As enterprises scale their digital initiatives and move to support more consumer groups (including AI agents), APIs are more critical than ever. They power internal services, enable partner integrations, and deliver value to customers. But with growth comes complexity. And more often than not, that complexity shows up as API sprawl and, eventually, API chaos.

These two terms are often used interchangeably, but they’re not the same. In fact, understanding the difference between API sprawl and API chaos is critical if you’re aiming to bring control, consistency, and value back to your API ecosystem.

Let’s break it down and discuss how to regain control of your enterprise API inventory.

What Is API Sprawl?

API sprawl is the uncontrolled proliferation of APIs within an organization—across teams, platforms, lines of business, and environments. It’s what happens when APIs are developed independently by disparate teams without proper oversight or lifecycle coordination.

If you’ve ever struggled to answer:

• “How many APIs do we have?”
• “Where are they deployed?”
• “Are there duplicate APIs serving the same function?”

…you’re likely dealing with sprawl.

As one enterprise architect at a Fortune 100 bank put it:

“We didn’t know how bad the sprawl was until we tried to map it. Teams were building similar APIs in different clouds, and no one had visibility across the portfolio. The catalog we had only covered 40% of what was out there.”

Key Signs of API Sprawl:

• Redundant or zombie APIs with no consumers
• APIs with unclear or no ownership
• APIs scattered across clouds, platforms, business units, and gateways
• Little or no central inventory or catalog
• Duplicated APIs doing the same thing in different formats
• Critical APIs with outdated documentation or no version control
• Developer teams reinventing the wheel due to lack of discoverability
• Inconsistent developer experience
• Project delays due to increased API security issues

It’s not just that there are too many APIs. It’s that they’re unmanaged, inconsistent, and increasingly risky to your business. Sprawl by itself doesn’t mean your API program has failed, it’s a natural by-product of growth. But if left unchecked, it opens the door to a much bigger problem: API chaos.

How do you compare?

At digitalML, we work with some of the world’s largest enterprises across industries like banking, retail, insurance, and healthcare. Over the years, we’ve collected deep insights into the scale and complexity of API ecosystems within these organizations, spanning applications, repositories, API gateways, and integration platforms.

Here’s what the data shows:

• A typical large enterprise supports around 600 applications, each consuming an average of 17 production APIs.
• Due to limited reuse and fragmented ownership, this often results in 10,000+ APIs across the enterprise—many of them redundant, inconsistent, or insufficiently governed.
• That number continues to grow rapidly, especially as AI agents and LLM models increasingly depend on reliable, well-documented APIs for data and decisioning.

Most of these organizations also operate across 3 to 7 runtime environments, often with multiple gateways and platforms in parallel, including:

• API gateways (e.g., Apigee, Kong, AWS, Azure)
• ESBs and integration platforms (e.g., MuleSoft, Oracle)
• Kubernetes services and serverless endpoints

And despite this API volume, we typically find that only 10–20% of APIs meet a “gold standard” for reuse – meaning they’re well-documented, discoverable, and aligned with enterprise governance policies.

What is API Chaos?

API chaos is the resulting difficulty and complexity in managing and securing a large portfolio of scattered APIs (aka sprawl). It refers to the instability, unpredictability, or inconsistency in APIs caused by frequent changes, poor documentation, lack of standardization, or conflicting integrations.

In chaotic environments, APIs may exist, but teams have a hard time finding them and don’t know whether they’re trustworthy, complete, or reusable. Compliance and governance challenges arise. Portals and catalogs are siloed, with negative consumption experiences. Ineffective change management often results in broken production services. And valuable APIs are often underutilized, or worse, rebuilt from scratch.

Symptoms of API chaos:

• Reduced agility
• Increased operational costs
• Increased compliance and security flaws (often resulting in expensive fines if you’re in a highly regulated industry)
• Low API reuse across teams and initiatives
• Poor experiences and therefore reduced customer retention
• No flexibility to capitalize on new opportunities e.g. agentic AI

While sprawl is primarily about quantity and fragmentation, chaos is about operational breakdown, and it has real business consequences: delayed innovation, increased risk, lack of visibility, flexibility, and control. Plus, missed opportunities for efficiency, reuse, and monetization.

Success Story: Taming API Chaos at a Global Insurer

A multinational retailer had over 7,500 APIs supporting everything from supply chain logistics to mobile customer experiences. However, these APIs were distributed across more than a dozen runtime environments and five different API gateways, with minimal centralized oversight. Governance and lifecycle management was manual and error-prone, and API security was only managed at the gateway, missing key enterprise compliance standards.

Developers couldn’t easily find or trust existing APIs, and business teams faced long delays waiting for integrations to be built from scratch. With ignite, the retailer established a single enterprise catalog spanning all gateways and platforms, applied governance scoring across the lifecycle, and launched a curated consumer portal tailored to business use cases.

In under a year:

• API reuse increased by 4x
• Onboarding time for new digital experiences dropped by 35%
• Over 600 unmanaged or redundant APIs were identified and consolidated

How to Bring Control Back to Your API Landscape

Leading enterprises are approaching API sprawl and chaos as a governance and maturity problem, not just a tech debt issue.

The solution to both starts with a centralized, governed API ecosystem. One that gives you visibility, consistency, and reuse across the full API lifecycle and one that spans environments, business units, and technologies.

Here are a few best practices:

1. Build a vendor-neutral API Catalog

Centralize your view of all APIs — regardless of gateway, platform, or team. Include metadata, ownership, and lifecycle status. The catalog should be kept up to date automatically via integrations to repos, gateways, and other ecosystem platforms to avoid manual maintenance time and resource.

2. Automate Quality and Governance Checks

Implement rules that score APIs for quality, documentation completeness, enterprise standards, and  reuse readiness — not just once, but across the lifecycle.

3. Encourage (and Measure) Reuse

Promote reusable APIs through internal consumer portals and track adoption across teams. Reward high-quality producers.

4. Make APIs a Business Priority

Align API initiatives with business capabilities. Tie maturity goals to strategic outcomes e.g. speed, security, customer experience, and AI enablement.

Ready to Get a Handle on the Chaos?

It’s hard to fix what you can’t see. That’s why we offer a free API Inventory Health Check — a fast, low-effort way to assess the true state of your API portfolio.

We’ll help you:

• Uncover redundant or unmanaged APIs
• Identify governance gaps
• Highlight hidden high-value APIs worth promoting

APIs are only valuable if they’re visible, governed, and reusable. Don’t let sprawl and chaos stand in the way of API maturity. With the right structure and support, you can regain control, and unlock the full potential of your enterprise ecosystem.