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Flexible Deployment, Easy to Use, and Smart Management/Data Plane Separation
What do you like best about the product?
Deployment flexibility, easy to use, separates management and data planes
What do you dislike about the product?
Plugin sprawl becomes a governance problem, Order of execution matters, but isn’t always obvious
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
API gateway, edge and micro-gateway
Fast, Reliable API Gateway That Scales Smoothly with Kubernetes
What do you like best about the product?
It’s fast, reliable, and doesn’t add unnecessary complexity when managing APIs at scale. Setting things up is straightforward, and the plugin system makes it easy to add features like security, traffic control, or monitoring without rewriting everything. It also plays really well with modern setups like Kubernetes, which saves a lot of time when deploying or scaling services.
What do you dislike about the product?
feel a bit heavy and complex once you move beyond basic use cases. The learning curve gets steeper when dealing with advanced configurations, custom plugins, or debugging issues, especially for teams new to API gateways. The admin and observability experience can also feel fragmented unless you invest time and effort into tuning it or upgrading to enterprise features.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Kong Gateway solves the business problem of controlling, scaling, and securing API traffic as companies grow their digital products. As applications move to microservices and multiple teams build and deploy services independently, managing APIs can become slow, inconsistent, and risky. Kong acts as a central layer that standardizes security, traffic management, and access control without forcing teams to redesign their services.
Seamless Transition to Kong Gateway with Superior Performance
What do you like best about the product?
I really like the UI dashboard of Kong Gateway. Its performance and speed are impressive, using an ultra-lightweight NGINX engine that can handle up to 50,000 transactions per second, which I find really good. I also appreciate its deployment flexibility, whether it's on-premise, in the cloud, or using the Kong Ingress Controller for Kubernetes. The platform is architecture-dependent with lots of options, and I find it really good for my needs. Additionally, it supports managing gateways via YAML and Kubernetes CRDs, which seamlessly integrates into GitOps and CI/CD pipelines. Setting it up was very easy; I was able to do it within an hour and start working on it right away.
What do you dislike about the product?
I think the documentation could be a bit simpler and should include more examples. There's also an enterprise wall, and while the open source resources are good, the paid product is also there, which can be a bit of a barrier.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Kong Gateway improves security and gateway configuration, managing upstream services and reducing 502 errors. It enhances performance and debugging, handling over 50,000 transactions per second. Its deployment flexibility integrates well with Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines, offering seamless integration.
Flexible and Easy-to-Use, But Command-Heavy
What do you like best about the product?
I like the flexibility and easy-to-use UI of Kong Gateway. The integration with AWS was impressive, and the initial setup was straightforward.
What do you dislike about the product?
A lot of commands involved and that need to be reduced
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I find Kong Gateway flexible with a straightforward UI and good AWS integration, though it involves a lot of commands.
Modern, Lightweight API Gateway with Competitive Functionality
What do you like best about the product?
It's very much competitive with functionality provided my modern api gateway. Latest technologies used and make very lighter.
What do you dislike about the product?
The UI could be better, but I still like how it helps everyone move away from what they’re currently using and explore the features.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Better policies and stronger support policies are needed for industry-standard companies.
Fast-to-Deploy API Gateway with a Rich Plugin Ecosystem
What do you like best about the product?
A fast-to-deploy API gateway that you can get up and running in a minute with Docker, plus a lot of plugins.
What do you dislike about the product?
Memory & Performance Overhead
Wait, isn't Kong famous for being fast? Yes, but there’s a catch:
Plugin Bloat: Every plugin you enable adds a small amount of latency. If you stack 15+ plugins (Auth, Logging, Rate Limiting, Transformer, etc.) on a single route, you will see your P99 latency start to creep up.
Resource Usage: Because it runs on Nginx, it’s highly efficient, but if you're running it in a "sidecar" pattern in Kubernetes for every single microservice, the cumulative memory footprint can become significant compared to lighter alternatives like Envoy.
Wait, isn't Kong famous for being fast? Yes, but there’s a catch:
Plugin Bloat: Every plugin you enable adds a small amount of latency. If you stack 15+ plugins (Auth, Logging, Rate Limiting, Transformer, etc.) on a single route, you will see your P99 latency start to creep up.
Resource Usage: Because it runs on Nginx, it’s highly efficient, but if you're running it in a "sidecar" pattern in Kubernetes for every single microservice, the cumulative memory footprint can become significant compared to lighter alternatives like Envoy.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
With your technical background, Kong feels “fast” because it can replace months of custom coding with just minutes of configuration.
Flexible API Management with a Steep Learning Curve
What do you like best about the product?
I really appreciate Kong Gateway's plugin-based architecture and flexibility. It allows us to centralize security and traffic management while keeping services simple, which scales well in cloud-native environments. The architecture helps us to centralize cross-cutting concerns like authentication, rate limiting, and observability, significantly reducing duplication and keeping services focused on business logic. From a platform perspective, it improves consistency and makes it easier to enforce policies across all APIs without touching individual services. Its flexibility also helps us respond quickly to changing requirements by updating configurations at the gateway level instead of redeploying services, leading to better scalability, faster iteration, and a more maintainable system overall.
What do you dislike about the product?
I find the learning curve can be steep, especially for teams new to API gateways. Configuration complexity increases as the number of services grows. Debugging issues across plugins and routing rules can sometimes be non-trivial. The initial setup had a steep learning curve due to the Lua-based architecture and our plugins were in Go language, which was not supported out of the box.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use Kong Gateway to centralize API management, improve scalability, and maintain consistency. Its plugin-based architecture helps focus services on business logic, while flexibility enables quick adaptation to changes, enhancing scalability, iteration speed, and system maintainability.
High-Performance, Scalable API Traffic Handling with Flexible Plugins
What do you like best about the product?
Kong Gateway stands out for its high performance and scalability, handling large volumes of API traffic with low latency.
Its flexible plugin architecture also makes it easy to extend functionality for security, monitoring, and authentication.
Its flexible plugin architecture also makes it easy to extend functionality for security, monitoring, and authentication.
What do you dislike about the product?
The learning curve can be steep, especially when dealing with advanced configurations and plugins.
It can also become complex to manage at scale without strong operational practices and tooling in place.
It can also become complex to manage at scale without strong operational practices and tooling in place.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Kong Gateway solves the challenge of managing, securing, and scaling APIs in a centralized way, eliminating the need to handle these concerns individually in each service.
This benefits me by simplifying operations, improving security consistency, and allowing faster development and deployment of APIs.
This benefits me by simplifying operations, improving security consistency, and allowing faster development and deployment of APIs.
Seamless Integration and Automation, Needs Better Documentation
What do you like best about the product?
I like Kong Gateway's seamless integration and how it's based on Nginx reverse proxy, which allows me to set limits easily.
What do you dislike about the product?
I find the documentation poor, especially for the initial setup and configuration.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use Kong Gateway for API connectivity and automation. It offers seamless integration, leverages Nginx reverse proxy, and allows me to set limits easily.
Lightweight Yet Powerful
What do you like best about the product?
Lightweight but powerful, deploy anywhere
What do you dislike about the product?
control plane groups, lua based plugins, lua is dead
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Federated gateways, dev teams being self sufficient in managing their APIs
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