So, you probably heard the news. It’s true, Stoplight has entered a definitive agreement to be acquired by SmartBear. I am excited to join the Smartbear team, and we’re looking forward to Stoplight becoming a part of the SmartBear portfolio of API development tools.
Now, it’s well-known that SmartBear is a leading provider of software development and visibility tools. Combining their strengths with our excellent form-based editor and built-in governance is going to be a winning combination. SmartBear is currently used by 16+ million developers, testers, and operations engineers at over 32,000+ organizations globally.
I truly believe that together, we’ll accomplish our goal of becoming the best API design platform in the world, and now we’ll have a full range of API tooling across the lifecycle to work with. We have always aimed to delight our customers and create the most positive developer experience we can with our tools, and I’m confident we’ll continue with that mission as a part of the SmartBear family.
Additionally, the SmartBear team has expressed their full support of our efforts in the API community. We expect to continue having engaging conversations with API thought leaders about their journeys and approaches to API design and management. Specifically, we have a number of episodes to come on API Intersection. I’ll be plugging away, aiming to find and share the most valuable API stories from across industries. It’s full steam ahead, and I look forward to continuing to provide valuable insights to the API community.
I will be working alongside our combined developers and program leaders to help all of those involved in creating and running world-class API programs to learn and do their best work.
Getting the Flywheel Going
This news comes at an excellent time, given our momentum at Stoplight has really taken off these last few months. Stoplight was recently covered as a sample vendor in five Gartner Hype Cycles reports on APIs, and we also received recognition from the G2 2023 Summer Reports for API Design and API management, placing Stoplight in the leader category for seven quarters in a row.
We’ve also released some key features to our product in the last few months that have been user favorites, including masking and component libraries for improving the reusability of API components, our new Stoplight Catalog API to improve integration opportunities with the platform, and a discussions feature in platform to improve collaboration for design review. Now that we’ll be part of SmartBear, the combined value we deliver to API developers will be endless!
What This Acquisition Means for Our Technology & Customers
As you probably saw in our release, SmartBear expects to begin integrating Stoplight features into its core API design, documentation, and portal offerings in the first half of 2024 to deliver a unified platform. Fear not, however, for all of our Stoplight customers – y’all will still enjoy ongoing access to the Stoplight platform and soon have added capabilities as our two platforms come together.
The Open-Source Impact
In addition to what it means for our platform, there will also be a positive impact to our open-source tools. We already knew that SmartBear’s has huge access to large-open source communities, including Swagger, SoapUI, and Pact. Given our work here at Stoplight with Elements, Prism, and Spectral and the global communities we’ve built around those open-source tools, this was another great reason for combining forces and continuing that great work in the open-source community.
We’ll be part of a broader commitment at SmartBear to open source. As we work through priorities, we’ll share where we expect to focus our efforts. SmarBear’s philosophy is to not only embrace open source but openness altogether, which includes diversity, equity, and inclusion, and I can’t think of a better place for our technology and tools to land!
In the end, I think this will be an extremely positive thing for all parties involved. The Stoplight team and I are looking forward to helping the community continue to have confidence behind the code they build under the SmartBear name. More to come soon!
– Jason Harmon,
Stoplight CTO
