Why choose Blackbird?

The legacy is deep in SmartBear’s portfolio of API tool brands, including the originator of OpenAPI, Swagger. But a forced combination of (even some old favorite) tools does not make for a pleasant or productive process. Blackbird, the API development platform, on the other hand, was purpose-built to prioritize developer experience in a modular, all-in-one platform hosted for you. The new platform was designed to reduce common friction points moving through the API lifecycle, increase development velocity, and facilitate collaboration to enable more, higher quality APIs in a fraction of the time.

Blackbird seamlessly connects API design, mocking, and testing in an all-in-one modular platform (UI and CLI) with a dedicated hosted development environment or built-in access to K8s to reduce barriers and fuel high-quality API production. With these Blackbird-hosted environments, you save on infrastructure costs. Plus, Blackbird's simple, predictable pricing model removes the complexity of managing multiple SmartBear product licenses.

The modularity stems from the ability to have a single, seamlessly connected platform without having to use all components or go in order. With Blackbird, you have the power and flexibility to execute discrete actions with your APIs seamlessly.

You deserve more than the "bear" necessities in your API development. It's time to soar with Blackbird!

Blackbird at a glance

Frictionless and flexible API development.

Blackbird stands out because it eliminates complexity while providing powerful API development features in one seamless, modular platform. While SmartBear’s suite of tools and API Hub are excellent, they add up to higher costs, more configuration, and a convoluted user experience. With Blackbird, you get design to delivery in a single, developer-friendly environment. If you're looking for speed and simplicity without being active and sacrificing power, Blackbird is the smart option.

Build a better sandbox.

Blackbird enables turn-key sandbox set-up, infrastructure included–i.e., there is no need for mock and test traffic to mingle with production traffic. In contrast, SmartBear’s tools, like ReadyAPI, offer sandbox environments for testing and virtualization but require setup and integration into your own infrastructure. Additionally, Smartbear’s sandbox does not provide the same sharable links features that Blackbird r collaboration during testing and for other CI/CD tools to use as well.

Instant production-like environments.

Enjoy hosted, containerized test environments that mirror production and enable developers to mock, run, and deploy APIs quickly without complex setups.

No heavy infrastructure burden.

Unlike SmartBear's suite of tools, Blackbird offers a hosted solution–ready to use without configuration headaches and heavy infrastructure costs. That means lower infra costs (literally cut cloud costs for development environments) and reduced inter-team dependencies.

Feature Comparison

Blackbird vs. SmartBear

Ambassador Blackbird

SmartBear

End-to-end API development

Modular platform for API design, mocking, codegen, debugging, and iteration with a dedicated hosted development environment

Yes, but multiple tools are needed for different API lifecycle stages, requiring additional configuration and licensing

Mocking and testing

Instant, shareable API mocks with the ability to run and debug (with IDE integration and breakpoints), and simple validation, fidelity, and integration testing via hosted ephemeral deployments or a local connection to your remote K8s. Automations available through headless auth with full git integration coming in Spring of 2025.

Requires separate tools (e.g., ReadyAPI, SwaggerHub) with varying levels of integration and setup. Also Offers robust automation capabilities, including cross-platform testing & self-healing features

Development environment and ephemeral deployments

Dedicated, hosted containerized test environments to deploy ephemerally (for testing) and the option to route remote traffic to local computers for debugging production without requiring complex set-ups and DevOps support

With their TestComplete tool, export options to an external application for testing, however, no ability to run and debug without affecting production traffic. Environment still needed. Their tool TestComplete integrates with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, Azure DevOps), which can automate the deployment of ephemeral environments. Allows triggers of automated tests in TestComplete after each ephemeral deployment to validate application behavior in a production-like environment.

Collaboration

Shareable links throughout the API development process (to expose mocks, code, deployments, etc) with keys for security

Collaboration varies across SmartBear tools, with some requiring additional configurations for team-based workflows

Code generation

No infrastructure management required; instant prod-like environments (hosted by us); no setup required unless initiating connection with remote K8s (via Telepresence)

Complaints of complex setup and configuration across tools, often needing dedicated infrastructure support

AI integration

AI-assisted API design and codegen

Uses AI across its tools, particularly in test automation (via TestComplete and HaloAI) to automate visual regression testing, generate test data, and create API contract tests

Cost and licensing

Simple, user-based pricing that scales from individual developers to large, multiple teams

A confusing mixture of pricing models from combined tools that can be expensive with multiple product licenses and add-ons

Try Blackbird today.

See why developers switch from Smartbear to Blackbird for faster, smarter API development. Contact us today about switching to Blackbird, scoring a great deal, and letting us handle your bear of a problem.

What our customers say

Every engineer needs a way to not only build out what their API will look like, but how it’s going to work in the real world. Designing, testing, and architecting an API within your code sounds good until it needs to scale. Using Ambassador Blackbird allows you to fully design and test from the very beginning.

Michael Levan

Cloud-Native Consultant

Blackbird's actually great when you have a complex workflow in a dashboard SPA that involves multiple steps, finalized with payment, that can fail due to connectivity. Simulating errors like packet drops or session expiration is highly valuable during aggressive automated testing.

Oleh

Principal SRE and Infra Architect at Arkis

Blackbird is so easy and so straightforward; it's really great to see.

Kristina D.

Senior Software Engineer at Tietoevry

It is hands-down a must-have tool for faster, smarter API development. The tool is a lifesaver in generating clean, server-side, and client-side boilerplate code. This allows me to focus on the unique aspects of my APIs rather than spending time on repetitive coding tasks.

Shinghai Zivuku

Technical Writer

We choose to use Blackbird since it allows us to build the API in the shortest amount of time possible while also producing a killer API.

Humorie

2024 Hackathon team

We need to give this huge lift of productivity to each and everyone. With a solution like Blackbird, plus what we are already doing, will help people to adapt their skills and be more innovative … that’s the holy grail.

Driss Lamrani

CEO of A2IM-Robotadvisors

We wanted to leverage Ambassador’s Blackbird tool to showcase the rapid development to save developers time from start to finish.

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Grocery Guardian

2024 Hackathon team

Ambassador Blackbird makes the most sense for visualize representation of your API. Without it, you’re traversing through lines and lines of JSON or methods in your API blocks in whatever language you’re comfortable with, which instantly becomes cumbersome.

Michael Levan

Cloud-Native Consultant

While creating tests in Python, we had to create some scenarios of each endpoint. We fixed some bugs in the code but it did take longer time to debug with various test cases when compared with Blackbird setup.

Grocery Guardian

2024 Hackathon team

To install our products, we need a gateway that is cloud agnostic because we have clients who have OpenShift, AWS, Azure, etc. Because of that, we needed to partner with a solution that could support the integration of all of those. And the main hurdle we found is that depending on which gateway you use, you may experience different performances with different platforms.

Driss Lamrani

CEO of A2IM-Robotadvisors