Top 10 API Security Tools of 2025

Application programming interfaces, usually just referred to as APIs, are a very common attack vector when enterprises are breached.

A poorly written and insecure API endpoint can make an organization lose data and customer trust in the blink of an eye. As outlined in the OWASP API Security Top Ten, API attacks can have disastrous consequences for organizations and their customers. The risks present within APIs are why ensuring the security of an organization’s APIs is an important practice. Adhering to API security best practices and standards is a must for any organization exposing APIs internally and externally.

Ensuring secure APIs is crucial as it helps organizations proactively detect and manage vulnerabilities in their APIs. In this article, we’ll look at some of the most popular API security tools and how they can help you. Let’s start by looking at some key factors when it comes to API security!

What are API Security Tools?

Broadly speaking, API security refers to the practices and protocols designed to protect Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from unauthorized access, data breaches, and other malicious activities. APIs are critical in most modern software applications, enabling communication and data exchange between different systems, services, and devices. As such, they are a prime target for cyber attackers seeking to exploit vulnerabilities and gain access to sensitive data.

API security works by adopting a comprehensive approach addressing the entire API lifecycle, from design and development to deployment and maintenance. This includes implementing robust authentication and authorization mechanisms, encrypting data both in transit and at rest, and conducting regular security testing.

Luckily, there are many API security tools that are designed to help you shoulder the burden of creating secure applications and APIs. Apart from the typical things such as cost, simplicity of integration, and ease of use, there are many other factors to consider when adopting new API security tools. Functionality should be at the top of the list, and ensuring that the tool fits your exact needs within its features.

Types of API Security Tools

Selecting the right API security tool involves evaluating capabilities such as API discovery, integration, testing, runtime protection, compliance, scalability, and maintenance to ensure comprehensive protection and alignment with the team’s workflow. When selecting an API tool, it should be capable of performing one or more of the following tasks:

• API security testing – The API tool must be capable of testing an API using the static application security testing (SAST) methodology, which involves testing the API source code for security flaws, or dynamic application security testing (DAST), simulating attacks to the API to check for security vulnerabilities.
• API security posture – The tool should be able to create an inventory of APIs and the methods exposed, and classify the data used by each method. This analysis provides visibility into the security state of a collection of APIs.
• API runtime security – The tool should provide real-time protection for APIs against potential security breaches and attacks.

Often, tools are also targeted towards a specific problem. In these cases, a tool may be specifically aligned to a given type of threat. These include:

• Unauthorized Access and Data Breaches – attackers can exploit weak authentication mechanisms to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data. Tools in this category focus on securing access and preventing data leaks.
• Malicious Attacks – techniques such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) can be used to manipulate API endpoints and compromise data integrity. Tools of this kind typically focus on sanitation or isolation.
• Business Logic Vulnerabilities – flaws like insecure direct object references (IDOR) can be exploited to access or manipulate data in unintended ways. These tools often offer business logic scanning to ensure nothing is being surfaced that should be kept private.
• Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks – these attacks can overwhelm an API, rendering it unavailable to legitimate users. Rate limiting and throttling tend to be common in this category.
• Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) Attacks – intercepting and altering communication between APIs and clients can lead to data tampering and theft. Attestation is common for tools in this category, forcing data to attest to its location of origin and purpose.
• API Key and Token Theft – compromised keys and tokens can provide attackers with unauthorized access to APIs. Scanning is quite common in this category to prevent accidental leaks.
• Data Tampering and Manipulation – attackers can alter data being transmitted through APIs, leading to data integrity issues. Detection algorithms are common in this category.

Understanding these threats – and their related solutions – is crucial for security teams to implement effective countermeasures and protect sensitive data. Although some of these can be handled manually, there is a large list of great API security tools that can help developers make APIs more secure.

Emerging Threats in the Age of AI and LLM-Powered APIs

It should be noted here that API security is only becoming more critical. With the rise of AI-integrated systems leveraging cloud resources, the need to be even more secure and aware has become obvious, and tooling has accordingly shifted to offer more specific solutions for this type of threat.

Unlike traditional REST or GraphQL endpoints, LLM APIs operate on probabilistic outputs and often return results shaped by user input. That makes them particularly vulnerable to prompt injection, data leakage, and unintended behaviors if not properly secured. For example:

• Prompt Injection – attackers can manipulate input strings to alter model behavior and extract hidden instructions or sensitive training data, and if the internal API is not configured to reject these inputs, they can be ingested under the assumption that they’re simply “part of the prompt.”
• Overly Permissive Endpoints – APIs that accept raw user input without validation may enable access to unintended functions or model scopes, especially if these systems use OpenAPI definitions or specifications, which may surface a complete view of the publicly accessible systems and potential vectors.
• Trust Erosion – poorly scoped or ambiguous prompts can return hallucinated, biased, or unsafe responses, eroding user trust and damaging brand credibility; in some cases, the prompts can be abused to return results created by malicious actors to regular users, bypassing controls put in place by the provider.

Accordingly, modern security tools are starting to respond to these challenges. Solutions like StackHawk can put you ahead of the game, but this is an ever-evolving threat that is much more complex than simply securing some HTTP headers, often requiring a full plan for tackling these threats and a SOC team to manage these efforts.

Benefits of API Security Tools

API security tools provide essential protection in a landscape where APIs are increasingly targeted by attackers. As APIs become more integrated into modern applications, securing them isn’t just an optional add-on – it’s a fundamental requirement. These tools help reduce manual workload, automate detection, and ensure that security policies are consistently applied across the entire API lifecycle.

Here are some of the core benefits of using API security tools:

• Proactive Vulnerability Detection – these tools identify potential weaknesses in your APIs before attackers can exploit them, reducing your exposure to threats.
• Automation of Testing and Compliance – with CI/CD integrations and automated scanning, API security tools ensure you’re continuously testing and maintaining secure coding practices at scale.
• Real-Time Threat Monitoring and Response – many tools include runtime protection and real-time traffic analysis to block malicious activity as it happens.
• Comprehensive Visibility and Inventory – discover hidden, deprecated, or shadow APIs that might otherwise be left unprotected. Security tools help maintain an accurate inventory of your API surface.
• Support for DevSecOps and Shift-Left – these platforms make it easier to embed security earlier in the development lifecycle, helping developers fix issues where it’s cheapest, before deployment.
• Improved Trust and Regulatory Readiness – secure APIs foster user trust and help meet compliance frameworks such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and others with features like logging, access controls, and audit trails.

Key Features to Look For in API Security Tools

When evaluating API security solutions, it’s important to match your toolset to your environment and team needs. While some tools focus on pre-deployment testing, others provide robust runtime protection or posture management. A well-rounded tool should be able to support several of the following key features:

• CI/CD Integration – the tool should support integrations with your DevOps pipeline, allowing you to automate scans and vulnerability testing with every commit or build.
• API Discovery and Inventory Management – automatically finding and classifying all exposed APIs, including shadow and zombie APIs, is critical for establishing a baseline security posture.
• Dynamic and Static Testing (DAST/SAST) – ensure your tool can simulate attacks (DAST) and review source code (SAST) to uncover known vulnerabilities and logic flaws.
• Real-Time Monitoring and Anomaly Detection – tools should monitor API traffic for unusual behavior, unauthorized access, and known attack patterns in real-time.
• Authentication and Authorization Validation – capabilities to test and validate OAuth, API keys, JWTs, and role-based access controls help ensure only the right users can access the right data.
• Threat Intelligence and Reporting – access to up-to-date threat databases and clear reporting dashboards makes it easier to understand risk levels and track resolution efforts.
• Runtime Protection – blocking active attacks as they happen, including bot detection, rate limiting, and injection protection – can help keep APIs resilient and performant.
• Support for Modern API Architectures – look for tools that support REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets, and LLM-powered APIs to ensure broad compatibility.

Selecting the right API security tool depends on your infrastructure, security goals, and development workflows. Understanding these core features ensures you choose a solution that delivers maximum protection with minimal friction.

Top 10 API Security Tools

1 – StackHawk

is a modern API security testing tool founded in 2019. It’s a dynamic application security testing (DAST) tool that scans APIs for potential vulnerabilities. StackHawk works by simulating an attack, which is based on common open-source vulnerabilities like OWASP top 10 or custom attack definitions, and observing how the API responds. In other words, it tries to leverage known vulnerabilities on the API to observe how it reacts to them to determine if the API is secure against the vulnerability or not.

Stackhawk provides seamless integration with your CI/CD so that you can automate the testing of every API endpoint in your application. By using StackHawk in your CI/CD pipeline, tests can be run on every commit to ensure developers are aware of any bugs in the codebase as soon as they are introduced.

Advantages of StackHawk

• It integrates easily and provides extensive automation capabilities with your CI/CD, automating application testing quickly
• It offers test report analytics and dashboarding
• Helps inventory and prioritize APIs for security testing
• StackHawk is built to test modern microservices infrastructure
• Full support for all API types: REST, SOAP, gRPC, and GraphQL APIs
• Developer-first. Easy to scale application security across teams
• Integrations with popular dev tools
• Solutions like HawkScan open up the OpenAPI contract and other more complex schemas

Disadvantages of StackHawk

• Lacks an on-prem solution required by some industries and organizations

2 – ZAP

First on our list is ZAP. The Zed Attack Proxy, abbreviated to ZAP, is an open-source web security testing tool. The tool was developed by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and continuously maintained by the community to ensure it is up-to-date and effective against the latest threats.

ZAP’s primary purpose is to provide penetration testing through automation. ZAP works by running simulated attacks against the API endpoint to check for exploitable vulnerabilities. By using this technique, ZAP lets developers know how their API will respond to an attack in real time. The result of these tests allows developers to implement security steps or refactor code to mitigate the discovered security defect. 

ZAP is a cross-platform tool and can run on a variety of operating systems, including Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. The platform’s primary language support is Java, but it also supports a variety of other languages such as JavaScript, JRuby, and other JSR 223 languages.

Advantages of ZAP

• Free and open-source
• Test web applications and APIs against vulnerabilities outlined in the OWASP API Top 10 list
• Supports integration with various other platforms
• Capable of testing APIs and generating test case reports

Disadvantages of ZAP

• Could use more detailed test reporting functionality
• Lacks automation support

3 – Wallarm

Wallarm is an all-in-one API security tool that provides API security posture reports, security testing, and runtime protection.

Founded in 2014, it protects an API against runtime attacks, provides dynamic application security testing, and provides continuous API service discovery to give you an overview of your API inventory.

Wallarm integrates with any CI/CD workflow, allowing you to run dynamic test cases automatically. 

You don’t need a lot of programming experience to utilize Wallarm. It’s a no-code tool hosted as a managed SaaS platform so Operating System compatibility is not a concern. 

Advantages of Wallarm

• It provides seamless integration with other platforms
• It’s a full-suite API security tool
• It provides analytics and dashboarding of test reports

Disadvantages of Wallarm

• Very costly to run since pricing runs quite high

4 – 42 Crunch

42 Crunch is a robust API security platform developed in 2016 to provide API security posture, automate API security testing in your CI/CD pipeline, and enforce security policies. The company provides protection to APIs against threats in runtime through their firewall. The platform also provides auditing and discovery into your API inventory. From the API security testing standpoint, it provides static analysis testing for your APIs.

42 Crunch is a no-code SaaS platform, which means it’s not dependent on any programming language and doesn’t have any issues with OS compatibility. 

42 Crunch also offers seamless interaction with many platforms, allowing you to automate security testing in your CI/CD workflow.

Advantages of 42 Crunch

• It’s a full-suite API security tool
• It provides integrations with your CI/CD workflow
• It provides analytics and dashboarding of test reports

Disadvantages of 42 Crunch

• Expensive since you are paying for a full suite of features, whether you use them or not
• It allows for fewer integrations with other platforms

5 – SALT Security

SALT is an API security platform founded in 2016 that provides continuous discovery and security posture management of all your APIs, including shadow and zombie APIs. This allows you to have the full context of your APIs and be aware of the data you’re exposing. The platform allows you to scan and test your APIs for security vulnerabilities and protect APIs against runtime attacks. 

SALT is a cross-platform software, meaning it can run on different types of operating systems and integrates seamlessly with your CI/CD workflow.

Advantages of SALT Security

• It’s a full-suite API security platform
• Provides integration with your CI/CD
• It provides analytics and dashboarding of test reports

Disadvantages of SALT Security

• Pricing is not transparent and not available on their website
• No self-serve demo is available

6 – Postman

Postman is an API tool for creating and managing APIs. Within it’s suite of tools, Postman provides a testing solution that allows you to test your API for vulnerabilities. You can, for example, test your API to see if it has a broken authentication level.

It also has features that allow you to automate your security tests. With the potential to run your security tests within your CI/CD workflows. 

Postman supports a variety of common languages and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Advantages of Postman

• Great offering in the free tier, and paid tiers are still cost-effective
• It’s cross-platform
• It provides analytics and reporting of tests, as well as integration with different platforms
• Good management through the use of Postman Collections, allowing you to organize more effectively

Disadvantages of Postman

• Integration possibilities are currently limited

7 – Imperva

Imperva is a cybersecurity software company founded in 2002 that offers an API security solution that includes API posture security and API runtime protection. 

The company enables continuous deep discovery into your API inventory to eliminate data leakage and abuse. The platform allows users to be aware of what sensitive data they’re exposing through their API endpoints, shadow APIs, and so on. 

Imperva also uses a machine learning model to protect APIs in real-time against vulnerabilities in the OWASP top 10 and other new threats such as bad bot attacks, DDoS, credential stuffing, and so on.

Advantages of Imperva

• It provides easy integration into your CI/CD
• Provides real-time API protection through machine learning models

Disadvantages of Imperva

• Has limited integration with other platforms

8 – Akami API Security

Akami Security is a comprehensive security solution. While Akami had its own tooling, it was improved significantly with the merger of the tooling offered by Noname Security, presenting a comprehensive toolset that is more than the sum of its parts.

Advantages of Akami Security

• As a one-stop shop, it provides a comprehensive suite of tools
• It’s well integrated with CI/CD pipelines, offering a wide range of supported workflows

Disadvantages of Akami Security

• This tool can be overly complex for most teams, offering more than is necessary for most use cases
• Since it’s a one-stop shop, Akami Security carries a hefty price tag that will be out of budget for most teams

9 – Traceable AI

Traceable AI is a security platform purpose-built for protecting modern, microservice-based APIs. By tying API activity back to users and services, it provides deep visibility into runtime behavior and suspicious interactions.

Advantages of Traceable AI

• Offers granular, context-aware threat detection by mapping user behavior across API calls
• Integrates with service meshes, gateways, and observability tools for real-time traffic analysis

Disadvantages of Traceable AI

• High implementation complexity, especially for smaller orgs without a mature observability stack
• Pricing can be prohibitive for startups or companies without dedicated security budgets

10 – Tinfoil Security

Tinfoil Security is a dynamic application security testing (DAST) tool that includes API-specific scanning. Now part of the Synopsys portfolio, it enables developers to automatically identify security issues in REST APIs as part of their CI/CD workflows.

Advantages of Tinfoil Security

• Easy to integrate into DevOps pipelines, making it ideal for shift-left security practices
• Focused and lightweight for API scanning without overwhelming teams with extra features
• Backed by Synopsys, offering integration with broader AppSec tooling

Disadvantages of Tinfoil Security

• Limited in runtime protection – more of a pre-deployment tool than a full-spectrum API defense
• Best suited for REST APIs – may lack robust support for GraphQL or event-driven API

API Security Best Practices

Regardless of the tools used, there are always some best practices you should adhere to when scaling up API security. To ensure the security of APIs, organizations should follow best practices that cover various aspects of API security, many of which the tools above can help with or help to detect issues with. These include:

• Implement Authentication and Authorization: Almost all APIs should have some type of authentication and authorization in place for users. Use strong authentication mechanisms and ensure that only authorized users can access API endpoints.
• Encrypt Data: Attackers can’t exploit data they can’t access. Protect data in transit and at rest using encryption to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches.
• Conduct Regular Security Testing: There’s no better way to be prepared than to continuously test your API’s security. Perform dynamic application security testing (DAST) and other security tests to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities.
• Rate Limiting and Throttling: Implement rate limiting to prevent abuse and ensure APIs are not overwhelmed by excessive requests.
• Use Secure Protocols: Ensure APIs use secure communication protocols like HTTPS and TLS to protect data integrity and confidentiality.
• Validate User Input: As one of the first steps in keeping your APIs safe, implement input validation and data sanitization to prevent injection attacks and other malicious activities.
• Deploy a Web Application Firewall (WAF) and API Gateway: Use WAFs and API gateways to provide an additional layer of security and manage API traffic. This can help streamline many of the best practices listed above, including rate limiting and encryption.
• Monitor API Traffic and Logs: Continuously monitor API traffic and logs for suspicious activity to detect and respond to potential threats. If something makes it through your defenses, set up alerts so you can remediate it ASAP.
• Incident Response Plan: When something does go wrong, know what to do! Have an incident response plan in place to quickly address and mitigate the impact of security breaches.

By knowing and putting these best practices into action, organizations can significantly enhance their API security posture and protect their APIs from a wide range of security vulnerabilities. Whether preventing API security issues or detecting them after they have already occurred, a holistic strategy that covers as many angles as possible is the best defense (and offense) when it comes to protecting your APIs.

Conclusion

In this post, we looked at some of the top API security tools for your organization. Generally, a single tool will not cover every aspect of security, so the best strategy is to layer tools for complete coverage. Although many platforms exist, each has its own advantages and disadvantages, which may or may not be applicable to your use case.

One thing to keep in mind when selecting an API security tool is to be certain about what you want out of the tool. For instance, if all you need is an API testing tool, there’s likely no need to invest in a full API security suite. Other factors to consider are affordability, language, OS support, ease of use, and available integrations. 

Whether you’re just beginning to think about API security tools or are upgrading your existing suite, StackHawk offers an easy and affordable solution to implement dynamic application security testing. Plug StackHawk directly into your CI/CD pipeline or run it locally and identify potential vulnerabilities in minutes. Easily access reports and discover potential fixes from within the platform and level up your API security with ease and automation. To get started, sign up for your free trial today!