API Ratings: Nov 17-24 | Active Monitoring is Good Monitoring

API Ratings: Performance

For our API ratings, we look at over 100 APIs and pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for the service quality for an organization’s APIs in a particular category with our patented CASC score.

Something of interest

One reason you need to be actively monitoring your APIs – and those of your peers – is competitor analysis and benchmarking. We all like to think that what we are doing makes us the best in class in the API ratings, but the only of knowing for sure is by measuring how well you are doing and – where possible – how well your competitors.

You might not be able to get easy access to a whole range of your competitor’s endpoints, but through API developer programs, you can often obtain API ratings data on a selection that does allow you to make different comparisons.

For instance, if you are Dropbox, you have a pretty good CASC score of 9.02 and you might be happy with those API ratings. But why does Box have a CASC score of 9.41? Box is a little bit faster but has fewer outliers and always passes.

Similarly, SendGrid is firmly in the green with a CASC score of 8.67, but Mailchimp is pulling 9.22 because it is faster, has fewer outliers and a 100% pass rate. Cisco WebEx Teams has a perfectly respectable CASC of 8.18, but Zoom manages 8.95, not as good as it might be, but better than Cisco WebEx Teams.

Teleconferencing – and any API-based consumer service! – is a tough game but having the existence proof of knowing your competitor is providing higher quality APIs than you should be enough of an incentive to get out and do everything you can to beat them at their own API ratings game next week.

API Ratings: Overall Quality

Week Ending 23 November 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	GitHub	9.47
COVID-19	covid19api.com	9.27
Search	Google	9.41
Social Networks	Twitter	9.63
UK Government	Police.UK	9.51
US Government	Department of Justice	9.55

Twitter in the Social Networks category takes the overall API ratings title this week with a CASC score of 9.63. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional. Three of the six categories are headed by organization with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this week. Sustaining a CASC score of >9.25 over a period of several weeks is a good showing and congratulations to those organizations that achieved it. This week, all six categories are topped by an API with a CASC score of 9.27 or more.

API Ratings: Top Performers by Latency

Week Ending 23 November 2020

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	Microsoft Office	224 ms
COVID-19	CDC Tools	162 ms
Search	Google	388 ms
Social Networks	Google	57 ms
UK Government	Police.UK	80 ms
US Government	Department of Justice	48 ms

Department of Justice in the US Government takes the overall title again with a median latency of 48 ms compared to 53 ms last week. An important caveat: medians can be misleading! An API might have a fast median latency but produce many slow outliers. So just being fast isn’t everything. You have to be reliable too if you want to have good APIs and get a high CASC score!

API Ratings: Worst Quality

Week Ending 23 November 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Adobe Stock Images	7.04
COVID-19	thevirustracker.com	6.91
Search	Nobody under 8.00!
Social Networks	Nobody under 8.00!
UK Government	NHS	6.67
US Government	NASA	6.78

NHS in the UK Government category takes the overall Wooden Spoon this week with a CASC score of 6.67. We launched API.expert (http://api.expert) earlier in the year as a simple way to provide everybody with insights into the API economy and the leading APIs in different categories in particular. 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. See you again in a week as we look at API ratings for the end of November. Also, don’t forget to look out for our monthly report for October and the weekly and monthly financial API reports.

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