REST Versus SOAP in Modern Enterprise Systems: A Structured Literature Review

Abstract

The evolution of modern enterprise architecture has been strongly influenced by distributed web services, especially protocol-based standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and resource-oriented architectural styles such as Representational State Transfer (REST). Cloud-native ecosystems, microservice architectures, and public API management commonly favor the lightweight, JSON-compatible, and horizontally scalable characteristics of RESTful services, whereas legacy configurations and highly regulated environments continue to use SOAP because of its formal contracts and compatibility with WS-* specifications for message-level security, reliable messaging, and transaction coordination. This paper presents a structured literature review that evaluates the architectural trade-offs, performance patterns, security boundaries, reliability considerations, and enterprise use cases of REST and SOAP. The review follows PRISMA-informed reporting practices and software-engineering review guidance, but it is not presented as an exhaustive systematic review because the original search strategy required REST and SOAP terms to appear together. IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, ScienceDirect, and Scopus were searched for studies published between 2021 and 2026, resulting in 32 selected studies. The selected literature contains different evidence roles, including direct REST-SOAP empirical comparisons, REST-only and SOAP-only empirical studies, implementation studies, analytical papers, surveys, reviews, and contextual technical sources. The synthesis therefore separates direct empirical evidence from contextual and secondary evidence. The findings indicate that RESTful APIs generally show lower latency, smaller payloads, simpler parsing, and better horizontal scalability in the reported benchmark and web-facing settings, while SOAP remains relevant where formal service contracts, message-level protection, reliable messaging patterns, and transaction coordination are required. The paper identifies gaps in production-representative stress testing, empirical security comparison, reference-level traceability, and independent validation of hybrid REST-SOAP decision models. The resulting decision framework is presented as a provisional evidence-informed decision aid, not as an empirically validated tool.