2021 State of the API Report
Global Growth of APIs
Over the last 12 months, the global growth of the entire API ecosystem—from the number of practitioners to the number of countries represented to the number of API requests being sent—has been impressive.
API activity is growing
Since the 2020 State of the API report was released, the Postman API Platform saw significant upsurges that indicate trends across the API ecosystem:
Users: 17 million
Collections created: 30 million (up 39%)
Requests created: 855 million (up 56%)
APIs are global
Who are the top geographic regions creating collections and sending requests? We wanted to know, and we wanted to compare those to the rest of the world. Here's how it breaks down:
Number of Collections Created
1,5,1,41,,233
9,5,27,,172
4,4,38,,537
3,5,45,,412
2,3,78,,307
1,1,40,,704
8,29,,607
6,21,,960
6,20,,548
5,64,,676
5,12,,374
4,89,,108
Number of Requests Created
48,0,3,91,,365
31,5,6,43,,567
14,4,5,84,,371
11,7,7,33,,814
5,8,0,56,,796
3,1,4,49,,899
2,8,0,30,,423
2,2,1,63,,293
2,1,3,00,,992
2,0,8,06,,505
1,8,4,00,,021
1,7,8,65,,251
Country-by-country API growth
We dug deeper into growth to understand which countries are growing the fastest, and here's what we found:
Year-over-Year Comparison in Collections Created
Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.
Year-over-Year Comparison in Requests Created
Due to rounding, percentages may not add up to 100%.
The API Platform Landscape
The global growth of APIs is also driving an ever-evolving landscape of tooling for APIs and development in the API Platforms category. We've observed that there are many vendors in this landscape serving a broad range of needs across the API lifecycle, from design to testing to security. Additionally, we see vendors offering repositories for source code, API gateways, application performance monitoring, and CI/CD—all of which should integrate with API platforms to achieve optimal results from API initiatives within an organization.
Here is our view of the landscape today:
Postman v11 is here!
It's jam-packed with updates to help you collaborate on your APIs, augment yourself with AI, and more.
