Kong Konnect Reviews & Product Details

Konnect simplifies the entire lifecycle—from designing and securing APIs to monitoring performance and scaling—without adding unnecessary complexity. Its cloud-hosted control plane removes a lot of operational overhead, while still giving full flexibility to deploy gateways anywhere: on-premise, cloud, Kubernetes, or hybrid environments.

Overall, it helps teams move faster, maintain better control, and deliver reliable APIs with far less effort. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I dislike about Kong Konnect is that some parts of the platform can feel a bit complex when you first start using it, especially for teams that are new to API gateways or Kubernetes. The documentation is extensive, but sometimes you need to piece together information from multiple places to get a complete picture. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Earlier we were using Kong enterprise and recently we migrated to Kong Konnect, the Konnect is absolutely a good enhancement that we wanted because UI is simple to check DP & CP, i can check all created Gateway's including how many servers are present in the DP. Integration with organization SSO is very seamless without any issues. Also there are plenty of new features for future enhancement like AI gateway and LLM connection. We have deployed CP in our on-prem and performance quite good and it was in ms only by using validations and authentication plugins. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are not major downsides, if we get a screen to deploy custom plugins or build custom plugins then that will be very helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like best about Kong Konnect is its cloud-native architecture and ease of managing APIs from a centralized control plane. It’s user-friendly, integrates well with existing systems, and offers strong security features like authentication and rate limiting. Overall, it’s scalable, efficient, and simplifies API management. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One downside of Kong Konnect is its initial learning curve, especially for beginners. Additionally, pricing can be high for smaller teams, and troubleshooting complex issues may take time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Currently Dev portal is really mature because of we can customize many of things.

2. Documentation is very improve like step by step guidance for setup the dev portal.

3. We can also integrate the third party IDP server like Okta and auth0 and much more like these.

4. Multi Dev Portal support is obviously now.

5. A plugin, I most like name as Mocking is fantastic, like you can use mock data when your API is under the development.

6. Introduce API tracing on the SaaS platform, Now we don't have to integrate the Dynatrace or other third party service.

7. AI manager is also in the SaaS platform.

8. They improved Observability & Metrics as compare to previous version.

9. AI plugin introduced like ai-proxy, ai-proxy-advanced.

10. Introduce Redis configuration for rate liming plugin.

11. A simple, user-friendly interface that's easy for anyone with basic API management knowledge to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. I thing they have to work on the pricing of the Kong gateway, price is much higher as compare to other tools in the market like Apigee.

2. They can improve the multi-tenant support in upcoming version.

3. Improve the RBAC for tight security and user permissions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Kong is full featured and really easy to setup API Gateway, featured as a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant.

Out of the box it has a lot of plugins centred in security, rate limiting, validations, and much more. It also supports custom plugins.

Kong is also a cloud native product, that works really well in containerized environments such as Kubernetes, and runs really well under load on low resources, such as low CPU and RAM.

Kong also offers an amazing and customizable API Gateway. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't have anything that I dislike about the product, as Kong always listens to customers complaints and tries to fix the issues that are raised. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Kong Gateway recently introduced several powerful features focused on AI readiness, performance, and enterprise-grade security. The latest version includes prompt compression to reduce LLM token usage and multimodal agent support for handling workflows across text, images, audio, and more. Earlier enhancements brought semantic caching, prompt guardrails, and intelligent routing—enabling the gateway to understand prompt intent, block unsafe content, and route requests to the most suitable AI model.

Core infrastructure has also been improved with incremental configuration sync for faster, lighter deployments and full OpenTelemetry integration for enhanced observability. Centralized config and consumer management through Kong Konnect make it easier to govern large-scale environments. Security features like PII sanitization, JSON threat protection, and certificate-based authentication further strengthen the platform. These updates position Kong Gateway as a smart, scalable solution for both traditional APIs and AI-driven traffic. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While Kong Gateway is a powerful and feature-rich platform, there are still areas where it could improve to enhance usability and scalability. The developer experience, for instance, can be challenging—especially for newcomers. A more intuitive UI, better error messages during configuration, and clearer guidance within the dashboard would make it easier for teams to get started and manage complex setups. Additionally, while Kong offers a wide range of plugins, the documentation and transparency around which plugins are open-source, enterprise-only, or tied to Konnect could be more consistent. This would help users make informed decisions more easily.

Support for additional protocols like WebSocket, MQTT, or GraphQL subscriptions is another area of potential growth, especially for real-time and IoT use cases. High availability configurations and multi-region deployments, though possible, can be complex and would benefit from more streamlined tooling, templates, and cloud-native deployment guides. Rate limiting is solid for typical workloads, but for AI-driven or token-sensitive APIs, more advanced controls—such as token-based throttling—would be highly valuable. Lastly, integration between local setups (like decK) and Kong Konnect could be more seamless, especially for teams adopting GitOps workflows. Addressing these areas would make Kong Gateway even more developer-friendly, scalable, and ready for evolving enterprise needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Kong architecture and ease in development and designing of API security Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Multiple coding for custom plugin which is time taken Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is a very easy and with a vast range of features tool, and it could be integrated with many cloud environments, and on premises as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are some wrong documentation, a high dependency of some beta plugins, and quite high costs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Having mulitple security policy to secure our api

2. We can create out of box custom plugins using Lua, js, python

3. Support Hybrid model

4. Low latency

5. Easy to setup in any cloud gateway like aws,azure,gcp etc

6. Easy to integrate with third party tools like loggly, datadog , prometheus & many more

7. Konnect has recently introduced dedicated cloud gateways, which is fully managed, multi-region API management solution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Thier documentation regarding things need to be more detailed

2. The developer portal needs to be more mature and should provide more functionality to the developer. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The software is very easy to implement. We use docker on a linux VM. The Kong API gateway is easily configurable for defining services and routes. We take advantage of both basic authorization and key authorization for our security needs. The API gateway is used for both production and non-production environments. We have had some needs for support. We have found that customer support is quick in responding to tickets to help us resolve the issue or question. We recently started using Konnect to control our configurations for easier data plane management. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The one thing that we don't really like is the UI and the filtering ability. The filter feature is good. But, feel that the filter should stay in place until you change it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.