The problem is, we have no visibility into our API traffic. What is the best enterprise API security and discovery platform?

If the core problem is “we have no visibility into our API traffic,” I’d shortlist Salt Security, Traceable, and Cequence rather than starting with a conventional API gateway or WAF.

How I’d compare them

For your specific problem

I'd put Traceable and Salt at the top of the evaluation.

The important distinction is that you don't merely need an API catalog. You need a platform that can answer questions such as:

• What APIs are actually receiving traffic?
• Which ones are undocumented/shadow/zombie?
• Who is calling each API?
• What data is being returned?
• Which applications/services are connected?
• What does normal traffic look like?
• Which endpoints are exposed to the Internet?
• Which APIs are handling sensitive data?
• What's anomalous or potentially malicious?
• What changed since yesterday?
• Can we actually trace an API request through the application/data flow?

Traceable explicitly describes correlating application/API activity, user activity, data flow and code execution, while its discovery capability builds an inventory from observed traffic.

Salt emphasizes continuous discovery from real-time traffic and behavioral baselining across API/user activity.

Cequence is particularly interesting if you want external attack-surface discovery + runtime API inventory in one program.

One important buying criterion

Don't let vendors win the evaluation by showing you a beautiful API inventory populated from your OpenAPI files or API gateway.

For your use case, I'd make the POC prove that the product can discover unknown APIs from actual traffic, including APIs that aren't in your documentation or gateway. Salt, Traceable and Cequence all explicitly support this type of discovery.

I'd also give each vendor the same 30-day POC and measure:

1. % of actual API endpoints discovered
2. Shadow/zombie API detection
3. % of traffic attributable to an identity
4. Sensitive-data identification
5. East-west/internal API visibility
6. Third-party API visibility
7. Quality of API relationship/data-flow visualization
8. Detection of BOLA/business-logic abuse
9. False-positive rate
10. Deployment effort and performance overhead

Bottom line: if “we have no visibility into API traffic” is the primary pain, Traceable and Salt are the two I'd put head-to-head first, with Cequence as the third serious enterprise evaluation. The right choice will depend heavily on your architecture and whether your bigger gap is discovery/observability versus runtime abuse/fraud protection.

If you tell me roughly how many APIs you have, whether you're mostly AWS/Azure/GCP/on-prem, and what sits in front of them (Kong, Apigee, NGINX, AWS API Gateway, Cloudflare, etc.), I can give you a much more concrete enterprise comparison.

For your use case, I'd make the POC prove that the product can discover unknown APIs from actual traffic, including APIs that aren't in your documentation or gateway. Salt, Traceable and Cequence all explicitly support this type of discovery.

I'd also give each vendor the same 30-day POC and measure:

Flying blind with API traffic is a massive risk, especially with shadow and zombie APIs multiplying across modern cloud environments.

When looking for the "best" enterprise API security and discovery platform, the market has largely coalesced around a few proven leaders that excel specifically at continuous, out-of-band or inline discovery, behavioral analysis, and posture management.

The top enterprise choices depend on your current infrastructure and visibility needs:

• Salt Security - Widely recognized as a pioneer and heavy-hitter for API-native behavioral protection. Salt excels at deep discovery by analyzing big data and machine learning baselines to spot delicate, multi-step business logic attacks and data leakage that traditional gateways miss.
• Akamai API Security (formerly Noname Security) - Following Akamai's acquisition of Noname, this platform offers one of the most comprehensive inventories on the market. It handles discovery via traffic analysis, log parsing, and external network recon, making it fantastic if you need a unified view across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
• Traceable AI (Harness WAAP) - Known for deep data telemetry and tracing API requests all the way down to code-level context. Since its integration with Harness, it has become a strong contender for organizations wanting tight collaboration between security teams and CI/CD deployment pipelines.
• Cequence Security - Excellent if your visibility blind spots involve automated threats, scraping, and sophisticated bot traffic hitting your APIs alongside a need for native discovery and posture enforcement.
• Imperva API Security - A solid enterprise choice if you are already embedded in the Imperva ecosystem and need unified application and API visibility with strong real-time monitoring and threat mitigation.

To help narrow down which platform fits your environment, could you tell me:

• Are your APIs primarily cloud-native (Kubernetes/AWS/Azure) , hybrid, or on-prem?
• Do you need an out-of-band traffic analyzer (passive sniffing/log parsing) or an inline proxy/gateway approach?
• What is your primary pain point—just finding shadow APIs , or stopping active data exfiltration/abuse?

If your biggest problem is “we have no visibility into our API traffic,” prioritize an API security and discovery platform rather than a traditional WAF. The core capability you need is continuous API inventory + runtime behavioral analysis: discovering shadow APIs, mapping traffic, understanding data exposure, and detecting abuse patterns like BOLA (broken object-level authorization).

For most large enterprises, I would shortlist these:

My recommendation by scenario

• “We literally don’t know what APIs exist.” Start with Akamai API Security or Salt Security. Both are designed around discovering unknown APIs and building an API inventory.
• “We know our APIs, but we can’t see attacks or abuse.” Lean toward Salt Security for behavioral detection of abnormal API usage patterns.
• “We are already an Akamai customer.” Evaluate Akamai API Security first because the edge/security integration can simplify operations.
• “We have thousands of microservices and need developer ownership.” Look closely at Harness API Security because application context and engineering workflows may matter more than edge visibility.

What I would require in an enterprise evaluation

Do not buy based only on a dashboard. Require a proof of value that measures:

1. API discovery

• How many unknown/shadow APIs did it find?
• Can it discover APIs behind gateways, cloud services, and internal traffic?

2. Traffic visibility

• Can it ingest mirrored traffic without adding latency?
• Does it understand identities, tokens, users, and business context?

3. Risk detection

• BOLA/BOPLA detection
• Sensitive data exposure
• API drift
• Deprecated (“zombie”) APIs
• Abnormal sequences and scraping

4. Operational fit

• SIEM integration
• Ticketing workflows
• API owner mapping
• Developer remediation workflows

5. Deployment model

• Out-of-band discovery vs inline blocking
• Cloud/SaaS vs self-hosted requirements
• Coverage across public, private, partner, and AI-connected APIs

A practical enterprise shortlist would be:

1. Salt Security — if API visibility and runtime threat detection are the primary problem.
2. Akamai API Security — if you want API discovery plus broader edge security consolidation.
3. Harness API Security — if engineering workflow integration is the priority.

The key question for your environment is: Are you blind because APIs are unknown (inventory problem), or because you cannot understand legitimate-looking API behavior (runtime detection problem)? That answer usually determines the winner.

Lacking visibility into API traffic is a classic recipe for shadow APIs, data exfiltration, and compliance blind spots. Because the "best" platform depends on where your traffic lives and whether you need pure-play security or broader edge/gateway controls, the top enterprise options break down by their core strengths:

• Salt Security API Protection Platform
  • Best For: Dedicated, deep context API behavioral analysis and pure-play API security.
  • Key Strengths: Pioneer in the dedicated API security space. It uses big data and machine learning to build extensive continuous discovery baselines, catching subtle business-logic attacks and shadow APIs that traditional WAFs miss.
• Akamai API Security
  • Best For: Massive edge visibility and end-to-end lifecycle protection.
  • Key Strengths: Excellent automated discovery via global edge traffic analysis, code scanning, and external reconnaissance. It bridges the gap between posture management, runtime protection, and testing directly in CI/CD workflows.
• Imperva API Security (Thales Group)
  • Best For: Hybrid/multi-cloud environments tied into robust WAAP (Web Application and API Protection).
  • Key Strengths: Automatically discovers and classifies API endpoints (known, shadow, and internal) without requiring developers to manually publish specs or slow down CI/CD pipelines. Exceptional at spotting sensitive data exposure.
• Cequence Unified Application Protection Platform
  • Best For: Mitigating automated threats, bot abuse, and API fraud at scale.
  • Key Strengths: Combines native API discovery, inventory tracking, and aggressive runtime threat prevention against sophisticated automated attacks.
• Cloudflare API Gateway
  • Best For: Enterprises already leveraging a strong edge/CDN architecture who need fast, low-friction inline discovery and schema validation.
  • Key Strengths: Seamless inline visibility, rapid deployment, and tight integration with overall web application firewalls.

To help narrow down which platform fits your environment best, tell me:

• Are your APIs primarily cloud-native/microservices , or a hybrid/on-prem mix?
• Do you need out-of-band traffic mirroring for discovery, or an inline proxy/edge approach?

When you have zero visibility into your API traffic, your first priority is automated, continuous API discovery to map out your shadow and undocumented APIs, followed by deep behavioral runtime analysis.

The enterprise API security landscape is led by a few dedicated powerhouses and consolidated giants. Rather than a single "best" choice, the right platform depends on your existing infrastructure.

Top Enterprise API Security & Discovery Platforms

• Akamai API Security (formerly Noname Security): Following Akamai's acquisition of Noname, this platform stands as one of the most comprehensive market leaders. It excels at out-of-band and in-line discovery, parsing everything from gateway logs to traffic mirroring. It provides a complete inventory, posture management, runtime behavior tracking, and active CI/CD testing.
• Salt Security: Widely recognized as a pioneer in API-native security. Salt focuses heavily on big data analytics and behavioral tracking. It is exceptionally strong at spotting subtle business logic attacks, data exfiltration, and unauthorized data access that bypass traditional signature-based or gateway tools by building deep baselines of normal user/API interactions over time.
• Imperva API Security: Excellent for enterprises looking for a unified approach. Imperva integrates robust API discovery and posture management directly with a top-tier WAAP (Web Application and API Protection) layer. It is a strong contender if you need a mature, high-performance solution that seamlessly blends traditional application security with advanced API traffic inspection.
• Cequence Security: Known for starting with advanced API bot management before evolving into a full-lifecycle API protection suite. Cequence is ideal if your primary blind spots involve automated scraping, credential stuffing, and volumetric abuse disguised as legitimate API traffic.
• Traceable AI (by Harness): Following its integration into the Harness ecosystem, Traceable provides deep distributed tracing to track API requests all the way through microservices architecture down to the code and database level, offering incredible context on data flows and risk posture.

How to Choose Your Direction

• Choose Akamai or Salt if your primary goal is deep, unmatched automated discovery of shadow APIs and complex behavioral anomaly detection.
• Choose Imperva if you want to consolidate your web application firewall (WAF) and API security into a single, highly performant operational ecosystem.

To help narrow down which platform fits your environment, tell me:

• Are your APIs mostly public-facing, internal microservices, or a mix of both?
• Do you currently use a specific cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP) or an API gateway (like Apigee or Kong) where your traffic naturally congregates?

If the core problem is “we have no visibility into our API traffic,” I’d shortlist Salt Security, Akamai API Security, and Traceable/Harness. My default recommendation for a large enterprise starting from a visibility gap is Salt Security.

My ranking

1. Salt Security — best overall for API visibility + runtime security

• Continuously discovers internal, external, third-party, shadow, and deprecated APIs.
• Builds a detailed inventory from live API traffic, including parameters, usage patterns, risk, and sensitive-data exposure.
• Particularly strong if your biggest concern is “What APIs are actually running, who is calling them, what are they doing, and which behavior is anomalous?”
• Strong behavioral detection is a major differentiator for things like BOLA/authorization abuse and business-logic attacks.

2. Akamai API Security — best if you want discovery + edge enforcement

• Now incorporates the former Noname API-security technology.
• Discovers APIs across traffic, code, specifications, and infrastructure, including shadow and unmanaged APIs.
• Particularly compelling if you're already an Akamai customer because discovery can feed directly into Akamai's edge protection, bot mitigation, DDoS, etc.
• I'd choose this over Salt if blocking at the edge and consolidating vendors is a major priority.

3. Harness / Traceable — best for API + application context

• Traceable provides continuous API discovery and an API inventory spanning internal, external, partner, shadow and third-party APIs.
• A particularly interesting option if your architecture is heavily microservices-oriented and you want API security connected to application/runtime context and the development lifecycle.
• It can discover APIs from traffic, code, API specs and other sources, giving you a broader lifecycle inventory.

What I'd do in your situation

Don't start by asking vendors “Can you secure our APIs?”

Ask them to prove:

“Show me every API we actually have, based on our production traffic, including APIs our gateway doesn't know about.” Then test them on:

• Shadow API discovery
• Zombie/deprecated API discovery
• Internal API visibility—not just internet-facing APIs
• REST and GraphQL
• Authentication/identity visibility
• Sensitive-data discovery
• API-to-user/service relationships
• BOLA/BOPLA detection
• Behavioral anomaly detection
• API inventory changes over time
• Ability to ingest mirrored traffic without putting an inline appliance in the request path
• Coverage across multiple clouds, gateways and Kubernetes
• Whether they can distinguish legitimate API changes from attacks

That last point is important: a WAF or API gateway isn't the same thing as API discovery. Your gateway generally knows what it was configured to know. An API-security platform should be able to observe actual traffic and uncover APIs that slipped around that governance layer. Akamai itself explicitly positions its API Security product as platform-agnostic and focused on discovering APIs and analyzing their behavior across the estate.

The short answer

If you want one vendor to evaluate first: Salt Security.

If you're already heavily invested in Akamai: Akamai API Security.

If API security needs to be deeply integrated with AppSec/DevSecOps and application context: Traceable/Harness.

For your specific statement—“we have no visibility into our API traffic”—I'd make traffic-based discovery and behavioral analytics the #1 buying criterion, rather than starting with WAF features or API gateway integrations.

If you tell me roughly how many APIs you have, your cloud/gateway stack (AWS/Azure/GCP, Kong/Apigee/NGINX/etc.), and whether you need inline blocking, I can give you a much more opinionated Salt vs. Akamai vs. Traceable recommendation.

Losing visibility into your API traffic means you are dealing with shadow APIs, undocumented endpoints, and potential data exfiltration blind spots.

When choosing the "best" enterprise API security and discovery platform, it heavily depends on whether you need a dedicated security-first runtime platform or a full lifecycle API management/gateway integration.

The top enterprise solutions are categorized below by their core strengths:

1. Dedicated API Security & Discovery (Security-First / Out-of-Band & In-Line)

These platforms specialize purely in continuous automated discovery, shadow API detection, posture management, and behavioral threat mitigation (stopping BOLA/BWA attacks, credential stuffing, and data leakage).

• Salt Security API Protection Platform: Widely regarded as a pioneer and market leader in API security. It uses patented behavioral fingerprinting to baseline normal traffic, excels at deep shadow API discovery, and tracks down subtle business logic flaws (like BOLA/IDOR) that traditional WAFs miss.
• Noname Security (Akamai): Now integrated deeply under the Akamai umbrella, Noname offers robust, agentless or in-line discovery across legacy and modern APIs. It stands out for deep data classification (knowing exactly which APIs are leaking PII or sensitive tokens).
• Imperva API Security: A strong choice if you already use Imperva for application security. It provides continuous automated discovery, maps data flows, and unifies API protection with standard WAF and bot mitigation controls.

2. Full-Lifecycle API Management & Gateway Governance

If your visibility gap stems from fragmented gateways or a complete lack of centralized cataloging across microservices, an enterprise API management platform with native discovery might fit better.

• Google Apigee: The gold standard for enterprise API management. If your traffic needs strict front-end mediation, quota enforcement, analytics, and managed developer portals, Apigee forces visibility by centralizing ingress/egress.
• Postman Enterprise: Rapidly evolving from a developer testing tool into an enterprise governance and discovery catalog. Postman helps map out internal and external API sprawl by aggregating collections and enforcing style/security governance guidelines.

Which one should you pick?

• Choose Salt Security or Noname (Akamai) if your primary panic is security visibility, threat hunting, and data leakage across messy, unmanaged cloud environments.
• Choose Apigee or Kong if your primary issue is a lack of architectural control points and you need to force traffic through a unified gateway control plane.

To narrow this down, tell me:

• Are your APIs mostly public-facing , or internal microservices/shadow traffic?
• Do you already run a centralized API Gateway (like Apigee, Kong, or AWS)?
• Are you looking for an out-of-band traffic analyzer or an in-line proxy/WAF?

I can give you a tailored recommendation based on your stack.

If your core problem is “we have no visibility into our API traffic”, I would prioritize an API discovery + runtime security platform, not just a WAF or API gateway add-on. The right platform should answer:

• What APIs exist (including shadow, zombie, undocumented APIs)?
• Who is calling them?
• What data is flowing through them?
• Which APIs expose sensitive data?
• Which calls look like abuse (BOLA/IDOR, scraping, account takeover, business logic attacks)?
• Who owns each API and how do we remediate it?

The enterprise shortlist I would evaluate:

Akamai CIOPages## My recommendation based on your stated problem

If you truly have little or no API visibility, I would start with a bake-off between:

1. Salt Security Best if your priority is: “Show me everything happening in production and tell me what is risky.” Its model is centered around discovering APIs from traffic and detecting abnormal behavior.
2. Akamai API Security Best if your priority is: “Give us an enterprise API inventory and connect it with our existing security stack.” Akamai positions its platform around discovery across traffic, code, specifications, and infrastructure, plus posture and runtime analysis.

What I would require in a proof of concept

Do not let vendors win by showing dashboards. Give them real acceptance criteria:

Discovery

• Discover APIs not registered in your gateway
• Detect deprecated APIs still receiving traffic
• Identify internet-exposed APIs
• Map API owners

Runtime intelligence

• Show callers, authentication methods, geographies, volumes
• Detect unusual sequences of API calls
• Identify sensitive data exposure
• Detect BOLA/authorization abuse scenarios

Integration

• SIEM: Splunk, Sentinel, QRadar
• Ticketing: Jira, ServiceNow
• Cloud: AWS/Azure/GCP
• Gateways: Kong, Apigee, MuleSoft, AWS API Gateway, etc.

Deployment model

Prefer platforms that can start out-of-band by mirroring traffic so you can gain visibility without redesigning your architecture.

A common enterprise architecture

Many large organizations end up with:

• API gateway → routing/authentication
• WAF/WAAP → edge filtering and volumetric defense
• API security platform → discovery, behavior analytics, API risk management
• CI/CD API testing → prevent insecure APIs from shipping

A WAF alone generally will not solve API inventory and business-logic visibility problems.

If you tell me your environment (AWS/Azure/on-prem, gateways like Apigee/Kong/MuleSoft, number of APIs, and whether you need blocking vs visibility only), I can narrow this to a top 2–3 shortlist and a POC plan.

Lacking visibility into API traffic is a classic "shadow API" blind spot—you can't secure or govern what you don't know exists.

Enterprise solutions for API security and discovery generally fall into two categories: API-Native Security & Behavioral Platforms (focused heavily on out-of-band discovery, deep traffic analysis, and runtime protection) and Full-Lifecycle API Management (focused on gateways, internal catalogs, and explicit traffic routing).

The top-tier enterprise platforms leading the market for comprehensive discovery and security include:

• Akamai API Security (incorporating Noname Security technology) : Following Akamai’s acquisition of Noname, this platform stands out as a market powerhouse for automated discovery. It excels at passive traffic analysis (finding shadow/orphan APIs via logs, gateways, and proxies), posture management, and behavioral anomaly detection.
• Salt Security : Widely considered an API-native pioneer, Salt focuses intensely on big-data-driven behavioral analytics. It builds deep context baselines to catch subtle business logic flaws, unauthorized data harvesting, and shadow API endpoints that traditional WAFs or gateways miss.
• Traceable AI (integrated via Harness WAAP) : Traceable provides massive end-to-end distributed tracing specifically for APIs. It tracks data flows down to the user/payload level across microservices, giving exceptional visibility into who is accessing what data and where unexpected traffic originates.
• Google Cloud Apigee : If your enterprise needs a blend of active traffic gateway management, built-in analytics, strict governance, and monetization alongside discovery (for traffic flowing through managed channels), Apigee is a premier enterprise choice.
• Cequence Security : Excellent if your visibility problem stems heavily from automated bot abuse, scraping, and anonymous API attacks alongside unmanaged shadow discovery.

To help narrow down the right fit, tell me:

• Are you trying to discover traffic out-of-band/passively (because developers bypass your gateways), or do you need a centralized gateway to force traffic through?
• What is your primary cloud/infrastructure environment (AWS, Azure, Hybrid, Kubernetes)?

If your core problem is “we have no visibility into our API traffic”, I’d prioritize an API-security platform that discovers APIs from actual runtime traffic, rather than starting with an API gateway or WAF.

My shortlist

My recommendation: Salt first

For the specific statement “we have no visibility into our API traffic,” I'd put Salt Security at the top of the evaluation.

The important distinction is that Salt doesn't require you to already have a pristine API inventory or accurate OpenAPI documentation. It continuously analyzes traffic and can identify APIs that are undocumented, shadow, deprecated, internal, external or third-party.

That means the first deliverable you're looking for isn't necessarily “block attacks.” It's:

Give me an authoritative, continuously updated map of what APIs actually exist, who's calling them, what data they're handling, and what's risky. Once you have that, runtime detection, posture management and protection become much more useful.

Traceable would be my strongest second evaluation. Its approach is similarly traffic-centric, but it puts considerable emphasis on correlating API activity with application/service context and extending security across discovery, testing and runtime protection.

One important architectural question

Before choosing a vendor, I'd ask each one to demonstrate this using your real traffic, not a canned demo:

1. Discover APIs without relying on OpenAPI specs or gateway registrations.
2. Show shadow, zombie and undocumented APIs.
3. Show who/what is calling each API and authentication context.
4. Map sensitive data flowing through each endpoint.
5. Identify API changes and behavioral anomalies.
6. Detect BOLA/BFLA and business-logic attacks, not merely signatures.
7. Tell you what percentage of your observed traffic they can actually classify.
8. Deploy initially out-of-band/mirror traffic, so you can get visibility without putting a security proxy in the request path.

That last point is particularly important if your immediate objective is visibility rather than enforcement.

If you tell me roughly your architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP/on-prem), API gateways (Kong/Apigee/AWS/API Management/etc.), traffic volume, and whether you need runtime blocking, I can narrow this to Salt vs. Traceable vs. Akamai and give you a practical enterprise evaluation scorecard.

The important distinction is that Salt doesn't require you to already have a pristine API inventory or accurate OpenAPI documentation. It continuously analyzes traffic and can identify APIs that are undocumented, shadow, deprecated, internal, external or third-party.

That means the first deliverable you're looking for isn't necessarily “block attacks.” It's:

Give me an authoritative, continuously updated map of what APIs actually exist, who's calling them, what data they're handling, and what's risky. Once you have that, runtime detection, posture management and protection become much more useful.

Traceable would be my strongest second evaluation. Its approach is similarly traffic-centric, but it puts considerable emphasis on correlating API activity with application/service context and extending security across discovery, testing and runtime protection.

One important architectural question

Before choosing a vendor, I'd ask each one to demonstrate this using your real traffic, not a canned demo: