Best API Security Tools (2026): Top 10 Compared

Salt Security, based in Palo Alto, California, states that it has secured APIs since 2016 and reports more than 100 enterprise deployments. Its use-case pages cover discovering all APIs, API posture management, stopping behavioural API attacks and extending data security to APIs.

The current product is the Agentic Security Platform. Salt describes an Agentic Security Graph that maps relationships between language models, MCP servers and the APIs they invoke, built from code through to runtime. Three modules sit on top. Agentic Security Posture Management inventories agents, MCP servers and models and flags shadow MCP servers and over-permissioned agents. AI Detection and Response looks for prompt injection, unsanctioned model use and sensitive data in model calls. Agentic Detection and Response baselines agent behaviour and blocks machine-speed attacks.

The Illuminate layer connects findings to existing tools, enriching SIEM alerts, opening Jira tickets and passing blocks to a firewall. Salt maps governance evidence to the EU AI Act, NIST and SOC 2.

Akamai API Security is the product Akamai built from its 2024 acquisition of Noname Security. Noname is no longer sold under its own name, and the capabilities now sit within Akamai's security portfolio.

Akamai organises the product around four stages. Discover builds a continuously updated inventory from traffic, code, specifications, gateways, cloud and external exposure, including shadow, zombie and unmanaged APIs and APIs connected to generative AI services and MCP servers. Test runs more than 200 API security tests in CI/CD and pre-production. Detect analyses runtime behaviour for business logic abuse, data scraping, tampering and sensitive data exposure. Respond routes findings to SIEM, ITSM, ticketing, CMDB, WAAP, gateway and developer workflows.

Posture is assessed against OWASP API risks, internal policies and compliance frameworks. Customer stories on the page include Novant Health and Commerzbank, which Akamai says secured 6 billion monthly API calls.

Traceable merged with Harness in 2025, and its API security platform is now sold as Harness Web Application & API Protection (WAAP), described in Harness materials as Harness WAAP by Traceable. The product documentation still uses the Traceable name for many features.

Harness WAAP combines API discovery, API vulnerability testing, API protection, bot and abuse protection, a web application firewall and runtime application self-protection. Discovery observes traffic to identify internal, external, shadow and retired APIs and the sensitive data they handle, and validates existing specifications against production behaviour. Protection applies built-in policies for rate limiting, bot protection, IP rules and attack detection, and teams can start in monitoring mode before enforcing.

API Security Testing scans can run once or on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule. An AI chatbot answers natural-language questions across discovery and protection data, and a security data lake keeps full request context for investigation.

Wallarm now describes itself as an AI Control Platform with four products: Wallarm API Security, Infrastructure Discovery, AI Hypervisor and API Security Testing. API Security remains the core product and each product has its own subscription.

Wallarm API Security discovers APIs, including shadow, zombie and rogue ones, and builds OpenAPI specifications from live traffic. It blocks OWASP API Top 10 attacks, injections, broken object level authorization and broken authentication inline, and detects credential stuffing, malicious bots and layer 7 DDoS by behaviour at the session level. It also tracks APIs carrying personal, payment and health data, and pushes events to Splunk, Sumo Logic, QRadar, Jira, PagerDuty, Opsgenie and Slack.

The subscription documentation separates the Cloud Native WAAP plan from WAAP + Advanced API Security. The bundle adds API discovery, attack surface management, sensitive data detection, GraphQL policies, specification enforcement and MCP server discovery.

Cequence Security sells API Security alongside Bot Management, a Web Application & API Protection bundle and an AI Gateway, grouped as its Unified Application Protection Platform. The company highlights a Leader placement in the 2025 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for API Security and Management.

Cequence API Security combines inside-out and outside-in discovery to find internal, external, third-party and shadow APIs, as well as gateways and hosting providers. It integrates with existing API gateways or deploys inline. Discovered APIs are assessed for access control risk, sensitive data leakage and conformance to their published specification, and specifications are generated where none exist. Machine learning rules find and mask sensitive data, with patterns for many countries' identity numbers.

Testing runs in pre-production and at runtime, with test plans generated from Postman collections and specifications. An observe mode scores new rules without raising issues, and audit reports map findings to each framework's controls.

Imperva is a Thales company, and its site links to the wider Thales data security portfolio. Imperva API Security is presented as a unified platform for API discovery, risk assessment, detection and mitigation in one console, and the company cites an Overall Leader placement in the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for API Security and Management.

Discovery covers public, private and shadow APIs, classifies them, and tracks changes and design flaws. Risk assessment checks for OWASP API Security Top 10 issues. Business-logic threat protection uses behavioural and rule-based engines to flag BOLA-prone endpoints, with inline enforcement through Cloud WAF and WAF Gateway. API Security Testing scans an uploaded specification file for design and configuration weaknesses and suggests fixes for developers.

Buyers choose cloud-managed or self-managed operation and agent-based or agentless deployment, covering cloud WAF, microservices, encrypted applications and network-layer monitoring. Imperva Advanced Bot Protection integrates with API Security for automated threats.

Cloudflare API Shield is the API security product within Cloudflare's application services. Its documentation states that API Security products are available to Enterprise customers only, and the full suite is a paid add-on.

API Shield provides API inventory, OpenAPI governance, profile export and automation. Schema Profiles come from two sources: Schema Learning, which learns from traffic, and Schema Validation, which uses uploaded OpenAPI schemas. Analysis and custom rule enforcement are handled in the WAF Application Profiles pages. Mutual TLS lets an API accept only clients holding a valid certificate.

The plans page sets limits by zone plan. Free, Pro and Business zones can save 100, 250 and 500 endpoints and enable five to ten uploaded schemas, with Block as the only rule action. Enterprise zones without API Shield can save 3,000 endpoints, and Enterprise with API Shield 10,000, with Log or Block actions. Enterprise customers can preview the product without metered fees before signing a contract.

42Crunch builds API security around the API contract. Each API gets a machine-readable definition of its declared surface, audits measure the definition against security rules, scans test the running API against it, and runtime protection enforces it.

Individual and team plans include API static and dynamic testing, vulnerability scans, identity scans and a default security quality gate, with IDE integration through the 42Crunch OpenAPI Editor. Team plans add a shared API workspace, API drift scans, customisable data dictionaries and customisable quality gates. The Enterprise API Security Platform adds runtime threat protection, a dedicated encrypted tenant, CI/CD, gateway, SIEM and SSO integrations and a dedicated support manager.

The company's homepage now leads with MCP security governance. It discovers MCP servers across registries, gateways and repositories, generates a contract for each, audits it and maps results to the EU AI Act, ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF and the OWASP MCP Top 10.

APIsec sells automated API security testing that it calls application exploit validation. The product builds a model of the application, generates attacks an attacker would use, such as cross-tenant object access, and executes them at runtime. Results are reported as verified exploits with replayable evidence, and the same exploit can be re-run against a patch to confirm the fix.

Pricing counts endpoints, where one endpoint is a single path and method combination such as GET /user. Plans are sold in 100-endpoint increments with no limit on applications per endpoint. Every plan can install a hosted agent to test private APIs, and on-premises deployment is custom-priced.

The company also runs APIsec University, which it says has more than 150,000 practitioners, a Discord community and a research group, APIsec Labs. APIsec claims use by 75% of the Fortune 100.

Levo.ai positions itself as a runtime application security platform for both APIs and AI applications. It captures authentication scopes, identities and data flows across machine-to-machine traffic and stitches APIs, agents, language models and MCP servers into one runtime graph, so chained and recursive calls can be governed together.

The company states that its data processing engine captures, samples and processes only the minimum data needed, and it integrates with CI/CD pipelines and runtime observability tools. Levo has been recognised for its use of eBPF, and it lists awards including a Data Security Council of India most innovative startup award and the FINSEC 2025 prize.

Pricing is scoped per endpoint after the vendor reviews API footprint, infrastructure and support needs. Support ranges from self-serve to dedicated security liaisons with custom SLAs, and the pricing page addresses estates from 10,000 to more than 100,000 endpoints.