# Kong Gateway Reviews **Vendor:** Kong Inc **Category:** [API Management Tools](https://www.g2.com/categories/api-management) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 308 ## About Kong Gateway Kong is a cloud-based API management solution designed to help organizations streamline their API operations and enhance their digital experiences. As businesses increasingly rely on APIs to connect services and enable functionalities, Kong provides a robust framework that simplifies the complexities associated with API management, security, and scalability. This platform is particularly beneficial for companies looking to adopt AI technologies and transition to an API-first approach, allowing them to innovate rapidly and respond to market demands effectively. Targeted at developers, IT teams, and organizations across various industries, Kong addresses the challenges posed by the growing number of APIs and microservices. With the rise of digital transformation, businesses often face hurdles related to compliance, security, and the management of numerous interconnected services. Kong's platform offers a unified solution that enhances productivity by providing tools for API gateways, AI gateways, service meshes, and ingress controllers, all within a single interface. This integration helps teams to manage their APIs more efficiently, reducing the time and effort required to deploy and maintain their services. Key features of Kong include its ability to enhance security through robust authentication and authorization mechanisms, ensuring that sensitive data is protected as it flows through APIs. Additionally, Kong offers performance optimization tools that allow organizations to monitor and improve the speed and reliability of their API interactions. The platform's scalability ensures that as a business grows, its API infrastructure can adapt without compromising performance or security. This adaptability is crucial for companies aiming to leverage AI capabilities, as they often require seamless integration with various data sources and services. Moreover, Kong's user-friendly interface and comprehensive documentation facilitate a smoother onboarding process for developers, enabling them to quickly implement and manage APIs. By fostering collaboration among teams and providing insights into API usage and performance, Kong empowers organizations to make informed decisions that drive business growth. This combination of features positions Kong as a vital tool for any company looking to enhance its digital strategy and capitalize on the opportunities presented by the API economy. ## Kong Gateway Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users commend the **ease of use** of Kong Gateway, benefiting from its comprehensive documentation and simple setup process. (57 reviews) - Users value the **high performance and scalability** of Kong Gateway for managing APIs effortlessly under heavy traffic. (53 reviews) - Users value the **strong security features** of Kong Gateway, ensuring robust protection and control over their APIs. (44 reviews) - Users appreciate the **high scalability** of Kong Gateway, enabling seamless performance even under heavy traffic. (42 reviews) - Users value the **ease of integration and extensive features** of Kong Gateway, praising its modular and customizable system. (41 reviews) - Flexibility (35 reviews) - Users value the **high performance and versatility** of Kong Gateway, praising its support for modern architectures. (31 reviews) - Speed (31 reviews) - Performance Efficiency (29 reviews) - Integrations (28 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users often struggle with **poor documentation** , finding it challenging to navigate plugin usage and configuration effectively. (28 reviews) - Users note a **lack of AI features** and suggest improvements to enhance performance and plugin availability. (21 reviews) - Users find the **lack of analytics and monitoring** in Kong Gateway limits their ability to track API performance effectively. (20 reviews) - Users note the **limited features** of Kong Gateway, expressing a desire for more advanced capabilities and better support. (20 reviews) - Users face a **steep learning curve** in configuring Kong, particularly with advanced features and plugins. (17 reviews) - Difficult Learning (16 reviews) - Users find the **expensive pricing** of Kong Gateway a barrier, particularly with its steep learning curve and limited free features. (16 reviews) - Users face **developer portal issues** , citing immaturity and inadequate documentation hinder their overall experience with Kong Gateway. (15 reviews) - Users find the **complexity** of Kong Gateway challenging, especially with setup and insufficient documentation for beginners. (14 reviews) - Difficult Configuration (14 reviews) ## Kong Gateway Reviews ### 1. API Management made easy, plus it's Open Source toooo!! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Akanksha M. | Technical Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 29, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway 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. ### 2. Flexible, High-Performance API Management at Scale with Kong Gateway **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Danyal A. | Senior Research Assistant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** What I like best about Kong Gateway is its flexibility and ease of managing APIs at scale. It provides a strong plugin ecosystem, solid performance, and smooth integration with Kubernetes and cloud-native environments. I also appreciate the centralized control it gives for security, traffic management, and observability, which makes operations much more efficient for both developers and platform teams. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** What I dislike most about Kong Gateway is that it can feel complex to configure and manage at first, especially for teams that are new to API gateways or service mesh concepts. Some advanced features also seem better suited to larger organizations, which can make it feel heavy for simpler use cases. In addition, troubleshooting and understanding plugin interactions can sometimes take more time than expected. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway is solving the challenge of securely exposing, managing, and monitoring APIs across multiple services and environments. Instead of handling authentication, rate limiting, routing, and observability separately in each service, we can centralize those capabilities in one platform. That reduces duplication, improves consistency, and makes it easier to enforce policies across teams. The main benefit for me is simpler API operations. It helps improve security, speeds up onboarding for new services, and gives better visibility into traffic and performance. As a result, we spend less time on repetitive infrastructure work and more time delivering actual product features. ### 3. Fast-to-Deploy API Gateway with a Rich Plugin Ecosystem **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** pongthep p. | system engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 02, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway?** 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. **What problems is Kong Gateway 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. ### 4. High-Performance API Gateway with Strong DevOps Alignment and Evolving UI Experience!! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 29, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway?** 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. **What problems is Kong Gateway 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. ### 5. High-Performance, Cloud-Native API Gateway with Flexible Plugins and Strong Security **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** purva s. | Associate Consultant, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 31, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** High performance – Built on NGINX/OpenResty, handles heavy API traffic with low latency Plugin-based architecture – Easily add features like auth, rate limiting, logging Scalable – Suitable for microservices and large distributed systems Cloud-native friendly – Works well with Kubernetes and containerized environments Strong security features – Supports OAuth2, JWT, key authentication, etc. Centralized management – Control APIs from a single platform Flexible deployment – Can be deployed on-prem, cloud, or hybrid Active community & support – Good documentation and ecosystem **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Advanced features are paid – Many enterprise capabilities (analytics, RBAC, dev portal) require paid versions **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway helps by: Centralizing API management Improving security (auth, rate limiting) Handling traffic efficiently Standardizing policies across services Benefit: Saves development time, improves scalability, and makes APIs more secure and manageable. ### 6. Kong: A Powerful Open-Source API Gateway for Managing APIs Across Any Environment **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ravi S. | Senior Operarional Lead, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 27, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** One of the Popular opensource API Gateways which help us to manage APIs deployed anywhere from a simple infra to complex multi cloud environment. As per my obeservation Kong is capable to handle different protocols like REST, GRPC, Graphql which enables us to manage almost all of our APIs needs. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Need improvement on AI features and plugins in Kong Gateway is limited, impacting overall functionality and performance. There is lack of analytics and monitoring in Kong Gateway, hindering effective performance tracking. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** While using other backend APIs, we ended up in applying many of the below architecture characteristics to every individual APIs to support the general requirements. That will be a lot of work. Authentication/Authorization, Monitoring, Logging, Traffic control, Caching, API Administration etc.. While using Kong Gateway it will take away all these cross-cutting concerns in managing these APIs and put them all across in a single plane. This will provide us with a lot of architecture advantages. ### 7. Fast, Reliable API Gateway That Scales Smoothly with Kubernetes **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hrutik J. | Senior Associate Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 07, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway 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. ### 8. Seamless Transition to Kong Gateway with Superior Performance **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shivansh V. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 07, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway 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. ### 9. Flexible API Management with a Steep Learning Curve **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chandra Prakash A. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 02, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway 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. ### 10. Phenomenal Speed and GitOps-Friendly Routing with Kong Ingress Controller **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 27, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** The speed is phenomenal, but the real game-changer is how the Kong Ingress Controller allows us to automate our entire routing configuration through kubernetes native resources and GitOps best practices. Using the OIDC and Rate Limiting plugins saved us weeks of custom development, instantly securing our services with zero performance hit. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** The shift away from a fully supported Open Source (OSS) model is disappointing, as it forces teams to move toward the Enterprise/Konnect licensing much earlier than expected to maintain security and stability. This transition adds significant overhead for smaller projects and complicates our long-term roadmap when balancing cost against the need for basic production-grade features. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Before Kong, we were bogged down manually coding cross-cutting concerns like OAuth2 and rate limiting for every new service, but now we offload all that complexity to the gateway. This "kickstart" approach has slashed our initial development time by weeks and ensures our entire API ecosystem has a consistent, high-quality security posture from day one. ### 11. Fast, Scalable & Reliable API Gateway **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Neeraj H. | Technical Operation Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** What I like most about Kong Gateway is its high performance and scalability, which make it a strong fit for managing APIs in production environments. It also has a rich plugin ecosystem for authentication, rate limiting, logging, and security, so I can customize behavior easily without heavy coding. The setup feels straightforward, and its support for a microservices architecture helps streamline overall API management. On top of that, the flexibility to deploy either on-premise or in cloud environments makes it versatile for a wide range of use cases. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** One downside of Kong Gateway is that the initial setup and configuration can feel complex, especially for beginners. You really need a solid understanding of plugins, routing, and the different deployment modes to get everything working smoothly. In addition, some advanced features are only available in the enterprise version, which can drive up costs. Debugging and troubleshooting can also be challenging at times, particularly when visibility is limited unless you have the right monitoring set up. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway helps us address key API management challenges, including handling high traffic, securing APIs, and efficiently managing multiple microservices. It centralizes authentication, rate limiting, and logging, which cuts down on development effort and strengthens overall system reliability. In our experience, it has improved performance, made API monitoring simpler, and enhanced security, enabling faster deployments and giving us better control over our services. ### 12. Reliable API Gateway with Strong Flexibility **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Denis S. | Data Analyst, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** What stands out most is the flexibility and control it gives us over our API traffic. The plugin-based architecture has been especially useful: we can apply authentication, rate limiting, and logging in a consistent way without having to build everything ourselves. It also integrates smoothly into our existing stack and supports both cloud and on-prem setups, which matters for us given our regulatory and data constraints. Performance has been solid under load as well, and that reliability is critical for our use cases. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** The biggest challenge for me is the initial setup and the ongoing maintenance. It isn’t always straightforward, especially for teams that aren’t deeply familiar with API gateway concepts. When configuration issues come up, debugging can take a while, and although the documentation is extensive, it can feel a bit fragmented when you’re working through more advanced scenarios. I also get the sense that some enterprise features are more necessary than optional, which can affect cost considerations. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong has helped us centralise API management and apply consistent security policies across our services. Before we started using it, many of these controls were implemented separately within each service, which led to duplication and inconsistent behaviour. Now we rely on a single layer for authentication, routing, and monitoring, which lowers risk and makes governance much simpler. ### 13. Lightweight, High-Performance KONG Gateway for Secure Banking API Management **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Samatha V. | PEGA Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway 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. ### 14. Future-Ready Kong: Thoughtful Features, Flexible Automation, and Great Support **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anudeep V. | Senior Technical Lead, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I started working with Kong about six months ago as a beginner. What I appreciate most about Kong is that the features they release are well thought‑out and come ready for use. Most capabilities can be easily performed through the UI, CLI, or Admin API, which makes automation straightforward and flexible. Kong also supports a wide range of architectures, from legacy setups to modern, cloud‑native designs. Their development process is strong, user feedback is actively considered, enhancements are delivered quickly, and the overall support experience has been very good. This has made learning and working with the platform much easier and more effective. The introduction of AI Gateway capabilities further positions Kong ahead of the market, making it a future‑ready platform. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** One area where I see room for improvement is that some capabilities which were previously available—and are still relevant and commonly expected in the API gateway space—have been deprecated or are no longer supported. For example, earlier versions allowed API products to be created with the same name, which enabled a single‑organization model while differentiating environments such as Production and Non‑Production, and publishing them to their respective developer portals. With the v3 Developer Portal, this is no longer supported, as API products must have globally unique names. This results in a less optimal user experience or requires maintaining separate organizations for Production and Non‑Production, which in turn increases operational and maintenance overhead. It would be valuable to revisit this capability to better support common enterprise environment‑segregation use cases. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Based on my experience with Kong, one feature I particularly appreciate is the ability to assign approvers to individual APIs as part of the self‑service journey, without requiring any external approval workflow. This was something we struggled to implement in our previous developer portal. Additionally, Kong makes it very easy to integrate with observability and monitoring tools such as OpenTelemetry and Splunk, enabling seamless visibility into API behavior and performance. ### 15. High-Performance, Scalable API Traffic Handling with Flexible Plugins **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chirang M. | Technical Lead, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 02, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** 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. **What problems is Kong Gateway 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. ### 16. Kong API journey **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Investment Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 31, 2021 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** Kong Gateway's new features focus on enhancing its AI Gateway capabilities and improving overall performance and security. There are rumours that Kong is promoting the Gateway to General Availability and introducing semantic intelligence for accelerated GenAI performance and LLM security. That would be awesome! **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Possibly think on ways where its usage can be cheaper or easier to adopt by SMB. **Recommendations to others considering Kong Gateway:** Ensure you evaluate Kong when applying your API strategy due to their vision and approach in this space. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** With an API strategy, corporations can start to bridge the gap between legacy systems and new channels or platforms required to be more agile, flexible and easier to implement. Kong offers not only that but also the ability to have an API platform implemented by baby steps that is always a big advantage and solves many questions about 'what is needed to open ourselves into the external partner community'. These are some of the benefits and problems solved by the API strategy and using Kong as your partner. **Official Response from Taylor Page:** > Hi Nuno -- I love to read reviews like this! You're absolutely right that our vision is to help our customers re-imagine what their API ecosystem looks like and how it can be optimized to best serve their customers (both internal and external). Would love to get more insight into your suggests around the ways we can improve the way we explain our solution to new Kong API Gateway users. Thanks so much for your review and feedback! ### 17. Empowers API Management with Ease, Despite Initial Setup Hurdles **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** kiranmayee K. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I like that Kong Gateway is a very useful tool for building secure and scalable applications. It helps me organize, secure, and manage all my APIs easily in one place. What I liked is that many features, like security and rate limiting, can be added easily without much coding. I like how it makes managing and securing APIs simple and organized. I enjoy its speed and how smoothly it integrates with my work. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Initial setup can be tricky and debugging could be simpler. Debugging is sometimes hard because errors aren't clear. Clearer error messages or a visual dashboard could make it easier. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway helps securely manage and organize all my APIs efficiently, handling traffic smoothly. It simplifies adding features like security and rate limiting without much coding and integrates well with my workflow. ### 18. Flexible API Management with Bit of a Learning Curve **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aakash S. | Sr. Technical Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 03, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway 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. ### 19. Performance Powerhouse with Strong Security Features **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** José Heriberto S. | Software Engineer/Mulesoft Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I really like Kong Gateway for its performance and flexibility. It’s great how it’s built from the engines of Kong and can handle tasks with low latency, making it a strong fit for environments where performance is crucial. The plugin-based architecture is a huge advantage, making it straightforward to extend functionality for things like authentication, logging, and rate limiting without overcomplicating the core setup. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** I think it would be helpful to have more real case scenarios where companies use Kong Gateway. The initial setup was not easy. I recommend that Kong provides more real case scenarios or company use examples. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Kong Gateway to secure and manage API traffic. It helps me maintain a strong security environment in my API setup and gives me a solid foundation in routing and flow management. ### 20. Kong **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Seenu V. | Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 09, 2022 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I really like how lightweight Kong Gateway is. It doesn't hog your system resources at all, which is a huge plus. Even if you're working on a laptop or a machine that's not super powerful, Kong runs just fine without slowing things down. You don't need some beefy server setup to get it going, which makes life a lot easier when you're just trying to get work done. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Overall, Kong Gateway is pretty solid, but the documentation could use some work. When I was getting started, I found the initial setup instructions a bit confusing. It would be awesome if they had more beginner-friendly tutorials or step-by-step guides that walk you through the basics. Maybe some video walkthroughs or real-world examples would help new users get up and running faster without having to dig through forums or Stack Overflow. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have been using Kong for my personal projects ita kinda great and helpfil for me, i been learning a new things fast ### 21. Flexible, Scalable, and Effortless API Management **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ayushi J. | Digital Marketing Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 15, 2025 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I like that Kong Gateway is incredibly flexible and scales really well, it just handles massive amounts of API traffic without breaking a sweat. The plugin system is a huge plus for me, since it lets me add features like authentication, rate limiting, or monitoring without doing a lot of extra work, and I’ve found the hybrid deployment options super handy when bridging older systems with new cloud apps. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** What I dislike is that getting started can be rough, especially if you’re new to API gateways; the documentation sometimes leaves you hanging and figuring things out can be frustrating. I also wish more advanced features were available in the open source version, since some really useful stuff is locked behind the enterprise paywall, and the developer portal feels a bit undercooked compared to others I’ve tried **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway is solving the challenge of securely and efficiently managing APIs in a microservices architecture. It helps by centralizing API authentication and authorization, making sure only the right users can access my services, and it protects APIs from abuse through rate limiting and other security tools. With built-in logging, monitoring, and plugin support, it simplifies both managing traffic and troubleshooting issues, all from a single platform. ### 22. Fast, Lightweight API Gateway with Strong Plugins and Kubernetes Integration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consulting | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 12, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway 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. ### 23. Kong Gateway’s Flexible, High-Performance Plugin Architecture **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I love Kong Gateway's flexibility and performance thanks to its modular plugin architecture. This makes it easy to add features like authentication, rate limiting, and logging without changing the core service, while also centralizing API management, keeping the backend focused on business logic. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** While powerful, Kong Gateway has a steep learning curve and configuration can become complex as needs evolve. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway helps address the complexity of API management in microservices architectures, especially in Kubernetes environments. By centralizing functions like authentication, rate limiting, and routing, I don't need to implement them in every service. This is especially beneficial in fintech because it improves consistency, security, and simplifies scaling and compliance, freeing the backend to focus on business logic. ### 24. Kong Gateway: Reliable and Scalable API Gateway for Microservices **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kiran P. | API Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 29, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** Kong Gateway is highly performant and scalable, making it ideal for microservices environments. I really like its plugin-based architecture, which allows easy implementation of features like authentication, rate limiting, and logging without changing application code. Its Kubernetes support and declarative configuration also make it very DevOps-friendly. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Kong Gateway has a noticeable learning curve, especially for beginners, and some configurations can be complex to troubleshoot. Also, a few advanced features are limited to the enterprise version, which may not be ideal for all teams. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway centralizes API management, helping us handle authentication, rate limiting, and monitoring in one place. This reduces development effort, improves security, and provides better visibility into API performance and usage. ### 25. Easy Onboarding, Tricky Setup with Powerful UI **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Krishna G. | Lead Project engineer, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 27, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I use Kong Gateway for load balancing and find that it handles preflight checks and acts as an auth wrapper using simple modules really well. I appreciate its best UI for routing, which makes things straightforward. What I like the most about Kong Gateway is how easy it is to onboard and use the UI, making the overall experience smooth and enjoyable. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** The system setup part could be improved. It can be tricky, and having a feature like Helm to set it up instantly would be beneficial. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Kong Gateway for load balancing, handling preflight checks, using auth wrappers with simple modules, and routing efficiently with the best UI. ### 26. Centralized API Control with Operational Challenges **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Frank W. | Senior platform Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I like that Kong Gateway is on premise, so we can control it ourselves without data flowing to different cloud providers. It gives us centralized control over our API routing, which is essential for managing all the APIs in one place. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** I think it has a lot of operation overhead, like patching and other things. That's why we're migrating to the Chrome connect, where the control plan is hosted in the SaaS space. And the data plans leave our network, which have private access to all the backend. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway provides essential control for all our APIs, offering a centralized platform for managing API routing. ### 27. From Product Creation to Future Market Dominance **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anshul A. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2024 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** High performance and scalability, even under heavy traffic. Flexible plugin architecture that allows easy customization and extension. Strong security features, including authentication, rate limiting, and traffic control. Native service mesh compatibility, enabling seamless integration with modern architectures. Wide range of built-in and community plugins that simplify data transformation and API operations. Simple setup and user-friendly configuration, making onboarding and deployment very smooth. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** More detailed and example-rich documentation to help developers understand advanced configurations and edge cases. Improved debugging and troubleshooting tools, especially around plugin errors, request tracing, and performance bottlenecks. Enhanced UI visibility in Kong Manager for monitoring, logs, and analytics. Simplified configuration for complex deployments, such as hybrid mode or multi-cluster setups **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** API Traffic Management Security Extensibility and Customization Observability and Monitoring ### 28. Smooth API Management with Kong Gateway **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Danish S. | Cloud Solutions Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway?** Key Value Maps, Share Flows, API Trace **What problems is Kong Gateway 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. ### 29. Flexible Deployment, Smooth Setup **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Resat Y. | Cybersecurity, CISSP, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 27, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I really like Kong Gateway's deployment flexibility. It can be deployed in various environments, whether on-premise, off-premise, or in the cloud. It's also appreciated how easy it is to configure services, routes, plugins, and consumers, making the whole setup process smooth and easy. Additionally, the gateway support team is very helpful, providing great assistance. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** I think Kong Gateway could use some improvements in compliance with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA depending on the environment. It needs to be more compliant in those aspects. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Kong Gateway for API management, microservices, and securing and routing requests. ### 30. Two Years with Kong API Gateway: A Reliable Partner in API Management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** GULSHAN K. | Kong Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 21, 2025 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** What I like best about Kong Gateway is its flexibility and scalability. It handles high traffic loads efficiently, provides strong security features like authentication and rate-limiting, and integrates seamlessly with monitoring tools like Prometheus. Its hybrid deployment model makes it easy to manage both DC and DR environments, and the plugin ecosystem allows for quick customization without heavy coding. Overall, it’s reliable, developer-friendly, and simplifies API operations at scale. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** With Kong Gateway Enterprise, the overall experience is excellent. The only area I would point out is that certain advanced configurations can feel complex at first, and some features require deeper expertise to fully leverage. Also, upgrades and version compatibility sometimes need careful planning. That said, the strong documentation, enterprise support, and stability make these challenges much easier to handle **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway Enterprise is helping us centralize and secure API traffic across multiple environments. It simplifies authentication, authorization, rate-limiting, and observability, which are critical for ensuring reliability and compliance. By managing APIs through a single platform, we’ve reduced operational overhead, improved scalability, and ensured high availability in both DC and DR setups. This has not only streamlined day-to-day operations but also given us confidence in handling peak loads and future growth ### 31. Intuitive API Management with Seamless Security **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Palle C. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I appreciate how with Kong Gateway, we can easily apply security for our APIs, which makes it very user-friendly. I like the interface of Kong Gateway for users because it's clear, and even a user who is new to Kong Gateway can easily use it. It's also nice that we can easily set it up with the help of the helpline. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** The trial period is too short; I'd like it to be extended beyond 45 days. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway helps us easily apply security for our APIs and has a clear, user-friendly interface. ### 32. Efficient API management for microservices **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** Open source nature of the platform does pose a rick of delayed support when it comes to integration with other systems as well as new feature requests. But i'm sure the team is working on it :) Kong's API support towards open source initiatives has significantly improved since my last review and the ease of integration has certainly reached a new high. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Open source nature of the platform does pose a rick of delayed support when it comes to integration with other systems as well as new feature requests. But i'm sure the team is working on it :) **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** kong api gateway helps me in my personal projects to develop applications based out of diverse tech stack. This eases the overhead of maintain domain knowledge and thereby assists in faster iteration on software development. ### 33. Incredible Speed, Rock-Solid Performance, and Total Control Over Security & Traffic **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anna S. | API Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 19, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** Its speed is incredible, and the performance doesn’t drop even under pressure. The best part is the complete control it gives you over security and traffic, which provides real peace of mind. On top of that, it adapts natively to any environment without any issues. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** The first few weeks can be difficult to get used to if you don’t have prior experience. Another drawback is the price; the enterprise version isn’t exactly cheap. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** It’s totally worth it. The security is truly robust, and the speed is incredible; we haven’t experienced any system failures. Best of all, the scalability is real—it’s clearly designed to grow without interruption. ### 34. Great tool and Market leader **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rakesh K. | Technology Analyst, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2024 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** 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. **What problems is Kong Gateway 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. ### 35. Powerful and Configurable, but Documentation Could Be Improved **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 14, 2023 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I like that Kong Gateway offers configuration possibilities and is designed for developers. Additionally, the management of rate limiting, API keys, and the ease of integration with Kubernetes are aspects that I find really useful. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Examples and documentation **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Kong Gateway to control access to different APIs. It makes it easier for me to manage rate limiting, API keys, and its integration with Kubernetes. ### 36. In Depth Analysis of Modern API Management with Kong **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Swathi A. | Zuno Community Captain , Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** With kong support, I have done changes for declarative configuration using YAML and it's integration with CI / CD pipelines which significantly reduced the manual intervention. It helped to accelerate the speed of testing and debugging. I would also like to appreciate the improved developer portal, interactive docs and finally the testing tools. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** The plugin configuration and debugging can be better since for the new users it is but complicated. But I found the setup is strong and ux can be improved and should be more developer friendly. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** API Management in Kong involves comprehensive API capabilities that allows us to efficiently manage and control the access to APIs. It includes many other great features like authentication, rate limiting, request/response transformation, and traffic control. These leveraging functionalities makes the use if Kong management and monitoring of APIs at ease and also ensuring availability and performance. Scalability of the Kong is easy to handle high volumes of API traffic when ee try again and again for certain specific use and it provides horizontal scalability features ad well. It mainly acts as a centralized entry point for the APIs, load balancing APIs is great among other. Also this capability improves the overall performance and reliability of API infrastructure. Security Control of Kong involves robust security features to protect the APIs from unauthorized access and potential threats. ### 37. Robust API Management with Impressive Performance and Scalability **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mario H. | Analyst, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 11, 2025 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I’m glad to see that this is a robust and well-established choice for API management. Its impressive performance and scalability make it highly efficient, and I particularly value the plugin architecture, which makes it simple to add new features. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** One persistent issue is that error messages from the proxy or plugin layer are often not sufficiently explicit. This lack of clarity can make it more challenging to debug and determine the underlying cause of a configuration failure. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Since adopting this platform, we have experienced considerable time savings in both the development and maintenance of our individual applications. Furthermore, it enables us to innovate new features quickly and supports a higher degree of customization. ### 38. Seamless Integration and Automation, Needs Better Documentation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ashley B. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 31, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway?** I find the documentation poor, especially for the initial setup and configuration. **What problems is Kong Gateway 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. ### 39. Flexible and Easy-to-Use, But Command-Heavy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** A B. | Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 06, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway?** A lot of commands involved and that need to be reduced **What problems is Kong Gateway 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. ### 40. Reliable, Cloud-Native API Gateway with Strong Security Features **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Oussama N. | Integration Consultant, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 19, 2025 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** Kong Gateway is highly performant and cloud-native by design, which makes it an excellent fit for modern microservices and Kubernetes-based environments. I really appreciate its flexibility with plugins for security, observability, and traffic management—especially features like authentication, rate limiting, and service mesh integration. The developer experience is smooth, and the open-source foundation combined with enterprise-grade support ensures scalability and reliability. Its lightweight footprint and API-first approach make it easy to integrate into CI/CD pipelines while maintaining strong security practices. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** The documentation can sometimes be fragmented, making it difficult to find detailed, end-to-end configuration examples for more complex use cases. The learning curve is a bit steep for teams new to API gateways, and some advanced plugins require enterprise licensing, which may not always be budget-friendly for smaller organizations. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway helps us centralize API management across different services and environments. It solves the challenges of securing APIs by enforcing authentication, authorization, and rate limiting consistently. It also provides strong observability with logging and monitoring features, which helps us detect issues early and improve performance. ### 41. Modern, Lightweight API Gateway with Competitive Functionality **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rajnish K. | Sr. Solution Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 03, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** It's very much competitive with functionality provided my modern api gateway. Latest technologies used and make very lighter. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Better policies and stronger support policies are needed for industry-standard companies. ### 42. Smooth Integration with User-Friendly UI **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rishabh U. | DevOps/ Site Reliability Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I like the UI of Kong Gateway. It solves our day-to-day needs and the team is very happy using it. The initial setup was very easy. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Nothing **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway addresses technical problems and integrates easily, which meets our day-to-day needs and keeps the team happy. ### 43. Develop a Product and Pinpoint a Prospective Future Market Leader **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ankit B. | software engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2024 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 1.Decentralized & High-Performance Architecture 2.Service Mesh Support (Kuma/Envoy Integration) 3.Powerful Declarative Configuration (GitOps-Friendly) **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Although Kong has many plugins, some community plugins lack maintenance, updates, and version compatibility. A more standardized, validated plugin ecosystem would help developers. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong API Gateway streamlines API management by efficiently routing, securing, and monitoring traffic, thereby reducing manual effort. This bolsters security, offers valuable analytics, and enables our team to concentrate on development. ### 44. Great Product having Potential of being the Segment Leader **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pawan S. | Technology Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 05, 2024 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway?** 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 Kong Gateway 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. ### 45. Go-To Multicloud API Gateway with Highly Scalable Performance **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bharath D. | Staff Incident Management , Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** One of the goto solutions for all your API gateway needs in multicloud environments providing highly scalable solutions. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Dealing with Enterprise restrictions, plugins management & a few performance challenges **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Open source API gateway platform delivering all your organisation needs ### 46. Flexible Deployment, Easy to Use, and Smart Management/Data Plane Separation **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Transportation/Trucking/Railroad | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 09, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** Deployment flexibility, easy to use, separates management and data planes **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Plugin sprawl becomes a governance problem, Order of execution matters, but isn’t always obvious **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** API gateway, edge and micro-gateway ### 47. Robust API Governance and Identity Controls with Kong Gateway **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** Kong Gateway provides a robust set of API rules, policies, governance, and identity controls for proper shielding and protection of assets. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** The Kong Gateway does so many things, and the options are numerous that being focused on particular use cases with specific configuration can be daunting. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Main problem Kong Gateway is solving is a shielding aspect for core software programs and keeping misbehaving systems from interfering with functional activities. ### 48. Native Kubernetes Support, but the Pricing Structure Needs Work **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 31, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** Native Kubernetes support is a key asset as thats the main entrypoint for our apps **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** The pricing structure, I dont know exactly to what extent Kong is really OSS, as we build heavily on OSS software its important to know the licensing of the product / plugins **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** We dont actively use Kong currently as more transparant open source gateways (like Tyk) currently cover all our needs ### 49. Reliable API Gateway with room for easier setup **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 23, 2025 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** I find Kong Gateway very reliable once I get it up and running. The performance has been solid in my experience, and it manages high traffic with minimal latency. I really like the flexibility it gives me through plugins and integrations, which makes it easier to adapt to different use cases. I also appreciate the active open-source community and the amount of documentation available, which helped me learn along the way. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Getting started with Kong Gateway took a bit of time to figure out. The setup and configuration were a little more involved than I expected, and I had to spend some extra time learning the best approach for my use case. I've also noticed that a few advanced features are only in the enterprise version, which is something to keep in mind. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Kong gateway mainly for API management in a microservices setup. It has helped me centralize traffic routing, enforce authentication, and monitor requests across different services. Before this, managing APIs individually was messy and inconsistent, but Kong gave me a single place to handle rate limiting, security, and observability. This has saved me time on maintenance and made it easier to ensure our APIs stay reliable under heavy load. ### 50. Kong API Gateway review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** NISARUDDIN M. | Technical Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2022 **What do you like best about Kong Gateway?** The dashboard actually makes sense now: I used to dread explaining API performance to our product team, but Kong's analytics are pretty straightforward. I can literally show them a graph and say "here's where things slowed down" without getting into the technical weeds. Kubernetes setup was surprisingly smooth: I'll be honest, I was expecting a headache when we moved to containers, but Kong just... worked? The ingress controller picked up our services automatically. Saved me probably a week of manual configuration. No more 3am deployment calls: Being able to tweak rate limits or add authentication without taking anything down has been huge. Last month during Black Friday traffic, I adjusted our rate limiting on the fly while sitting in my pajamas. My sleep schedule thanks Kong for this. Finally, consistent environments: Our staging environment actually mirrors production now. No more surprises when we deploy - what works in dev actually works in prod. **What do you dislike about Kong Gateway?** Look, Kong's solid, but it's not perfect: The Lua thing is annoying: If you need custom plugins, you better know Lua or be ready to learn it. I spent way too many hours on Stack Overflow figuring out basic syntax. Would love a simpler way to write custom logic. Documentation feels incomplete sometimes: The basics are covered well, but when you hit edge cases, good luck. I've had to reverse-engineer solutions from GitHub issues more times than I'd like. Monitoring could be better: I still use external tools to keep an eye on resource usage. Would be nice if Kong gave me better visibility into how much CPU and memory it's actually using. Initial setup was overwhelming: My first time setting up Kong, I stared at the config files for like an hour. A setup wizard would've saved me a lot of confusion. **What problems is Kong Gateway solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automation, we did a lot of end-to-end automation with this KONG API Gateway. We developed APIs with this. and security services with this. ## Kong Gateway Discussions - [What is the use of Kong API gateway?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-the-use-of-kong-api-gateway) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [What does KONG software do?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-does-kong-software-do) - 3 comments, 1 upvote - [What is Kong API management?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-kong-api-management) - 1 comment - [Is Kong Devops tool?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-kong-devops-tool) - 6 comments - [View Kong Gateway pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/kong-gateway/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-14+16%3A40%3A40+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=ca6ce83a-872b-40ba-9b91-8bddc546288c&secure%5Btoken%5D=f6ececc2e4ed293753aa6d8b566888d7bd4ed4fcf8ef051298c0cd4521b7283a&format=llm_user) ## Kong Gateway Integrations - [Active Directory Reporting Tool](https://www.g2.com/products/active-directory-reporting-tool/reviews) - [Amdocs CES](https://www.g2.com/products/amdocs-ces/reviews) - [Apache Kafka](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-kafka/reviews) - [AppSentinels](https://www.g2.com/products/appsentinels/reviews) - [AWS Elastic Load Balancing](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-elastic-load-balancing/reviews) - [AWS Lambda](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-lambda/reviews) - [Datadog](https://www.g2.com/products/datadog/reviews) - [Dynatrace](https://www.g2.com/products/dynatrace/reviews) - [Elasticsearch](https://www.g2.com/products/elastic-elasticsearch/reviews) - [ELK Kubernetes Container Solution Stack](https://www.g2.com/products/elk-kubernetes-container-solution-stack/reviews) - [Grafana Labs](https://www.g2.com/products/grafana-labs/reviews) - [Keycloak on CentOS Stream 8 by Neodoo](https://www.g2.com/products/keycloak-on-centos-stream-8-by-neodoo/reviews) - [Kubernetes](https://www.g2.com/products/kubernetes/reviews) - [Logz.io](https://www.g2.com/products/logz-io/reviews) - [MuleSoft Anypoint Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/mulesoft-anypoint-platform/reviews) - [Noname Security](https://www.g2.com/products/noname-security/reviews) - [Okta](https://www.g2.com/products/okta/reviews) - [Prometheus](https://www.g2.com/products/prometheus/reviews) - [Redis Software](https://www.g2.com/products/redis-software/reviews) - [SailPoint](https://www.g2.com/products/sailpoint/reviews) - [Salt Security](https://www.g2.com/products/salt-security/reviews) - [Splunk AppDynamics](https://www.g2.com/products/splunk-appdynamics/reviews) - [Splunk Enterprise](https://www.g2.com/products/splunk-enterprise/reviews) - [Traceable AI](https://www.g2.com/products/traceable-ai/reviews) ## Kong Gateway Features **Development** - API Testing - Data Security - Orchestration - Scalability **Customization** - SEO - API Contracts - Change Management **Prompt Engineering - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps) ** - Prompt Optimization Tools - Template Library **Inference Optimization - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Batch Processing Support **Development - API Platforms** - API Testing - Scalability - Orchestration - Data Security **API Construction** - API Testing - Data Security - Orchestration - Scalability **Collaboration** - Design Management - Access Control - Visibility **Organization** - Respository - Third-Party Integration - Access Management **Model Garden - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Model Comparison Dashboard **Collaboration - API Platforms** - Visibility - Access Control - Design Management **API Management** - Traffic Control - Logs/Documentation - API Monitoring - Monetization - Gateway **Custom Training - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Fine-Tuning Interface **API Management - API Platforms** - API Monitoring - Traffic Control - Gateway - Logs/Documentation - Monetization **Data Integration** - App Integration - Data Transformation - Plugins **Application Development - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps) ** - SDK & API Integrations **Model Deployment - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps) ** - One-Click Deployment - Scalability Management **Guardrails - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Content Moderation Rules - Policy Compliance Checker **Model Monitoring - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Drift Detection Alerts - Real-Time Performance Metrics **Security - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Data Encryption Tools - Access Control Management **Gateways & Routers - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Request Routing Optimization ## Top Kong Gateway Alternatives - [MuleSoft Anypoint Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/mulesoft-anypoint-platform/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (615 reviews) - [Swagger Studio](https://www.g2.com/products/swagger-studio/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (183 reviews) - [Postman](https://www.g2.com/products/postman/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (1,719 reviews)