We compared Apigee and Kong Enterprise based on our users reviews in five parameters. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
The setup process for Apigee can be either straightforward or complex, while Kong Enterprise generally has a smooth and easy installation process, although some users needed additional support.
Apigee is notable for its robust capabilities, analytics functionality, developer portal, and pre-configured policies. It also offers sandboxing, scalability, and extensive customization options. In contrast, Kong Enterprise excels in plugin-driven network services, authentication and authorization features, and Lua script customization for observability. It also delivers strong performance and a route limiting feature.
Kong Enterprise has room for improvement in various areas such as pricing, automatic data API creation, customization for integration, solutions for east-west communications and Zero Trust architecture, scaling up process, and developer portal with isolated data plans for federated teams.
Apigee is known for its costly setup, including high licensing fees that may discourage certain users. On the other hand, Kong Enterprise's setup cost is influenced by factors like scale, licenses, and usage, but its licensing expenses are deemed reasonable when compared to other products.
Apigee is praised for its exceptional customer service, particularly in terms of technical support during the initial design phase. They go above and beyond by providing an architect to define the architecture. Similarly, Kong Enterprise also offers commendable customer service, with a responsive and helpful technical team.
Comparison Results
Based on user feedback, Apigee and Kong Enterprise have distinct strengths and weaknesses. Apigee is highly regarded for its robust features, analytics function, developer portal, and security measures. However, it requires enhancements in terms of user-friendliness, iPaaS capabilities, pricing, customization options, and documentation. Conversely, Kong Enterprise receives praise for its seamless installation process, plugin-based network services, authentication and authorization features, and customization through Lua script. It could benefit from improvements in pricing, automatic data API creation, customization for integration, scaling up process, and developer portal. Overall, Apigee offers a broader range of capabilities and features, while Kong Enterprise excels in providing a straightforward installation process and plugin support.
"We can customize the dashboard."
"A special feature is configuring target servers, proxy config, and Cert related security, which regularizes incoming traffic from cloud users or external applications to internal applications in a secured manner."
"I think the most valuable features are the security features. Of course, the user access control is the same as the security. The other very important issue is the sandboxing capability of Apigee."
"The security provided by the solution is excellent."
"It is easy to set up. It is on Google Platform, and there are multiple deployment models they support, which is great."
"A simple platform that's easier to work with than IBM API Connect. Support for it is really good and gives it advantage over other providers."
"The following features are most valuable: API Management, Analytics, Quota, and the Developer Portal."
"Apigee Analytics dashboard is useful to monitor transactions, error percentage, transaction latency, etc."
"The most valuable features of Kong Enterprise are the out-of-the-box open source easy functionality."
"Good at intercepting traffic and modeling APIs around that."
"The route limiting feature is very valuable."
"Kong Enterprise comes with some ready plug-ins, which is very good for the customers."
"The features I like include ease of operation and implementation in a cloud environment, the dashboarding features for API statistics, and the user-friendly developer portal."
"This is a solid intrusion prevention system that combines a firewall and antivirus in a single solution."
"The most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise is its capability to integrate with various security tools."
"In our buying companies' perspective, it was easier to use compared to other platforms. The markets were pretty familiar with the solutions."
"Compared to its competitors, such as Axway AMPLIFY API Management and Layer7 API Management, Apigee could benefit from having more policies to cater to various use cases. This would reduce the need for writing custom JavaScripts. If more features come straight out of the box, we can leverage them instead of writing custom code to achieve the same functionality."
"We do not have control over the installation."
"They should improve the monitoring tools for on-premises environments."
"The solution’s scalability could be improved."
"iPaaS is something that we would like to see. For example, MuleSoft is kind of an integrated platform as a service (iPaaS), and it provides a lot of out-of-the-box connectors and other such things. This is where Apigee lacks. I'm not sure if that's the roadmap for Apigee, but any improvements on those lines would be helpful where things become easier to implement."
"The analytical aspect of it could be better. I think it is fair if Apigee lets you configure some of the metrics of the key details you want to monitor in terms of analytics."
"I'd like this solution to improve on releasing new features; I'd like it to be more frequent."
"I see some lagging in regards to integration capacity"
"Kong Enterprise has decided not to support the web portal feature anymore, but I think that feature should stay in the on-premises solution."
"Kong Enterprise needs to improve its pricing, which starts at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pricing should be based on API usage rather than monthly. It should improve its documentation as well."
"The OS upgrades are not as frequent as they should be and they are bulky."
"It becomes difficult if you try to scale it up to multiple clusters."
"The technical support team's response time needs to be improved."
"We are facing issues with the solution's features like reports and traffic analysis."
"The tool needs improvement in UX."
"There should be an easier way to integrate with other solutions, even though it's the same API solution layer. Comparability will be a good improvement."
Apigee is ranked 2nd in API Management with 82 reviews while Kong Gateway Enterprise is ranked 6th in API Management with 20 reviews. Apigee is rated 8.2, while Kong Gateway Enterprise is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Apigee writes "Has a robust community and outstanding performance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kong Gateway Enterprise writes "Provides role-based access control and can be easily customized with Lua script". Apigee is most compared with Microsoft Azure API Management, IBM API Connect, Amazon API Gateway, WSO2 API Manager and Axway AMPLIFY API Management, whereas Kong Gateway Enterprise is most compared with Microsoft Azure API Management, WSO2 API Manager, Apache APISIX, Layer7 API Management and MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager. See our Apigee vs. Kong Gateway Enterprise report.
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