Top 10 API Visibility Tools (2026)

APIs now form the connective tissue of modern digital ecosystems, powering microservices, mobile apps, partner integrations, and AI driven workflows. Yet despite their critical role, more than 60% of enterprises still lack a complete, real time inventory of their APIs, leaving large portions of their attack surface and operational footprint invisible. As API estates sprawl across clouds, regions, teams, and third parties, shadow, zombie, and undocumented APIs quietly accumulate, driving security incidents, outages, and compliance failures.

The challenge today is no longer just building APIs, but maintaining continuous visibility and governance at scale. Static documentation, manual inventories, and periodic scans fail in fast moving, cloud native environments where APIs are created, modified, and deprecated daily. Industry research consistently shows that a majority of API breaches stem from unknown or poorly governed endpoints, not zero day exploits or complex attacks.

API Visibility Tools close this gap by providing always on discovery and contextual insight into every API across development, staging, and production. They continuously identify new and changing endpoints, classify authentication and exposure risk, map sensitive data flows, and surface behavioral drift in real time. This enables security, engineering, and compliance teams to detect blind spots, misconfigurations, and policy violations before attackers, outages, or auditors do.

The following list highlights the Top API Visibility Tools, evaluated for depth of discovery, automation, runtime context, and enterprise scalability. These platforms go beyond basic inventories to deliver continuous, unified visibility that supports security, compliance, and operational control across modern API driven architectures.

TL;DR

Explore the 10 most recommended API Visibility Tools: Levo.ai, Traceable AI, Rapid7, Akto, Inviciti, Qualys, Salt Security, StackHawk, Akamai Security, and Orca Security. These platforms deliver continuous API discovery and runtime API visibility, surface shadow and zombie APIs, map sensitive data exposure, and enforce governance across development, staging, and production, helping organizations eliminate blind spots, reduce security risk, and maintain compliance at scale.

What are API Visibility Tools

API Visibility Tools provide continuous, automated insight into every API operating across an organization’s environments. They go beyond basic discovery to identify, catalog, and contextualize APIs in development, staging, and production, including internal services, external integrations, third party endpoints, and unmanaged shadow or zombie APIs. By maintaining an always current inventory, these tools eliminate blind spots that undermine security, reliability, and governance.

Modern API Visibility Tools analyze live traffic, gateways, and supporting infrastructure to understand how APIs actually behave at runtime. They enrich each endpoint with critical context such as authentication status, data sensitivity, usage patterns, and dependency relationships. This runtime first approach transforms static inventories into actionable intelligence, enabling teams to assess risk, enforce policy, and govern APIs continuously as architectures evolve.

Why are API Visibility Solutions essential?

API Visibility Tools are essential for controlling API sprawl and maintaining real time awareness of an organization’s true API attack surface. In modern, distributed architectures, APIs are created, updated, and deprecated continuously. Without continuous visibility, shadow, zombie, and low usage endpoints remain invisible to security and operations teams, creating exploitable gaps.

API Visibility Tools like Levo provide runtime first visibility by observing live traffic directly at the OS level using eBPF based, agentless instrumentation. This captures every API interaction before encryption, without code changes or inline proxies, ensuring full coverage across REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and SOAP APIs, including internal services, partner integrations, and third party dependencies.

By enriching each API with authentication posture, sensitive data exposure, usage patterns, and reachability context, API visibility becomes the foundation for security, compliance, and operational governance. Teams can detect new APIs instantly, align testing and monitoring with real risk, enforce consistent policies, and remediate issues faster.

At scale, API Visibility Tools act as the control plane for secure, compliant, and resilient API driven enterprises, enabling organizations to move fast without losing control.

When to use API Visibility Tools?

Organizations should use API visibility tools when operating large, distributed, or fast changing API environments where manual tracking cannot keep pace. These tools become critical during cloud migrations, microservices adoption, partner integrations, or post merger system consolidation, when undocumented APIs and configuration drift introduce hidden risk.

API visibility tools are essential once API ecosystems reach scale and velocity. Industry data shows that more than 40% of organizations run shadow or unmanaged APIs, and nearly 60% of API breaches originate from unknown, deprecated, or poorly governed endpoints. Without continuous runtime API visibility, these gaps persist unnoticed until exploited.

Enterprises should adopt API visibility tools whenever APIs handle sensitive data, power customer facing applications, or underpin core business workflows. At this stage, visibility is no longer optional; it is required to detect new API endpoints in real time, understand actual usage and exposure, and enforce consistent security and compliance controls.

When selecting an API visibility platform, teams should prioritize continuous discovery, runtime context, and enterprise scalability. The right solution automatically uncovers every API, enriches it with risk and data insights, and integrates seamlessly into existing environments without impacting performance or developer velocity.

What to look for when choosing API Visibility Platform?

When evaluating API visibility tools, enterprises should prioritise depth, automation, and scalability, not surface level discovery. The right platform must continuously uncover every API, enrich it with runtime context, and integrate cleanly into existing environments without slowing systems or teams.

• Comprehensive, Continuous Discovery: The tool should automatically discover all API types, i.e. internal, external, partner, third party, and public, across REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and SOAP. API Discovery must be continuous to ensure no new, deprecated, or low traffic endpoint remains invisible.
• Agentless, Low Overhead Architecture: Prefer agentless or eBPF based approaches that observe traffic at the OS level before encryption. This avoids code changes, inline proxies, or agents that introduce latency, operational risk, or deployment friction.
• Sensitive Data and Exposure Awareness: The platform must identify APIs that handle PII, PHI, PCI, or regulated data and correlate this with authentication and reachability. Data awareness is essential for risk prioritisation and compliance readiness.
• Real Time Context and Risk Intelligence: Each API should be enriched with live metadata such as auth status, rate limiting, usage patterns, versions, and error behaviour. Context transforms raw inventories into actionable risk and governance insights.
• Automatic Updates and Drift Detection: New APIs, changes, and deprecations should be detected instantly. Version tracking and change history are critical to prevent configuration drift, duplicate APIs, and forgotten endpoints.
• Seamless Ecosystem Integrations: The tool should integrate with gateways, cloud platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and security tools using traffic, logs, or native connectors.
• Zero Impact on Production Performance: Discovery must be passive and out of band, ensuring full visibility without affecting latency, throughput, or reliability of production workloads.
• Support for Hybrid and Restricted Environments: Enterprise environments often include hybrid, multi cloud, or air gapped systems. The platform should support flexible deployment models without compromising coverage.
• Actionable Outcomes Beyond Inventory: API visibility should enable faster incident response, risk based testing, compliance reporting, and API reuse across teams. The inventory must serve security, compliance, and engineering equally.
• Proven Enterprise Scalability: The solution should scale across thousands of APIs and microservices while keeping operational overhead low, ensuring long term sustainability as API estates grow.

Top 10 API Visibility Tools in 2026

Modern API visibility tools go far beyond endpoint lists. The leading platforms in 2026 continuously discover APIs at runtime, enrich them with authentication and data context, and serve as a control plane for security, compliance, and engineering teams.

As API ecosystems continue to expand across microservices, cloud platforms, partners, and AI driven integrations, API visibility has become a foundational requirement, not a security add on. With a majority of API incidents now tied to unknown, unmanaged, or poorly understood endpoints, organizations need platforms that deliver continuous discovery, runtime context, and actionable intelligence.

Below are the Top 10 API Visibility Tools in 2026, evaluated for discovery depth, runtime intelligence, scalability, and enterprise readiness.

1. Levo.ai

Overview:
Levo.ai is a runtime first API visibility platform built for modern, distributed architectures. It continuously discovers and contextualizes APIs across development, staging, and production using eBPF based, agentless instrumentation at the OS level.

Integrations:
GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Jira, AWS, GCP, Slack, Kubernetes, Postman, Burp Suite.

Pros:

• True runtime discovery with zero latency overhead
• Identifies shadow, zombie, internal, and third party APIs
• Deep context: auth, sensitive data, reachability, versions

Cons:

• Newer entrant compared to legacy vendors.

Pricing:
Custom enterprise pricing, typically 1/10th of competitors’ cost, minimizing egress and compute overhead.

Best For: 

Enterprises needing real-time, authoritative API visibility at scale.

G2 Rating:

4.9

2. Traceable.ai

Overview:
Traceable.ai focuses on runtime API observability and security analytics, using behavioral analysis to detect anomalous API usage and data exposure.

Integrations:
AWS, Azure, GCP, Datadog, Splunk, ServiceNow, Jira, Okta.

Pros:

• Mature runtime defense and SOC alignment.
• Effective traffic analytics and incident response tools.

Cons:

• Lacks meaningful shift left and pre production coverage.
• High compute and data storage costs due to full payload capture.

Pricing:
Enterprise custom pricing based on traffic volume, costs scale linearly with API load.

G2 Rating:

4.7

3. Rapid7

Overview:
Rapid7 extends its security platform to include API discovery and exposure management through scanning and asset correlation.

Integrations:
Jira, Jenkins, Splunk, AWS, Azure, GCP, GitHub.

Pros:

• Familiar interface and mature reporting for compliance.
• Centralized vulnerability dashboard.

Cons:

• No continuous monitoring; blind spots between scans.
• Scan heavy architecture increases infra cost and delays.

Pricing:
Subscription based; pricing varies by asset and module count.

G2 Rating:

4.7

4. Akto

Overview:
Akto provides lightweight API testing and discovery using traffic capture and pre defined test templates. It supports basic continuous integration and quick onboarding for dev teams but misses inactive and low traffic endpoints.

Integrations:
GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Slack, Postman.

Pros:

• Developer friendly, quick deployment.
• Pre built test library for OWASP API Top 10.

Cons:

• Limited real time production visibility
• Generic payloads may miss business logic flaws.

Pricing:
Free tier available; enterprise pricing on request.

G2 Rating:

4.5

5. Inviciti

Overview:
Inviciti combines manual and automated API scanning by importing OpenAPI specs, gateway crawls, and network traffic samples. While it offers decent coverage for documented APIs, it struggles with discovering dynamic or shadow endpoints.

Integrations:
Jenkins, Jira, AWS, Azure, API gateways (Kong, Apigee).

Pros:

• Good compliance alignment.
• Strong policy based scanning and reporting.

Cons:

• No runtime monitoring or behavioral context.
• Heavy manual setup for continuous testing.

Pricing:
Tiered enterprise plans; pricing based on scan volume.

G2 Rating:

4.6

6. Qualys

Overview:
Qualys provides API visibility as part of its cloud security and compliance platform, primarily through scheduled discovery and posture assessment, but falls short on API specific discovery and runtime intelligence.

Integrations:
ServiceNow, Splunk, AWS, Azure, GCP, Qualys Cloud.

Pros:

• Comprehensive asset inventory across hybrid environments.
• Strong compliance and reporting ecosystem.

Cons:

• High operational complexity and multi module licensing cost.
• Limited to scheduled scans without runtime intelligence.

Pricing:
Per module license with volume based addons.

G2 Rating:

4.3

7. Salt Security

Overview:
Salt Security focuses on production API visibility and runtime protection using traffic mirroring and edge based instrumentation. While strong in detecting runtime attacks, it lacks pre production and developer first testing capabilities.

Integrations:
API gateways, SIEMs, Splunk, ServiceNow, AWS.

Pros:

• Strong runtime anomaly detection.
• Mature SOC workflow integration.

Cons:

• Heavy computing cost due to traffic ingestion.
• No true shift left integration.

Pricing:
Enterprise custom; typically high due to traffic mirroring.

G2 Rating:

4.7

8. StackHawk

Overview:

StackHawk delivers developer friendly, CI/CD integrated API scanning that fits seamlessly into pipelines. While efficient for pre production scans, it lacks runtime coverage and deep business logic testing.

Integrations:

GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Docker, Slack.

Pros:

• Fast, dev oriented testing.
• Docker based scanning for easy setup.

Cons:

• Static payloads limit test depth.
• No runtime or live traffic correlation.

Pricing:
Subscription based, scalable by environment count.

G2 Rating:

4.6

9. Akamai Security

Overview:
Akamai Security extends its edge first approach to APIs through integrated CDN and WAF protection. It excels at DDoS prevention but remains reactive for API specific threats, lacking internal visibility. Akamai provides API visibility at the edge through traffic inspection, rate limiting, and WAF based discovery.

Integrations:
Akamai Edge, WAF, API gateways, SIEMs.

Pros:

• Unmatched edge resilience and scalability.
• Strong DDoS and bot mitigation.

Cons:

• Limited API discovery and shift left capabilities.
• Limited insight into internal and east–west APIs
• High deployment overhead.

Pricing:
Premium enterprise pricing tied to traffic volume.

G2 Rating:

4.6

10. Orca Security

Overview:
Orca Security provides agentless cloud visibility and limited API discovery through its cloud posture management engine. It’s ideal for hybrid cloud visibility but not comprehensive for internal API traffic.

Integrations:
AWS, Azure, GCP, ServiceNow, Slack.

Pros:

• Broad cloud coverage, easy setup.
• Clear compliance dashboards.

Cons:

• No runtime API discovery.
• Cannot detect internal east-west traffic.

Pricing:
Enterprise custom pricing.

G2 Rating:

4.6

Benefits of using API Visibility Tools

With API ecosystems scaling rapidly, lack of visibility directly translates into security gaps, compliance failures, and operational inefficiencies. API Visibility Tools move organizations from reactive discovery to continuous control by providing real time, system wide awareness of every API in use.

• Eliminate API Blind Spots: Automatically discover internal, external, partner, and third party APIs across hybrid and multi cloud environments, reducing shadow and undocumented APIs by up to 70%.
• Expose Hidden and Dormant Risk: Identify shadow, zombie, deprecated, and low traffic APIs that bypass manual audits and account for a significant share of API breaches.
• Maintain Continuous, Real Time Inventory: Keep an always up to date API catalog that evolves with every deployment, eliminating the 20–30% drift common in static or manual inventories.
• Prioritize by Data Sensitivity: Automatically detect APIs handling PII, PHI, PCI, or financial data and rank them by exposure, reachability, and authentication context.
• Support All API Protocols: Gain unified visibility across REST, GraphQL, gRPC, SOAP, and legacy APIs, regardless of framework, gateway, or deployment model.
• Zero Impact on Performance: Use passive, out of band, or agentless discovery methods that introduce no latency, no traffic interception, and no production risk.
• Accelerate Detection and Response: Reduce MTTD and MTTR by up to 50% by instantly tracing exposed or misconfigured endpoints during incidents.
• Strengthen Governance and Compliance: Maintain continuously validated API inventories aligned with SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, DPDP, and other regulatory frameworks.
• Improve Developer Productivity: Prevent duplicate APIs, enable reuse, and reduce rework across teams, improving delivery speed and time to market.‍
• Create a Single Source of Truth: Align security, platform, and engineering teams around one authoritative, continuously verified view of the entire API surface.

Conclusion: Why Levo.ai is the right API Visibility platform in 2026

APIs now carry the majority of application traffic, yet most organizations still operate with fragmented visibility. Unknown, unmanaged, and fast changing endpoints remain a primary cause of API breaches, while static inventories and gateway only discovery fail to keep up with dynamic, multi-environment architectures. 

In 2026, continuous, context rich API visibility is no longer optional, it is foundational.

Levo.ai delivers that foundation by discovering 100% of APIs across production and pre-production environments using eBPF based OS level instrumentation. It observes every API call before encryption or abstraction, providing real time, lossless visibility without agents, code changes, proxies, or performance impact.

Unlike traditional tools that stop at enumeration, Levo builds a living, risk aware API inventory. Every endpoint is automatically enriched with authentication context, sensitive data classification, reachability, and change history, allowing teams to focus on what actually matters as APIs evolve.

This transforms API visibility into a control plane:

• Security: Surfaces shadow and exposed APIs before they are exploited.
• Compliance: Maintains continuous audit readiness for SOC 2, PCI DSS, DPDP, and HIPAA.
• Operations: Detects drift, version changes, and misconfigurations in real time.
• Engineering: Reduces duplication and accelerates safe, reusable API development.

By unifying discovery, context, and governance into a single platform, Levo.ai shifts API visibility from reactive monitoring to proactive control. The result is a secure, scalable, and continuously governed API ecosystem built for modern enterprise demands.

Achieve complete API visibility with Levo.ai. Book a demo to secure and govern your APIs with confidence.