I use it as a gateway for our APIs. We have several hundred APIs here, so we use Kong Gateway Enterprise to manage and monitor them. In this application platform, we prefer to use the Kong Enterprise UI instead of the Kong Community Edition GUI.
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Create Product and potential future market leader
What do you like best about the product?
1. Low Latest
2. Lots of plugins which is useful
3. Ease of use and setup
2. Lots of plugins which is useful
3. Ease of use and setup
What do you dislike about the product?
Kong Documentation needs to be more detailed and their Developer portal needs to be more mature.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It efficiently manages our APIs by routing, securing, and monitoring traffic, reducing manual overhead.
This enhances security, provides valuable analytics, and allows our team to focus on development.
This enhances security, provides valuable analytics, and allows our team to focus on development.
Great tool and Market leader
What do you like best about the product?
In 2025, Kong has releasae lots of new features in Kong Konnect like in AI Gateway it has release Automated RAG Pipelines , PII Sanitization plugins and also enhance Enhanced security and reliability.
Kong also release a debug tracing where we can see the live tracing, which is really good and too fast compare to other APIM.
Kong has also release Kong Event Gateway which is tailored for event-driven architecture which extends Kong's reach beyound synchronous REST.gRPC APIs to tackle streaming and event-based workflow
Kong also release a debug tracing where we can see the live tracing, which is really good and too fast compare to other APIM.
Kong has also release Kong Event Gateway which is tailored for event-driven architecture which extends Kong's reach beyound synchronous REST.gRPC APIs to tackle streaming and event-based workflow
What do you dislike about the product?
I want Kong Gateway to also work as an Identity Provider (IDP) so it can create and manage tokens on its own, instead of depending on third-party platforms like Okta, Auth0, and others.
Kong Gateway Operator 1.5 is powerful, but CRDs can be verbose, and debugging misconfigurations still requires YAML diving.
Kong Gateway Operator 1.5 is powerful, but CRDs can be verbose, and debugging misconfigurations still requires YAML diving.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It centralizes API management, ensuring security, scalability, and streamlined development, while providing analytics for optimization, benefiting developers and businesses alike.
About to be Market leader Product.
What do you like best about the product?
1.Ease of use and setup.
2.Low latency
3.Useful Plugins
2.Low latency
3.Useful Plugins
What do you dislike about the product?
The developer portal needs to be more matured as it is in starting phase.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It enhances API scalability, security, and management with high performance, robust protection, and flexible deployment, benefiting you with improved performance, observability, and simplified API management.
Great Product having Potential of being the Segment Leader
What do you like best about the product?
after my previous response, I can see various plugins such as PII sanitization and Automated RAG injector as welll as trace tool for debugging is also very helpful.
What do you dislike about the product?
Kong is not acting as an IDP server, we are not able to generate tokens from kong itself, we have to use third party IDP servers as okta, oauth 0 etc, so it will be good if we can get this functionality in kong itself, so it can compete with other API gateways like Apigee.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It addresses traffic control, security, and service discovery issues, ensuring efficient API management and high availability. It benefits organizations by providing robust security, scalability, and operational efficiency, enhancing overall API performance and reliability.
Helps manage API usage, monitor anomalies, and detect unusual behavior
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
We use both authorization and header-based methods. Additionally, we connect with our identity provider (IdP) using single sign-on (SSO) and OAuth 2.0. We also enable OpenID Connect.
The traffic control capabilities in Kong Gateway are effective. It helps me manage the usage of each API and monitor any anomalies. I can see any strange behavior or illegal usage from developers, which allows me to notify management about potential issues. Sometimes, it might just be a typo or a bug in the application, but other times, it could be something more serious. The Kong Gateway's traffic control helps detect these anomalies in usage.
What needs improvement?
The main challenge, in my opinion, is the price. It's difficult to convince our management to approve the budget to purchase it from our vendor. There are no technical problems.
It's expensive in Thailand (10 million baht, in Thai currency).
One thing I've seen in a competitor's product is the ability to create a simple API within their platform using a low-code/no-code GUI. It connects to databases and allows you to drag and drop to create basic API functions. I think this feature would be a valuable addition to Kong Gateway Enterprise.
So, they should create a single API for the platform.
Moreover, if Kong Gateway Enterprise could integrate AI, that would be great. It could automatically scale itself, assess request rates for each API, or even detect attacks. That would be great.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it for one and a half years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Kong Gateway helped to improve performance. It's good enough for our users.
I would rate the availability an eight out of ten, we experienced some hiccups.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's very easy to scale and create another adapter.
I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. We around thousands of end users using it.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Kong is my first API gateway.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup had moderate complexity. You have to know a lot of things.
I would rate my experience with the initial setup a five out of ten, with ten being easy.
The Community Edition requires a lot of technical knowledge to implement and use. It's okay for me, but you need to know a lot about Linux, Docker, and networking.
- Deployment time: From scratch, it took about three months.
- Deployment process: The main thing is the configuration and combining it with our existing APIs. Adding them one by one is the most tedious part.
What about the implementation team?
I implemented it. I deploy it in Docker and use it with my team.
What was our ROI?
It helps us mitigate the time to detect problems since we can look up the monitoring system and logs very easily.
It's free for the community edition.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's expensive in Thailand.
As far as I know from one of our vendors, it's about 10 million baht per year.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I'm comparing Kong Gateway Enterprise with other software for potential use in our enterprise. We're looking at management, monitoring, and ease of use.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend it because its performance is great. It's reliable.
Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
Performance and Scaleability
What do you like best about the product?
It can handle large number of Transactions per second which makes it suitable for high throughput requirement applications.
Since it's built on nginx it can be disturbed achieving horizontal scaling is very easy.
Since it's built on nginx it can be disturbed achieving horizontal scaling is very easy.
What do you dislike about the product?
Even though it's powerful, Kong can be complex for initial setup specially for users who lack infra knowledge or API gateways knowledge
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
In IDFC our infra is baed on Mule where gateway is embeded with runtime. So, IDFC is paying high price even for proxy which doesn't require emebeded runtime. Having kong saves cost for the company and also avoid single point of failue if any of the Dependable Mule Service goes down.
Kong discourages modern microservice architecture, outrageously priced
What do you like best about the product?
Built on OpenResty, with straightforward Kubernetes resource definition of routes. The documentation was good as well, and there are free plugins and an open source variant of Kong to get you locked in before you realize the need to switch to another provider.
What do you dislike about the product?
They are dropping their support for Alpine-based images, and their Ubuntu base image brings about too large an attack surface. So you have to build Kong yourself, but the Enterprise Gateway product adds closed source modifications so it's impossible to get a secure build. Also, you have to go with enterprise for FIPS, which is reasonable if it wasn't prohibitively priced. They charge for every separate microservice TIMES every environment, including QA or trial environments. Basically, this makes them implicitly discourage companies from decoupling their enterprise application into separate services.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Reverse proxy with path-based routing. Self-hostable without request or response size or latency restrictions. Extensible for custom logic. Controllable with Kubernetes resources.
One of the Best API Gateway I have ever used!
What do you like best about the product?
Portabie, scalable and open source with easy to use interface and implement in a microservice based architecture. We have been using it for a year without any problems.
What do you dislike about the product?
The Kong API documentation is quite difficult to understand and more user friendly tutorials or documentation could be helpful.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
HA Routing and security for micro-services.
Amazing API
What do you like best about the product?
the intuitive way to register apps and routes
What do you dislike about the product?
it does not handle good the connections to the databse
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
authorization and authentication
Fast reliable and flexible..
What do you like best about the product?
I love using the Kong API gateway because it allows to make secure connections. It has rich plugin ecosystem and offers a wide range of plugins for authentication.
What do you dislike about the product?
Limited GUI interface though not a deal breaker.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Helps me easily configure my services. Quick customer support really helps.
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