List of the Top 8 API Security Software for NGINX in 2025

Enhance the security of your APIs by conducting thorough analyses and safeguarding them through passive, inline, or API-driven integration with various network elements, including API gateways, proxies, or CDNs. Utilizing predefined policies that have been meticulously adjusted according to prevalent threat patterns, which have effectively safeguarded billions of API transactions daily, ensures unparalleled defense. A robust API-centric architecture paired with a comprehensive user interface facilitates seamless integration with threat intelligence feeds and additional security measures. Moreover, a patented machine learning-based analysis method mitigates the drawbacks of JavaScript integration, such as slow page loading times, prolonged development cycles, and the necessity for mobile app updates. This ML-driven approach creates a distinctive Behavioral Footprint that helps in recognizing harmful intentions while consistently monitoring attackers as they adapt their strategies, reinforcing the overall security framework. With these advanced technologies at your disposal, organizations can significantly bolster their API security posture against evolving threats.

Introducing the leading API security platform that understands the context of the industry. Traceable detects all your APIs, assesses their risk levels, prevents API-related attacks that can result in data breaches, and offers analytics for both threat detection and investigative purposes. By utilizing our platform, you can efficiently identify, oversee, and protect every aspect of your APIs, while also enabling rapid deployment and seamless scalability to adapt to your organization's evolving requirements. This comprehensive approach ensures that your API security remains robust in the face of emerging threats.

Resurface serves as a specialized tool for runtime API security, enabling continuous scanning that facilitates immediate detection and response to potential threats and vulnerabilities. Designed specifically for API data, it captures every request and response payload, including those from GraphQL, allowing users to quickly identify possible risks and failures. With its real-time alert system, Resurface notifies users about data breaches, providing zero-day detection capabilities. Additionally, it aligns with the OWASP Top 10, offering alerts on various threats while employing comprehensive security patterns. As a self-hosted solution, it ensures that all data remains first-party and secure. Unique in its capabilities, Resurface can conduct extensive inspections at scale, efficiently detecting active attacks as it processes millions of API calls. Leveraging advanced machine learning models, it identifies unusual patterns and recognizes low-and-slow attack strategies, enhancing overall API security measures. This combination of features makes Resurface a crucial tool for any organization serious about safeguarding their APIs and mitigating risks.

Akto is a rapid, open-source API security platform that enables users to set up in just one minute. Security teams utilize Akto to keep an ongoing inventory of APIs, assess them for vulnerabilities, and identify issues during runtime. The platform includes tests for all categories from the OWASP Top 10 and HackerOne Top 10, such as Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA), authentication flaws, Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF), Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and various security configurations. With its robust testing engine, Akto conducts a range of business logic tests by analyzing traffic data to discern API usage patterns, effectively minimizing false positives. Additionally, Akto supports integration with a variety of traffic sources, including Burpsuite, AWS, Postman, GCP, and various gateways, enhancing its usability across different environments. This adaptability makes Akto a valuable tool for ensuring the security of APIs in diverse operational settings.

Wallarm delivers automated, real-time defense for web applications, microservices, and APIs through its sophisticated WAF, API protection, automated incident management, and asset discovery features. This solution successfully shields digital assets from the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, bot threats, and misuse of applications without the need for manual rule configurations, all while achieving an impressively low false positive rate. The platform is crafted for easy deployment across leading cloud services such as AWS, GCP, and Azure, as well as within hybrid cloud infrastructures. Furthermore, it is natively compatible with Kubernetes and service mesh frameworks, enhancing its adaptability in various environments. Wallarm also incorporates dynamic rules to mitigate account takeover (ATO) and credential stuffing risks, making it an ideal option for DevSecOps teams focused on secure cloud-native application development. Additionally, Wallarm’s API security features are designed to integrate smoothly with top API gateway solutions, facilitating straightforward installation regardless of a company's existing setup. Importantly, the extensive functionalities offered by Wallarm guarantee that security is integrated into the development process right from the outset, thereby reinforcing the overall integrity of applications.

Strengthen your application security and protect your APIs with AppSec powered by contextual AI. Safeguard your web applications from emerging threats with a fully automated, cloud-native security solution that eliminates the need for tedious manual rule adjustments and exception drafting whenever changes are made to your applications or APIs. As modern applications demand sophisticated security strategies, it’s essential to defend against vulnerabilities effectively. With CloudGuard, you can shield your web applications and APIs, minimize false positives, and counter automated attacks targeting your business. The platform employs contextual AI to precisely eliminate threats autonomously, adapting as your application landscape changes. It’s crucial to protect your web applications against the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, and CloudGuard AppSec excels in this area. From setup through ongoing management, the system conducts thorough evaluations of every user, transaction, and URL to produce a risk score that effectively stops attacks while minimizing false alarms. Impressively, all CloudGuard clients report having fewer than five rule exceptions per deployment, underscoring the system's effectiveness. By choosing CloudGuard, you can be confident that your security measures will keep pace with your applications, providing not only robust protection but also a sense of security in an ever-evolving digital landscape. Furthermore, this seamless integration allows for continuous improvement, ensuring your defenses remain strong against new threats.

Open-appsec is an innovative open-source project that leverages machine learning to deliver proactive security measures for web applications and APIs, safeguarding against the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities as well as zero-day exploits. This system can be seamlessly integrated as an add-on to Kubernetes Ingress, NGINX, Envoy, and various API Gateways. The core engine of open-appsec observes typical user interactions with your web application, utilizing this behavior data to identify any requests that deviate from established norms, subsequently forwarding these anomalies for further scrutiny to determine their potential maliciousness. To achieve this, open-appsec employs two distinct machine learning models: 1. A supervised model developed offline, drawing insights from millions of both malicious and harmless requests. 2. An unsupervised model that evolves in real time within the protected environment, focusing on the unique traffic patterns of that specific setting. In addition to its robust detection capabilities, open-appsec streamlines maintenance by eliminating the need for frequent threat signature updates and exception management, which are often prerequisites in many conventional WAF solutions. Overall, open-appsec not only enhances security but also reduces the complexity typically associated with managing web application firewalls.

Theom is a cutting-edge solution for cloud data security that aims to discover and protect various forms of data stored in cloud environments, APIs, and messaging systems. Acting like a dedicated bodyguard for vital information, Theom guarantees that security protocols are uniformly enforced across all data, regardless of how or where it is accessed. By employing agentless scanning techniques alongside natural language processing classifiers, Theom proficiently detects personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), financial records, and trade secrets, while also supporting tailored taxonomies for specific needs. Moreover, it uncovers dark data—unused information that often goes unnoticed—and shadow data, which possesses a different security posture than its original counterpart. Theom demonstrates exceptional capability in pinpointing sensitive items, such as developer keys, within APIs and message queues. In order to help organizations prioritize potential threats, it evaluates the financial implications associated with their data. Additionally, Theom intricately maps the relationships among datasets, access identities, and their security attributes, thereby exposing possible vulnerabilities that may exist. By visualizing how critical data is accessed by various identities, including users and roles, Theom offers a detailed understanding of security characteristics, such as user locations and abnormal access behaviors. This comprehensive and strategic approach not only enhances data protection but also empowers organizations to make well-informed choices about their overall data security frameworks. Ultimately, Theom serves as an indispensable tool for navigating the complexities of cloud data security.