The time has come for us to check out the monthly API ratings, this time for September 2020.
We recently launched API.expert as a simple way to provide everybody with insights into the API economay and the leading API ratings in different categories in particular.
The basic service is free and will remain free. But other, related API ratings services will be built on top of it, including your very own API.expert dashboards if you want them!
We are expanding our coverage of Open Finance APIs from around the world, so one of the major changes we made recently to these round ups has been to pull out the financial APIs. Look out for the separate report on financial APIs.
Each week, month, and year we’ll look at API ratings in a variety of sectors for their quality CASC score using our patented system (US Patent 10,644,962, if you fancy a little light bedtime reading) that allows you to see the API ratings and compare them to other ones, as well as factors like uptime and availability.
If something is missing in our API ratings that you think should be here, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!
Now, onto what the past months tells us about the state of API ratings during a very long month of an unending year.
API Performance Headlines
To compile our API ratings, we look at more than 200 APIs. Then we pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for API quality in a particular category.
We do see that certain providers consistently vie for top spot in their API ratings category, including GitHub and Google. Others do less well, such as Halifax and the NHS.
Top API Ratings – CASC Score
September, 2020
|
Category |
Organization |
CASC score
|
|
Corporate
|
Github |
9.56 |
|
COVID-19 |
COVID-19 Finnhub API |
9.13 |
|
Search
|
Microsoft Bing |
9.34 |
|
Social Networks
|
|
9.64 |
|
UK Government
|
Police.UK |
9.49 |
|
US Government
|
Department of Justice |
9.66 |
Top API Ratings - Latency
September, 2020
|
Category |
Organization |
Median Latency
|
|
Corporate Infrastructure
|
Microsoft Office |
229 ms |
|
COVID-19 |
CDC Tools |
166 ms |
|
Search
|
|
325 ms |
|
Social Networks
|
|
58 ms |
|
UK Government
|
Police.UK |
90 ms |
|
US Government
|
Department of Justice |
51 ms |
Worst API Rating Overall
September, 2020
|
Category |
Organization |
CASC score
|
|
Corporate Infrastructure
|
Cisco Spark |
7.78 |
|
COVID-19 |
Coronavirus Smartable (smartable.ai) |
3.61 |
|
Search
|
Nobody below 8.00! |
|
|
Social Networks
|
Nobody below 8.00! |
|
|
UK Government
|
NHS |
6.18 |
|
US Government
|
Department of Labor
|
7.34 |
Something of interest
Microsoft Bing is king in the September Search API ratings. All of the search APIs are relatively slow compared to some APIs, but then it is difficult to cache stuff for search and it is a miracle search works at all, of course, when you think what it actually involves!
Microsoft Bing manages a 100% pass rate and a very few outliers. A very solid effort.
For search APIs, the rate-determining step is process time, which shouldn’t be too affected by network issues. Interestingly, out of six regions, Azure is fastest for process time in only three despite the fact that Microsoft Bing is presumably hosted on Azure.
For Google, out of six regions, its own cloud is fastest for process time in four regions. You would hope that you would be faster from your own infrastructure. So what is going on? It is likely that there are multiple hosts for Microsoft Bing and Google around the world. Different locations might vary in speed because of the speed of the system processing the results and the load on it. There are also likely to be differences in network configuration that can affect the process time by a few tens of milliseconds. But if you want to be the fastest, you need to identify and cut out as many of the issues affecting the median latency as you possible can. And it’s only by using an active API performance and quality monitoring system that you can understand how an API is really behaving from the end-user perspective and whether or not your own infrastructure is actually serving you best as well as it could in terms of delivering the services you provide.
See you again in a month as we assess how matters have gone in October. Also don’t forget to check out our weekly State of the API reports each week.
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