That time of the week has already arrived again for us to hand out our API ratings winners and losers over the past seven days.
We launched API.expert earlier in the year as a simple way to provide everybody with insights into the API economy and the leading API ratings in different categories in particular.
The basic service is free and will remain free, but other, related services will be built on top of it, including your very own API.expert dashboards if you want them!
If something is missing that you think should be here in our API ratings, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!
Now, onto what the past week tells us about the state of the world of APIs as we dive into the first full week of August 2020.
API Ratings: The Headlines
We look at over 200 APIs, but pull all the metrics together into these API ratings to give you a general feeling for the service quality for an organization’s APIs in a particular category.
We do see that certain providers consistently vie for the top spot in their category, including GitHub and Google, with others doing less well, such as Halifax and the NHS.
Top API Ratings – CASC Score
Week Ending 10 August 2020
Category | Organization | CASC score |
Corporate Infrastructure | GitHub | 9.62 |
Covid-19 | NovelCOVID (lmao.ninja) | 9.13 |
Cryptocurrency Exchanges | BitMEX | 9.16 |
PSD2 Banks | Nordea Bank | 9.89 |
Search | 9.49 | |
Social Networks | 9.73 | |
UK Open Banking (Open Data)
|
Bank of Ireland | 9.79 |
UK Government | GOV.UK | 9.72 |
US Government | Department of Justice | 9.42 |
Another volatile week this week!
- GitHub replaced Pivotal Tracker in Corporate Infrastructure
- NovelCOVID (lmao.ninja) replaced the COVID Tracking Project in Covid-19
- BitMEX replaced Coinpaprika in Cryptocurrency Exchanges
- Environmental Systems Research Institute replaced the Department of Justice in US Government
Nordea Bank retains the crown for the private sector with a fine CASC score of 9.89. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional.
Five of the nine categories are headed by an organization with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this week down from six last week (but one Google has a CASC score of 9.49 in Search).
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.
Top API Ratings – Latency
Week Ending 10 August 2020
Category | Organization | Median latency |
Corporate Infrastructure | Microsoft Office | 230 ms |
Covid-19 | CDC tools (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) | 156 ms |
Cryptocurrency Exchanges | FTX | 253 ms |
PSD2 Banks | Nordea Bank | 170 ms |
Search | 325 ms | |
Social Networks | 57 ms | |
UK Open Banking (Open Data) | HSBC | 82 ms |
UK Government | Police.UK | 87 ms |
US Government | Department of Justice | 78 ms |
Yet another stable week this week in this stable category with no changes again to the top performers.
Google takes the overall title again with a median latency of 57 ms in Social Networks.
An important caveat: medians can be misleading! An API might have a fast median latency but produce many slow outliers. These won’t affect the median, but they mean that users can experience many calls that were unacceptably slow. 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!
As so often, FTX tops the Cryptocurrency Exchange category by median latency, but this week is up to thirteenth out of 18 overall with a CASC score of 8.16, placing them to the lower end of the Green Zone. But it is still worth remembering that it’s no good just being fast if you are flakey, although being fast does help!
Worst API Ratings
Week Ending 10 August 2020
Category | Organization | CASC score |
Corporate Infrastructure | Nobody below 8.00! | |
Covid-19 | Coronavirus COVID19 API (covid19api.com) | 6.61 |
Cryptocurrency Exchanges | RadarRelay | 6.66 |
PSD2 Banks | Nobody below 8.00! | |
Search | Nobody below 8.00! | |
Social Networks | Nobody below 8.00! | |
UK Government | NHS | 7.03 |
UK Open Banking (Open Data) | HSBC | 7.93 |
US Government | Federal Communications Commission | 5.83 |
A few changes this week:
- Nobody below 8.00 in Corporate Infrastructure
- Coronavirus COVID19 API (covid19api.com) replaced Coronavirus Data API (thevirustracker.com) in Covid-19
- Nobody below 8.00 in PSD2 Banks
- HSBC replaced Bank of Ireland in UK Open Banking (Open Data)
- NHS replaced GOV.UK in UK Government
The Federal Communications Commission takes the overall loser trophy again with a pretty bad CASC score of 5.83, placing it firmly in the Red Zone.
Something of interest
GitHub is what we call a perennially performant API. Props to the people at GitHub for that. It’s not easy to maintain an API with a CASC score of over 9.50 month after month in our API ratings.
That’s one reason why you need to do active API monitoring: for that sense of reassurance that everything is going well. It’s a tough world out there for APIs and a lot of things can and do go wrong. Having one less thing to worry about because you know your APIs are performing is a weight off your mind. And you can use APImetrics to provide that reassurance.
Corporate Infrastructure is a pretty competitive category in our API ratings, with everyone (this week) having a CASC score of 8.00 or more and 11 out of 16 APIs having a CASC score of 9.00 or more. 6 APIs have a CASC score of more than 9.25. So all the more reason why you need an active API monitoring solution to make you can say competitive.
GitHub has a 100% pass rate, is the second-fastest API with a median latency of 234 ms, just behind Microsoft Office at 230 ms, and a middling number of outliers (7th out of 16). As so often, being a good all-rounder makes a great API (so not so much like bits and pieces players in cricket luckily).
One of the great things about APImetrics is that with our Insights feature we can see at a glance the most crucial information about an API endpoint, how has been behaving, and how that behavior has changed over the last week.
We can see that this particular GitHub endpoint has sped up 5.21% since last week on average. We can also see which cloud, region, country, and agent (cloud location) is causing the most trouble. WE can see that the slowest cloud, region, country, and agent are all much slower than the median latency.
You can then drill down further, as deep as individual call results to see what is really happening at whatever granularity you need.
See you again in a week as we look once more at our API ratings! And don’t miss our monthly API ratings report for July that we published recently.