As we stagger out of the first month of the 2020s, the time has come for us to inform you about the State of the APIs, not just in the last week, but over the whole of January. We recently launched API.expert as a simple way to provide everybody with insights into the API economy and the leading APIs 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!
Each week, month and year we’ll look at the APIs we track in a variety of sectors for their quality (using our patent pending CASC score) and other factors like uptime and availability.
If something is missing that you think should be here, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!
Now, onto what the last seven days and last month can tells us about where the world of APIs is in early 2020.
API Performance Headlines
We look at over 200 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.
We do see that certain providers consistently vie for top spot in their category including Twitter, Slack and Github with others doing less well such as Cisco’s Spark services.
Top Performers based on overall quality in each category were:
CASC score
Week ending February 3, 2020
| Category | Organization | CASC score |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate Infrastructure | GitHub | 955 |
| Cryptocurrency Exchanges | LATOKEN | 953 |
| PSD2 Banks | BNP Paribas |
962 |
| Search | 950 | |
| Social Networks | Google (including YouTube) |
951 |
| UK Government | Police.UK | 936 |
| UK Open Banking (Open Data) | Bank of Ireland | 972 |
| US Government | General Services Administration | 968 |
CASC score
Month of January 2020
| Category | Organization | CASC score |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate Infrastructure | Slack | 948 |
| Cryptocurrency Exchanges | LATOKEN | 928 |
| PSD2 Banks | Railsbank | 942 |
| Search | 929 | |
| Social Networks | 945 | |
| UK Government | Police.UK | 936 |
| UK Open Banking (Open Data) | Bank of Ireland | 962 |
| US Government | General Services Administration | 954 |
The Bank of Ireland is once again the best overall this week and also takes the mantle for the month. Bank of Ireland has been getting better week on week. It will be fascinating to see how high they can go. LATOKEN takes back the top spot in Cryptocurrency Exchanges as we predicted last week. A CASC score of over 900 is very good and one of 950 or more exceptional. Six of the nine categories are headed by organization with a CASC score of 950 or more this week, which is a very good showing. Sustaining a CASC score of >925 over a month is a good showing and congratulations to those organizations that achieved it.
Top performers by latency
Week Ending 3 February 2020
| Category | Organization | Median latency |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate Infrastruture | GitHub | 235 ms |
| Cryptocurrency Exchanges | FTX | 251 ms |
| PSD2 banks | BNP Paribas | 139 ms |
| Search | Foursquare | 408 ms |
| Social Networks | 131 ms | |
| UK Government | Police.UK | 82 ms |
| UK Open banking (Open Data) | HSBC | 83 ms |
| US Government | Department of Justice | 74 ms |
Month of January 2020
| Category | Organization | Median latency |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate Infrastruture | Slack | 190 ms |
| Cryptocurrency Exchanges | FTX | 249 ms |
| PSD2 banks | BNP Paribas | 134 ms |
| Search | 414 ms | |
| Social Networks | 136 ms | |
| UK Government | Police.UK | 82 ms |
| UK Open banking (Open Data) | HSBC | 87 ms |
| US Government | Department of Justice | 67 ms |
FTX remain fastest in Cryptocurrency Exchanges despite LATOKEN reclaiming the overall top spot. 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! FTX might have a low latency, but they also have a lot of outliers, which is why the rank only 13th out of 18 in terms of the CASC score.
Worst quality across all categories
Week ending February 3, 2020
| Category | Organization | CASC Score |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate Infrastructure | Mailchimp | 838 |
| Cryptocurrency Exchanges | Oasis Dex | 694 |
| PSD2 banks | Visa | 616 |
| Search | Foursquare | 906 |
| Social Networks | Tumblr | 798 |
| UK Government | NHS | 548 |
| UK Open banking (Open Data) | Halifax | 727 |
| US Government | NASA | 561 |
Month of January 2020
| Category | Organization | CASC Score |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate Infrastructure | Cisco Spark | 700 |
| Cryptocurrency Exchanges | Oasis Dex | 385 |
| PSD2 banks | Visa | 541 |
| Search | Foursquare | 867 |
| Social Networks | Soundcloud | 861 |
| UK Government | NHS | 548 |
| UK Open banking (Open Data) | Halifax | 665 |
| US Government | Department of Commerce | 402 |
Something of interest
Of all the APIs we looked at, Bank of Ireland has the best CASC score over the whole of January. What makes it so good? If we look at the Top Ten banks by CASC score, we can see that it is not the fastest, although a median latency of just over 200 ms is perfectly fine. Other banks also have 100% availability. But where the Bank of Ireland really shines is in reliability. It has only 0.17% of outliers, which is significantly fewer than even the best of the other banks. It is this ironclad reliability that is the key to a quality API. As with the Tortoise and Achilles, the slower of the two can still win, if he always gets there.
See you again in a week to see who have been the movers and shakers of the first full week of February.
