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Lightweight, High-Performance KONG Gateway for Secure Banking API Management
What do you like best about the product?
Its lightweight architecture and high performance API Gateway is best for industries like us (Banking). We use for our API management, considering risks in banking we need a secure system to connect to API's for which we use KONG Gateway.
What do you dislike about the product?
It is good, but needs full expertise to unlock full potential. Initial set up, configuration might feel complex if you have no prior experience. Additionally to unlock some advanced capabilities require license.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It is used to fulfill our integration requirements in a secure way. We use it to replace oracle integration use cases.
Flexible API Management with Bit of a Learning Curve
What do you like best about the product?
I like that Kong Gateway provides a runtime that can be managed by me on Kubernetes or Docker, or alternatively, it can be managed by Kong itself. This gives me multiple options based on specific requirements or the governance and compliance needs of different clients.
What do you dislike about the product?
The setup can be Kubernetes-based and requires some special skills on the platform side, which means it has a bit of a learning curve before people become conversant with the interface.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use Kong Gateway to manage APIs, centralizing API keys and policies, reducing costs related to security and observability. It allows us to modernize communication by changing record formats and handling older patterns, effectively acting as a strangler interface.
API Management made easy, plus it's Open Source toooo!!
What do you like best about the product?
I appreciate Kong Gateway for providing better visibility into APIs and upstream services. The Kong Proxy performs way better than other alternatives like NGINX Proxy. I particularly like the 'Plugin first' approach since the plugins in Kong are modular like legos, making tasks like rate limiting or blacklisting certain APIs much easier without having to write lots of code. The built-in, out-of-the-box plugins reduce latency effectively. The setup process is super easy, thanks to the right scripts and developer documentation available, making installation and setup straightforward.
What do you dislike about the product?
The support for Custom Plugins needs to be improved even further, a bit more streamlining in terms of building and developing plugins using Lua.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Kong Gateway gives me better visibility into APIs and upstream services, and its proxy outperforms others like NGINX. The modular plugins make tasks like rate limiting or blacklisting easy without extra code, reducing latency with built-in solutions.
High-Performance API Gateway with Strong DevOps Alignment and Evolving UI Experience!!
What do you like best about the product?
I use Kong Gateway for streamlining microservices and better visibility. I appreciate that it offers insight into all my microservices on a single platform. I like its versatility and how it can handle a huge number of transactions per second (TPS) without needing equivalent infrastructure. Kong Gateway offers almost 50K TPS per node, which is impressive in its segment, and it's cost-effective. My team switched from APIGEE to Kong Gateway for some parts of our business due to its cost efficiency and 100% operational efficiency without the risk of vendor lock-in. The initial setup is pretty easy, especially with the new Kong Docs Portal.
What do you dislike about the product?
From my hands-on experience, Kong Gateway can feel a bit too DevOps centric for teams that would rather have more guided management through a rich GUI(KONG Manager type), since so much of the control is handled through configuration and APIs.
If you run it in DB mode, you also need to plan carefully for PostgreSQL operations and failover as part of the overall gateway design. And although Lua plugins are powerful, it’s not always easy on real projects to find people who are comfortable extending Kong at that level.
If you run it in DB mode, you also need to plan carefully for PostgreSQL operations and failover as part of the overall gateway design. And although Lua plugins are powerful, it’s not always easy on real projects to find people who are comfortable extending Kong at that level.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Kong Gateway addresses the core need to control, secure, and standardize how APIs are exposed, without requiring changes to the backend services themselves. It provides a consistent layer where I can apply authentication, rate limiting, transformations, and logging across APIs in a uniform way, which significantly cuts down on custom code at the application level. Because it supports declarative configuration and is designed with automation in mind, I can manage API behavior through versioned configuration files and CI/CD workflows rather than relying on manual updates. This improves governance and security while also making deployments more predictable, repeatable, and easier to scale across different environments.
Smooth API Management with Kong Gateway
What do you like best about the product?
I like Kong Gateway because it's easy to install and set up, which speeds up our go-to-market process. I find the flexibility of Kong Gateway to be wonderful and a game changer. The initial setup was really smooth, thanks to developer.konghq.com.
What do you dislike about the product?
Key Value Maps, Share Flows, API Trace
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use Kong Gateway for API management, tackling information security issues like OWASP Top 10. It's easy to install and set up, which speeds up our market readiness. Its flexibility is a game changer.
Fast, Lightweight API Gateway with Strong Plugins and Kubernetes Integration
What do you like best about the product?
Kong is fast, lightweight and predictable under load. The plugin model gives you tight control over routing, auth, and rate‑limits without building custom components. Declarative config fits cleanly into CI/CD, and the Kubernetes integration is solid.
From a cost point of view, the open‑source core gives you most of what you need without locking you into a heavy enterprise contract. The ROI is straightforward: once it’s in place, you spend less time maintaining API plumbing and more time on actual product work.
Support has been steady when we’ve needed it, and onboarding new services is simple once the patterns are in place. The newer AI‑driven insights in Konnect are early but useful — mainly around traffic patterns and anomaly detection — and they help tighten operational visibility without extra tooling.
From a cost point of view, the open‑source core gives you most of what you need without locking you into a heavy enterprise contract. The ROI is straightforward: once it’s in place, you spend less time maintaining API plumbing and more time on actual product work.
Support has been steady when we’ve needed it, and onboarding new services is simple once the patterns are in place. The newer AI‑driven insights in Konnect are early but useful — mainly around traffic patterns and anomaly detection — and they help tighten operational visibility without extra tooling.
What do you dislike about the product?
The UI is limited, so most work ends up in config and CLI. Some plugins are harder to tune than they should be, and debugging interactions between them takes time. Enterprise features are useful but push you into higher pricing tiers earlier than expected.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Kong gives us a consistent way to manage routing, auth, and rate‑limits across distributed services. It standardises API governance, removes one‑off patterns, and keeps traffic policies in one place. The declarative approach speeds up onboarding for new services and reduces the time spent maintaining API plumbing. Overall, it improves reliability and keeps day‑to‑day operations predictable.
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.
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