains the most-used API architecture by far, it has lost a bit of ground to newcomers.
This year, 86% of respondents said they used REST, down from 89% last year and 92% the year
prior.
SOAP registered a notable drop. It was used by just 26% of all respondents this year versus 34%
last year. The decline makes SOAP the fourth most-used architecture in our survey, down from thethird spot last year.
GraphQL took SOAP’s spot and was used by 29% of survey-takers.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report51Specifications: JSON Schema holds the lead
We also asked folks which API specifications they use and love. JSON Schema remains the top
pick, named by almost twice as many respondents as any other. Swagger/Open API 2.0 and Open
API 3.x were the next most popular choices, almost evenly tied.

Multiple choices allowed.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report

52

The outlook
for APIs
and more

The outlook forAPIs and more
API investments to climb
Organizations’ investment of time and resources into APIs will increase or stay the same over the
next 12 months, said 92% of respondents. That’s up from 89% last year and may reflect a senseamong some quarters that the worst of tech’s economic contraction has passed.
When we polled just CEOs, we found they were more bullish than developers. Fifty-three percentof CEOs said API investments would increase in the coming year, compared with 44% of developers
who said the same.

Due to rounding, percentages
may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report54

Return to the office
Many companies went fully remote in the past two years but now want workers in the office mostdays. Almost 70% of our survey-takers—about 28,000 people—fell into this camp. We asked themto describe employees’ reactions to this shift.
The answers revealed differing perceptions that split along job lines. CEOs said reactions in theirworkforce were evenly split between resistant, neutral, and welcoming—about 33% each.
Developers and engineers saw it differently. From their perspective, 49% of employees wereresisting the return to the office. Only 21% of workers welcomed the return.
Directors and managers rated employee dissatisfaction the highest: 53% said employees wereresisting a return to the office, and just 19% said workers welcomed the shift.

Due to rounding, percentages
may not add up to 100%.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report55

Methodology

Methodology
This report is based on two sources: a survey of 40,261 developers and API professionals fromaround the world and anonymized, aggregated data from the Postman API Platform. The survey
was fielded from April 25 through June 4. The answers to most nonnumerical questions wererandomized in order to prevent order bias in answering.
Respondents were recruited largely through channels owned by Postman, including social media,
email, and the Postman community forum. This year, Postman expanded its recruitment efforts toinclude technology-focused media outlets and influencers in tech.
As an incentive, respondents who finished the survey could opt to receive a copy of this report.
Individuals from eligible geographies were also offered a chance to win prizes, including a
PlayStation 5, a Steam Deck, five $100 Amazon gift cards, and ten $50 gift certificates to the
Postman swag store.

Acknowledgments:
Thanks to the many people outside Postman whose input helped shape questions for thisyear's State of the API survey: Mehdi Medjaoui at APIDays, Derric Gilling at Moesif, Mark Boyd
at Platformable, Bill Doerrfeld at Nordic APIs, James Higginbotham at LaunchAny, Alex Xu at
ByteByteGo, Darrel Miller at Microsoft Graph, Mike Amundsen at Amundsen.com, Claire Barrett at
API Collective, Alex Savage at Advanced, and George Mitry at Discover Financial Services.

Postman 2023 State of the API Report57© 2023 Postman, Inc.