Migrate from Apigee to Gravitee

Migrate from Apigee to Gravitee: what the move involves

Moving from Apigee to Gravitee API Management is a rebuild of proxies, API products and subscriptions, not a file copy. Gravitee has its own API definitions, plans and subscriptions, so each Apigee proxy, shared flow and product has to be re-expressed in Gravitee's model and tested again. The effort depends on how many policies each proxy uses, how much custom logic sits in them, and which Enterprise features the team needs. Teams that want one self-hosted product for the gateway, Console UI and Portal UI should start by inventorying Apigee proxies, products, apps and developer accounts, then sorting them by policy complexity. The work usually falls to three groups. The platform team deploys and operates the gateway, management API and MongoDB backend, using the Helm chart or Docker Compose setup described in the Gravitee repository. The security team defines authentication, key handling, IP and geographic controls, and audit requirements, and checks each rebuilt policy against the Apigee original. The API product team maps products to Gravitee plans, approval flows and documentation in the Portal. A systems integrator or implementation partner can take on part of this under a written, fixed scope, but the client should still own the mapping decisions and the acceptance tests.

Start the licensing decision before the design is final. The Apache-2.0 Community Edition covers the core: the gateway, management backend, Console UI and Portal UI. Gravitee's documentation states that the Enterprise Edition requires a license, and the Enterprise features include event endpoints such as Kafka, MQTT5, RabbitMQ and JMS, Server-Sent Events and Webhook entrypoints, audit trails of API consumption, data masking, GeoIP filtering, Dynamic Client Registration, the enterprise policy pack, Redis caching and the LLM and MCP proxies. Map each Apigee feature you rely on against that list. Where an Apigee policy has no Community equivalent, decide whether to license Enterprise, write a custom policy, or drop the feature. Ask Gravitee to confirm current license terms and any support options in writing, because feature lists change between releases.

How Apigee capabilities map to Gravitee

This table maps the main Apigee capabilities to their closest Gravitee API Management equivalents and marks each row as a clean move, a rework item or a gap. Use it to scope the migration and to see which needs fall under the Enterprise license. Confirm exact policy parity in the Gravitee documentation for every policy you use before estimating effort.

Apigee capability	Gravitee equivalent	Migration note
Proxies and flows	APIs with entrypoints, endpoints and a flow designer on the gateway	Needs rework: recreate each proxy and its request and response flows, then test each route against the existing backends
Policies (shared flows, mediation, security)	Gravitee policies applied per flow, with the enterprise policy pack for some features	Needs rework: confirm exact policy parity in the Gravitee documentation for each policy in use, and rebuild any custom JavaScript or Java logic
API products and plans	API plans attached to published APIs, with access controlled through subscriptions	Needs rework: map each Apigee product's quotas, approval mode and visibility to Gravitee plans and subscriptions
Apps, developers and API keys	Applications and subscriptions in the Portal, with API keys or OAuth2 and JWT for consumers	Needs rework: developer accounts and credentials do not migrate automatically, so plan a reissue or rotation with consumers
Developer portal	Portal UI, a catalog of APIs with documentation, subscriptions and access requests	Clean for catalog and docs, but branding, custom pages and approval flows need rebuilding and testing
Analytics and monitoring	Gateway analytics in the Console, with audit trails and Cloud Reporter on the Enterprise license	Gap for some reports: confirm which dashboards, retention and business reports you need and whether the Enterprise license covers them
Deployment and runtime	Self-hosted through Docker Compose with MongoDB, or a Helm chart for Kubernetes including EKS, GKE, AKS and OpenShift	Clean in principle: deploy the gateway and management API in your own cloud or data center, and confirm the supported topology for your environment
Event and streaming endpoints	Kafka, MQTT5, RabbitMQ, JMS, Solace, Azure Service Bus, SSE and webhook entrypoints on the Enterprise license	Gap on Community: these endpoints need the Enterprise license, so confirm licensing before designing event-driven APIs
Security features (masking, GeoIP, client registration)	Data masking, GeoIP filtering and Dynamic Client Registration on the Enterprise license	Gap on Community: if Apigee relies on these, treat them as licensed scope and confirm them with Gravitee before cutover

How API products and apps become Gravitee plans and subscriptions

The core design decision is how Apigee API products map to Gravitee plans. In Apigee, an API product bundles proxies with quotas, scopes and access rules, and developer apps subscribe to those products to receive keys. In Gravitee APIM, the equivalent unit is a plan attached to an API, and a consumer application subscribes to a plan to get access. The practical rule is to create one Gravitee plan per commercial or access tier, not one per Apigee product, because several Apigee products often differ only by the proxies they include. Before design freeze, list every Apigee product, note its quota and approval settings, and group products that share the same limits and approval flow into a single plan. Each group then becomes a candidate plan that your API owners sign off on. Confirm in the Gravitee documentation which plan types and security options are available in your APIM version, since plan configuration differs by deployment and edition.

Existing app keys are the highest-risk part of cutover, because client applications hold credentials that stop working when traffic moves. Gravitee does not, to the knowledge of this page, offer an automated import of Apigee developer apps and keys, so do not plan a bulk conversion without first verifying it in the documentation. A safer pattern is to have each application owner re-register or re-subscribe in Gravitee, then run the old and new keys in parallel through a defined window, with a named owner tracking which apps have moved. Ask Gravitee whether consumer keys can be carried over or must be reissued, and whether the Portal supports self-service subscription with manual approval where Apigee used an approval flow. Document, for each app, its Apigee product, its Gravitee plan, its key status and its cutover date in one register so no consumer is left unaccounted for when the Apigee environment is retired.

What to export and what to rebuild

Moving from Apigee to Gravitee is mostly a question of which Apigee objects you can carry across as files and which you must rebuild by hand in the Gravitee Console. The cards below follow the order most migrations take, starting with the proxy bundles that serve as your source of truth and ending with the event integrations that may need an Enterprise license.

Export proxy bundles first

Treat exported Apigee proxy bundles as the source of truth for flows, policies and endpoint definitions before any Gravitee work starts. Keep every revision you still serve, not only the deployed one, so you can compare behavior during parallel running. Store the bundles in your own version control. Then read each bundle and list the policies it calls, because those policies decide how much of the logic maps directly to Gravitee policies and how much needs redesign. Use the export guide for the exact steps and IAM permissions.

Inventory products, apps and developers

Apigee API products bundle proxies, quotas and access rules, and developer apps hold the credentials that consumers use. Export these lists before cutover and record which apps are active, which keys are approved, and which developers own them. In Gravitee, the closest equivalents are plans and subscriptions, so each Apigee product needs a planned mapping to one or more Gravitee plans. Confirm how quotas and approval flows translate, because a product that auto-approves keys in Apigee may need a manual approval step in Gravitee.

Rebuild target endpoints and backend security

Apigee target endpoints, TLS settings and backend credentials do not move as-is into Gravitee. Recreate each backend connection in the Gravitee API definition, including certificates, timeouts and any credential the proxy injected, such as keys held in Apigee KVMs or target server configuration. Store those secrets in your secrets manager rather than in plain configuration. Test each backend from the Gravitee gateway in the target network, because routing and firewall rules often differ from the Apigee runtime.

Reconnect identity providers

Apigee commonly authenticates consumers with OAuth tokens or API keys, and some organizations also apply SSO to the developer portal. Gravitee supports OAuth2 and JWT validation at the gateway and its own user management for the Console and Portal, so decide which identity source is authoritative for each audience. Document the token issuer, audience, scopes and claim names used today, then configure Gravitee to accept the same tokens. Confirm with your identity team which login methods the Console and Portal need before you publish either.

Rebuild alerts and reporting

Alerts and reports in Apigee are often tied to its analytics and to notifications configured by the platform team. Gravitee provides its own alerting and reporting features, but the Alert Engine and Cloud Reporter are listed among Enterprise Edition features, so confirm which of your alerts need them. Inventory every alert threshold, its recipient and its runbook, then recreate them in the target tooling and test each one with a simulated error. Plan the metrics pipeline in advance so historical comparisons are still possible after cutover.

Event integrations need Enterprise endpoints

If Apigee fronts event brokers or messaging, such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, MQTT or JMS, verify those endpoints before you commit to a plan. Gravitee lists Kafka publish and subscribe over HTTP and WebSocket, MQTT5, RabbitMQ, Solace, JMS, Azure Service Bus, Server-Sent Events and Webhook entrypoints as Enterprise Edition features. Community Edition may cover only your HTTP proxies, so map each event flow to an entrypoint and confirm the license scope with Gravitee before you rely on it. The Enterprise Edition documentation lists the features in full.

Migration sequence from inventory to decommission

This sequence moves Apigee APIs to Gravitee one API at a time, with a pilot, a parallel run and a rollback path at every cutover, so that Apigee is retired only after the new gateway has carried production traffic and the agreed retention period has passed.

Inventory proxies, products, apps and policies
The platform owner exports every API proxy, its revisions, API products, developer apps, keys, quotas and the policies and shared flows each proxy calls, using the Apigee management API or apigeecli. Each environment is listed separately, and each item is tagged with its owner, consumers, traffic level and whether it depends on a custom Java callout or a Enterprise-only feature in Gravitee. The step closes with an inventory register that maps every Apigee product to a planned Gravitee API, plan and subscription. Ask your Google contact or integrator to confirm which export format your Apigee deployment supports before the work starts.
Pilot one representative API with a plan and subscription
Choose one API that has real consumers but a contained blast radius, and rebuild it in a non-production Gravitee environment. Recreate the Apigee product as a Gravitee API with a plan, a subscription and the same authentication method, then replay representative requests and compare responses, headers and error codes with Apigee. Developers from one consuming team test their existing keys or migrated credentials. The step closes with a pilot sign-off record listing the tests run, the known differences and the owners who accepted them.
Run Apigee and Gravitee in parallel with a traffic split
Deploy the Gravitee gateway in the same network zone as the Apigee runtime and route a small share of each environment's traffic to it through the DNS, load balancer or upstream routing you already use. Start in non-production, then move to production only after the pilot sign-off. Compare latency, error rates, rate-limit behavior and backend load between the two gateways, and check that audit and analytics data reach the reporting tools your team uses. The step closes with a parallel-run metrics report that shows where the two gateways agree and where they do not.
Cut over each API with a documented rollback
Move one API at a time from Apigee to Gravitee, after the parallel-run metrics for that API are acceptable to the owner. Before each change, record the routing configuration that sends traffic to Apigee, so the same change can be reversed in minutes. Notify the registered consumers, update their base URLs if the host changes, and watch the error budget and consumer support tickets for an agreed period after the switch. The step closes with a cutover record per API that lists the change time, the approver, the rollback steps and the post-change check results.
Decommission Apigee after the retention period
When every API has run on Gravitee for the retention period your compliance and audit owners agreed, export final Apigee configuration, analytics and audit records to archive storage the organization controls. Then stop routing traffic to Apigee, disable the environments, and remove keys and service accounts that only Apigee used. Confirm with your Apigee contract owner which records, subscriptions and billing items must be closed. The step closes with a retirement checklist signed by the platform owner and the security lead, listing the archived artifacts, revoked credentials and confirmed contract closure.

What drives cost and duration

This table lists the factors that change the effort of moving from Apigee to Gravitee APIM, and how to keep each one contained. Read it before requesting a quote, because the scope of each row decides which work the quote must include. Apigee's charges are unrelated to the open-source license cost analysis, so the main takeaway is that effort and Gravitee licensing costs are driven by your own estate and feature choices.

Driver	Why it matters	How to reduce it
Number and complexity of policies	Each Apigee policy, shared flow and conditional flow must be mapped to a Gravitee policy or rebuilt, and some logic may need custom work. Complex mediation usually dominates the effort.	Export proxy bundles first, inventory policies by type, and migrate the simplest APIs as a pilot before complex ones.
Enterprise feature needs	Features such as Kafka, MQTT, RabbitMQ, JMS, data masking, GeoIP filtering, Redis caching and the Alert Engine sit in the Enterprise Edition and need a Gravitee Enterprise License. Confirm each need against the Enterprise Edition documentation.	List every Apigee feature in use, mark which ones Community Edition covers, and ask the vendor to quote only the Enterprise features you require.
Identity integration	Apigee apps, keys and OAuth flows must map to the identity provider used by Gravitee subscriptions and the developer portal. Token validation and client registration rules often need rework.	Decide the identity provider and client registration model before migration, and test token flows with a small set of consuming applications.
Number of environments	Each Apigee environment and its target servers, keystores and configuration must be recreated and kept in step across development, test and production.	Standardize deployment with Helm or Docker Compose templates, and reduce the number of environments to those you truly need during cutover.
Developer and partner migration	Consumers must re-register, receive new keys or subscriptions, and update endpoints. Partners with contractual quotas or notice periods can slow the schedule.	Map Apigee products and apps to Gravitee plans and subscriptions early, announce changes with notice, and run old and new gateways in parallel.
Analytics and reporting rebuild	Apigee analytics dashboards and business reports do not transfer automatically. Reporting pipelines and alerts must be rebuilt on the Gravitee side or on your observability stack.	Define the reports that matter to finance and operations first, then decide whether to use the Alert Engine, Cloud Reporter or an external stack.
Internal skills	Platform, security and API teams need working knowledge of Gravitee configuration, the management API and gateway operations. Gaps in skills extend the schedule and raise dependence on outside help.	Ask the implementation partner to include knowledge transfer and runbooks in the written scope, and train two or more staff on the console and gateway.

What usually goes wrong and how to prevent it

Most failed Apigee to Gravitee moves fail in predictable places: runtime behavior, credentials, licensing assumptions, reporting, rollback and deployment hardening. Each card names one risk and the check that prevents it, so the migration plan can assign an owner to every item before traffic moves.

Policies that behave differently at runtime

An Apigee policy and a Gravitee policy with a similar name can differ in ordering, variable scope, error responses and default limits. A mediation flow that passes in a sandbox can change status codes or headers once it runs behind the production gateway. Replay a recorded set of production requests through both gateways and compare responses byte for byte, including error paths, before any consumer is pointed at Gravitee.

Developers losing keys or subscriptions

Apigee app keys, product entitlements and approval states do not transfer by themselves. If consumer keys are reissued at cutover, every integration that hardcodes an old key stops working on the day of the switch. Map each Apigee API product and app to a Gravitee plan and subscription in a spreadsheet, confirm that existing keys can be carried over or rotated on a schedule, and notify each consuming team with a deadline.

Enterprise features assumed to be in Community

Teams often assume the Community Edition covers everything they used in Apigee. Gravitee documents that the Enterprise Edition requires a license and lists features such as audit trails, data masking, GeoIP filtering, Redis caching, the Alert Engine and event endpoints like Kafka, RabbitMQ and MQTT5 as Enterprise features. Inventory every policy and endpoint type in use, mark each as Community or Enterprise, and get the license decision in writing before the design is signed off.

Analytics gaps after cutover

Apigee dashboards, custom reports and any API Analytics add-on feed business and operations teams who notice quickly when charts go blank. Gravitee's reporting and audit features depend on the edition and the data store you choose, so historical traffic does not carry over automatically. Before cutover, list every dashboard, alert and monthly report, confirm which ones Gravitee produces natively, and export the Apigee history you must retain to your own storage.

Untested rollback

A rollback path that has never been run is a hope, not a plan. If Gravitee misbehaves for one API or one consumer, the team needs to route that traffic back to Apigee within a defined window without losing requests or subscription changes made in the meantime. Rehearse the reverse DNS or route switch in a staging environment, time it, and record who has authority to trigger it and which consumers must be told.

Helm or Docker Compose without hardening

Gravitee's documentation lists a Helm chart for Kubernetes and a Docker Compose setup with MongoDB, which suit evaluation and lab work. A production deployment still needs TLS termination, secret storage outside values files, backup and restore of the management database, resource limits, network policies and a tested upgrade path. Ask the Gravitee team which configuration is supported for your topology, and treat the Compose file as a starting point for a hardening review rather than a production template.

How the move differs by starting point

Apigee documentation states that Apigee Edge for Private Cloud 4.53.01, first released on August 26, 2025, reaches end of life on June 30, 2027, after which Apigee stops providing bug fixes, security updates, hotfixes or patches for that version line. Continuous support requires running a version within its 18-month full support window, so the deadline sets the schedule for this group more than any feature gap does. Your first decision is whether a Gravitee cutover can finish before the end of life or whether a short-term upgrade path is needed to keep the current estate supported while the migration runs.

Fixed deadline: Plan the cutover backward from June 30, 2027, and confirm with Apigee which upgrade or support options remain available to you.
Self-run runtime: Your gateway already runs on your infrastructure, so the move is mostly a control plane and portal replacement, not a hosting change.
Export first: Export proxy bundles and product definitions while the Edge management API is still reachable, since that data is the input to Gravitee APIs and plans.
Licensing: Gravitee Community Edition covers the gateway, Console and Portal, but any Enterprise-only feature you rely on needs a Gravitee Enterprise License before go-live.

Confirm the exact support terms for your contract and the upgrade path to 4.54.00 with your Apigee account team before you set internal dates.

Questions teams ask before moving from Apigee to Gravitee

How much effort does a move from Apigee to Gravitee take?

Effort depends mostly on how many proxies, policies, products and developer applications you run, and on how much of that logic relies on Apigee-specific policies that must be rebuilt. No effort figure is published in the sources we rely on, so ask for one only after an inventory. Start by counting API proxies per environment, listing each policy type in use, and noting which API products carry active subscriptions. Proxies with simple routing and authentication move quickly. Proxies with custom JavaScript, Java callouts or complex shared flows take longer because their behavior has to be reproduced and tested in Gravitee policies or flows.

How long does a migration from Apigee to Gravitee usually take?

The duration depends on scope, team size and how much testing your change process requires, and no duration is supplied for this migration. Plan in phases: inventory and mapping first, then a pilot API in a non-production environment, then environment-by-environment cutover with traffic kept on Apigee until each group of APIs passes testing. Your timeline should also account for the time developers need to re-register applications and update credentials. Ask any implementation partner to propose a timeline in the written scope, with each phase and its exit criteria listed.

Can our internal team migrate from Apigee to Gravitee without outside help?

A team with gateway operations and Kubernetes or Docker experience can run a pilot alone, but a production cutover of many APIs usually benefits from outside help with inventory, policy mapping and testing. Gravitee's Apache-2.0 repository and its documented Helm chart and Docker Compose options make a self-hosted install approachable. The harder work is translating Apigee policy logic, aligning security controls and running cutover rehearsals. Assess your team's experience with each of those tasks before deciding. DeployOpen plans, implements and supports self-hosted platforms in your own infrastructure under a fixed scope agreed in writing, so you can decide which parts to keep in-house.

What does the Gravitee Enterprise license cover that Community Edition does not?

The Enterprise Edition requires a Gravitee license and adds features that the Community Edition does not include. According to Gravitee's documentation, these include Kafka publish and subscribe over HTTP and WebSocket, Azure Service Bus, MQTT5, RabbitMQ, Solace and JMS endpoints, Server-Sent Events and Webhook entrypoints, and audit trails of API consumption and activity. It also includes data masking, GeoIP filtering, Dynamic Client Registration, an enterprise policy pack, the Alert Engine, Redis caching, Cloud Reporter, and Agent-to-Agent, LLM and MCP proxies. Map each Apigee feature you rely on against this list before budgeting, and confirm current terms with Gravitee.

Is Gravitee Community Edition enough to replace Apigee?

Community Edition may be enough for gateway routing, authentication and basic API lifecycle needs, but it is not enough if you depend on the Enterprise features listed in the license documentation. Check each Apigee capability your teams use, including event-based endpoints, audit trails of API activity, data masking and any custom policy logic. Any capability that only exists in the Enterprise Edition needs a license decision before the migration plan is final. Confirm your entitlement with Gravitee rather than assuming a feature is available in the open-source build.

How do we move developers, applications and subscriptions to Gravitee?

Developers move through the Gravitee Portal UI, which provides a catalog of APIs with documentation, so the work is mostly mapping and communication. Map Apigee API products to Gravitee plans, then map developer apps to subscriptions, carrying over quotas and approval flows where they apply. Plan for applications to re-subscribe and obtain new credentials unless you can preserve keys, which must be verified in a pilot. Announce a dated window, keep the old Apigee endpoints running during overlap, and give consumers a checklist for updating base URLs and API keys.

How do Gravitee deployment options differ for a regulated team?

Gravitee documents SaaS, hybrid and fully self-hosted deployment for Enterprise customers, while the Community Edition is self-hosted. For a team that wants data to stay in its own environment, the self-hosted route runs the gateway, management backend, Console and Portal in your infrastructure. The README lists Docker Compose with MongoDB and a Helm chart for Kubernetes, including AKS, GKE, EKS and OpenShift, as ways to run APIM. Confirm which deployment modes your license permits and which components store data where before you design network zones and backups.

What should we ask for in a quote before starting?

Ask for a written scope that lists the inventory method, the APIs and environments in scope, the policy mapping approach, the cutover plan and the testing and rollback criteria. Request a line-item breakdown separating platform licensing from implementation, integration, hardening, backup, documentation and ongoing support. Ask which items are one-time and which recur, which Gravitee license tier each feature requires, and who is responsible for Gravitee license procurement. Also ask what happens if the inventory reveals more policy work than planned. DeployOpen provides quotes from a written scope, so the more complete your inventory, the more precise the quote.

How DeployOpen scopes and runs the migration

DeployOpen is a Chainscore Labs company that plans, implements, integrates, hardens, documents and supports self-hosted open-source platforms inside the client's own infrastructure. For a move from Apigee to Gravitee, that means the work covers the Gravitee gateway, the management API backend, the Console UI for administrators and the Portal UI for developers, deployed into the cloud accounts, data center or air-gapped network the client already controls. Most engagements start with a written scope that names which Apigee proxies, API products, applications and developer accounts move, which Gravitee plans and subscriptions they map to, and which Gravitee Enterprise Edition features, if any, are in or out. The scope is the document that decides what the client pays for, so it should be settled before any configuration is built.

Engagements are fixed-scope. The written agreement sets out deliverables and timelines for each phase, such as exporting Apigee assets, rebuilding policies in Gravitee, running parallel traffic and cutting over one environment at a time. Your team should ask for the deliverables to be listed per environment, the acceptance criteria for each, and the named Gravitee features that depend on an Enterprise License, so the license decision is made in writing rather than discovered during testing. Where a Gravitee feature is not confirmed for your deployment model (self-hosted, hybrid or SaaS), the scope should record it as an open item for confirmation with Gravitee before work begins.

Your organization keeps control of the production environment throughout. DeployOpen works in the environments the client grants access to, and the client's staff hold the decisions on production changes, secrets, certificates and traffic routing. Ongoing support, upgrades and continuous testing after cut-over are available as retainers, which suit teams that need the Gravitee gateway patched and tracked against new releases, such as the core_4.13.1 tag listed in the Gravitee repository. DeployOpen does not publish a price list, so ask for a quote based on the written scope, and ask the vendor which Enterprise License terms apply to your deployment before the quote is finalized.

Migrate from Apigee to Gravitee