The product seems to be good, especially in terms of API creation and management. The tool is seamlessly easy to use, and offers ease of configuration and management. The tool has some very good options for infusing some API security parts. The tool also offers some readily available connectors as well. From an overall perspective, I am handling both B2B integrations and cloud integrations. In our company, we had multiple products in place of Kong Gateway Enterprise.
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Robust solutions with wide array of plugins
What do you like best about the product?
What I like most about Kong is its ease of use and configuration. There are countless plugins for various use cases, including different types of authorization like OAuth2, SAML, and OIDC. Additionally, there is an admin API and a Kong Manager UI, which make it easy to view configurations for each service, route, and plugin individually.
What do you dislike about the product?
I find it frustrating that there isn't a clear way to view metrics like latency in Kong. Recently, we had an issue with one of our upstream services, and it would have been helpful to see Kong analytics to identify which endpoint had problems or which plugins were causing issues. Observability in Kong needs improvement.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It helps us to publish a diverse array of services behind a central gateway so that it appears coherent for all of our customers, both internal and external.
Futuristic API gateway - Kong
What do you like best about the product?
Ease of deployment and free offering to create and test our services really helps anyone starting their APIM journey.
What do you dislike about the product?
Kong does not provide a debugger like other API management tools which can be a problem in some situations.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Kong helped in Migration from legacy APIM tools
Provides easy ad flexible deployment options
Provides easy ad flexible deployment options
Setting up OSS version of the Gatway manager
What do you like best about the product?
I love using the Kong API Gateway because it allows us to make secure connections and allows us to protect the different applications we use against known bad actors attacks like DDoS. It also allow us to configure in a seamless way, different consumers to allows service consumption and usage of different access points accross out cloud services. Another great advantage is that the Kong API Gateway allow us to program different applicatins that make a lot of the parameters used in different plugins configurable on demand, which means that by simply using its REST API we can configure different profile and create consumers as any user wants to define it. All in all, the Kong gateway allow us to configure different users as consumers, it allow us to configure multiple different protocol sorts and payloads, it has a very complete way of doing rerouting and port forwarding, it makes it easy to redirect requests and it is also great that we can also make different API gateways configurable via Kong KONNECT.
What do you dislike about the product?
I am yet to find out something that I dislike about the Kong Gateway. It is a very robust gateway that never failed. Having sais that, if I am force to say something that still feels different when interpreting logs is the usage of LUA scripts, to which not many people have experience working with, but that on its own has never been an actual issue.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Is helping us to solve for the most part, security and rerouting issues. It also allows us to configure user profiles on demand via a custom application we have created.
Kong API Gateway experience so far
What do you like best about the product?
The way it works and how routing is easily managed by the api. I am using the Kong API Gateway as an Ingress and a stand-alone gateway in which both setups are easy to integrate either with helm, manifests, standalone or with etcd datastore. I am not using support but usually find most of the things I need in the docs or forums.
The kong API and Ingress is something that I use and trust every day.
The kong API and Ingress is something that I use and trust every day.
What do you dislike about the product?
When I started using Kong API the documentation was pretty hard to understand, I think that it was reworked and now it's a bit easier to understand.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
HA Routing and security for micro-services.
Streamlining API Management with Kong
What do you like best about the product?
1. High Performance and Scalability
2. Extensibility with Plugins
3. Ease of Deployment and Management
4. Ease of Monitoring and Analytics:
2. Extensibility with Plugins
3. Ease of Deployment and Management
4. Ease of Monitoring and Analytics:
What do you dislike about the product?
It need to have better performance for other laguages, it it has for luma
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Ease of Deployment and Management
API Gateway and Service Mesh
API Gateway and Service Mesh
api gateway service
What do you like best about the product?
very easy process with api gateway and endpoint protection solution also very easy to understand
What do you dislike about the product?
no need, any everything is good kong api
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Easily apply proven principles of DevOps and GitOps to bring applications online faster using Aws integrate
KONG API MANAGEMENT
What do you like best about the product?
Adds support for audio transcription, translation, image generation, batch LLM calls, stateful assistants, and response introspection via providers like OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Azure, Gemini, Cohere, Hugging Face. Empowering richer, multilingual, multimedia agent
What do you dislike about the product?
Kong OSS lacks a built-in GUI; the enterprise UI (Kong Manager) is powerful but can be overwhelming or unintuitive for new users.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Kong API gateway is opensource and it support multiple language. so we are to add multiple services along with security. Kong API gateway also easy to do configuration and installation to our system
Premium and trusted open source API gateway
What do you like best about the product?
It is a fast and flexible cloud native gateway that offers too many premium services. It has very strict policy about who can access the the data and services that are managed behind it. It's data security is good, only authorised users can access the data.
What do you dislike about the product?
It is very difficult to setup the implementation, if you are a new user,then you will face too many difficulty. It's customer support is supportive but can't solve your all issues.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It is very premium and trusted open source API, It ensures our data security by allowing access to the only authorised users. It maintains high availability and good performance.
Reasonably priced and offers ease of integration to users
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
Kong Gateway Enterprise enhances our company's API security in a strong way, and it is compliant with most of the security compliance issues, which is good from an assurance standpoint and acts as a strong point when it comes to the product. In terms of ease of configuration and maintenance of the APIs, the tool offers a very good dashboard, specifically API dashboards, which can provide you insights into how you can use the dashboard for monetizing your solution. For example, for some of the APIs that accompany the product and become a part of the ecosystem, be it for opening new services with different partners, the tool is able to provide good insights in terms of integration touchpoints, which not only caters to the internal ecosystem but also into a partner ecosystem, giving an agnostic view. Depending on the exact need of the hour and based on the requirements, Kong Gateway Enterprise is useful in terms of integration, ease of use, and dashboard.
Though I have not tested the tool, I can say that the product supports AI-driven applications. Nowadays, in most language models, especially when we talk about the edge deployment model, any of the platforms provide you with seamless integration, which is advantageous because most of the applications are consumed by end users. It also boils down to the fact associated with the latencies. For some of the services and requirements, it doesn't always have to be some public cloud infrastructure that one needs to experience. I believe that I will be better off with edge deployment, where things can be run on a nearby location where the customer proximity is there. A combination of AI and edge deployment will be an advantage.
What needs improvement?
The ease of integration offered by the tool is strong. The security is being built in the tool. In terms of the connectivity part of the tool, I haven't had a chance to comment on the challenges since we have not tried it on a large enterprise.
With Kong Gateway Enterprise, since users want more readily available connectors that can be used in head offices or back offices, it is an area that needs to be considered for improvement. For example, if I give out a setup tomorrow for the systems in head offices or back offices, like SAP or ERP systems, then you should be able to provide connectors, and it is an area where my company has not been able to test the product yet. The aforementioned features should not only be available in Kong Gateway Enterprise but also across the product stack offered by others.
From an improvement perspective, the product should offer more readily available connectors and also allow for more seamless AI integrations. Most of the products nowadays are becoming more AI-native because of the needs of the industry. The introduction of GenAI and the use of the integration part to make the tool more of an industry-based solution can make a difference.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Kong Gateway Enterprise for two to three years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Speaking about scalability, I would say that I would not be able to comment on it since the product is not used in large enterprises from a scalability standpoint. The way the tool has been built and the way the API integrations are happening on the cloud solutions, I think it should not have a problem scaling up, but my company has not tested it. To see if the product can be scalable, my company needs to test it in large enterprises with the help of agents. I don't think the scalability part of the product will be an issue, but only if I deal with larger implementations can I be in a better position to comment on the scalability part.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's technical support is good and fast in terms of responsiveness and problem-solving skills. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The product is reasonably priced because it goes by the SaaS model. When it comes to Kong Gateway Enterprise, I don't see much of a price point difference from other tools in the market.
What other advice do I have?
I rate the tool a nine out of ten.
User-friendly developer portal but licensing model changes for each geography
What is our primary use case?
We use it to provide API services to our clients.
What is most valuable?
The features I like include ease of operation and implementation in a cloud environment, the dashboarding features for API statistics, and the user-friendly developer portal.
The plugin architecture is simple and easy to implement.
What needs improvement?
There is room for improvement in the licensing model. It charges differently for each geography. If I have to use Kong in two different geographies for the same organization, it charges me twice. When it comes to Azure, it doesn't charge me twice. Azure has a more economical model.
The licensing in the Middle East, where we work. The licensing of Kong and Azure is a lengthy process. It was not readily available. We had to talk to the product owner to make the Kong Gateway available as a solution on the Azure marketplace. The licensing is only as an on-prem or separate product.
The difference between billing on the cloud and outside the cloud is if I purchase Kong outside, I have to pay the AMC every year or so. The purpose of cloud implementation is to have a consolidated billing for all resources purchased on the cloud. You don't need to deal with multiple vendors. If you have purchased five applications on the cloud marketplace, you get a single consolidated bill every month.
The ease of billing is lost when Kong is not available directly on the Azure marketplace. This is one area where they can improve. There could be a problem with the Middle East geography. They may have Kong available on the Azure marketplace in other geographies, but this is how it is in the Middle East.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it for two and a half years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a very stable product.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten, with one being one scalability and ten being high.
The scalability aspect has a limitation with geography. I can expand it to any country within one region, but not beyond. There are licensing implications.
Technologically, it is scalable to whatever extent required, without any limitations. The limitation is only across geography. It cannot be scaled beyond one region.
There are around 25 technical people using this solution in my organization. We use it daily.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Kong is the first API solution we used. We started API solutions with Kong.
How was the initial setup?
I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy.
The first implementation took three months.
What about the implementation team?
The deployment was done by a vendor.
What was our ROI?
Kong Gateway doesn't save anything, actually. It is not for that purpose. It's a technological solution, we cannot directly attribute revenue to Kong alone. Multiple applications work together to offer the APIs, and those API solutions have brought in some revenue, but not entirely because of Kong, so I cannot quantify that.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing is expensive. I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Our parent organization has been using Kong and evaluated all the possibilities. We took their reference. Recently, we did an evaluation and migrated to Azure API Management from Kong.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend using it. It is a very powerful tool with lots of features. It's stable, user-friendly, and easy to learn.
Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
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