Kong Gateway Enterprise Reviews

Our primary use cases for Kong Gateway Enterprise are modernizations, migrations, and digitalizations of financial institutions. These are the primary areas we are looking for.

I find the price of Kong Gateway Enterprise to be competitive. Price is not a concern for us, but based on our experience working with financial institutions, maintainability and security are the primary concerns and areas they focus on.

Bringing in additional features to Kong Gateway Enterprise would not necessarily help it. Improving the existing features, increasing security, and adding robustness would be more beneficial. The focus should be on stabilizing the product, improving it, and increasing the documentation. Kong should focus on how the product can be self-onboarded or self-implemented, as this would ease and help customers significantly.

The necessary deployment of Kong Gateway Enterprise, API management, and guidance on how customers can use it or improve that area would be helpful. Security is a major concern, especially with new security architecture coming into place. These are the areas that should be prioritized. Beyond these areas, I do not see anything lacking. Kong Gateway Enterprise is quite comprehensive.

I have been working with Kong Gateway Enterprise for five or six years.

I do not have inputs on the technical support for Kong Gateway Enterprise, as those matters are handled by my architects. I have not heard any negative comments on the technical support.

In my current organization at Ernst & Young, I am not certain whether they are partners with Kong, but I have not heard anything from them. My previous organization was a partner, not a reseller, and we never had any issues or problems.

The initial setup for Kong Gateway Enterprise has been ongoing for some time.

Two of our customers are using Kong Gateway Enterprise as well as other API management solutions such as MuleSoft, APIM, Azure, or AWS. These are the major four API management tools being used across the board for our customers.

For us, implementing Kong Gateway Enterprise with existing infrastructures and the cloud in tandem requires more effort than implementing MuleSoft or Azure APIM or AWS. Their integrations, implementations, and documentation are quite comprehensive for us. The learning curve is also slightly higher with Kong than with the other solutions.

I cannot provide detailed information about Kong Gateway Enterprise's security features, but when setting up the entire infrastructure plus the open API framework, we have to set up the infrastructure security as a given.

I cannot provide details on implementations, but we have been using Kong Gateway Enterprise for our customers for some time. Based on my experience and my team's experience, I rate Kong Gateway Enterprise at a seven as a product.

We use this solution as a way to expose our internal APIs, both internally in Kubernetes and for private cloud of our own.

The most valuable features of Kong Gateway Enterprise are its seamless integration with Kubernetes and cloud, many plugins that can be incorporated in a solution, and its incorporation with low-code function systems.Kong provides the ability to relatively fast change our development and DevOps scaling from on-premise API and managed APIs to a very good and scalable solution, which provides the ability to monitor and react to the API, making it more valuable and providing more benefits for customers.

More plugins for additional integrations would be helpful and openness for traditional development languages, such as .NET, because many enterprises are looking for .NET solutions or incorporating with .NET solutions. I mostly missed local resellers or partners that we could use within our enterprise, because it was difficult for some tech personnel to work with remote tech support.

I am just a customer of Kong Gateway Enterprise from my former work.

The stability would be rated about eight, as it is mostly stable.

The scalability of this solution would be rated about eight or nine, and it would benefit if there was a little less latency.

The technical support from Kong Gateway Enterprise would be rated about eight, as we missed local technical support.

Positive

Before using Kong Gateway Enterprise, I used Azure API management.We switched from Azure to Kong Gateway Enterprise because we needed a solution to make API management on-premise and on cloud, and we did not want to work with Azure Arc, so we tried to find a solution that is possible to work with on both platforms, such as hybrid platforms.

The initial setup of this solution was pretty straightforward, as we started to work with Docker, Docker containers, and Kong Gateway Enterprise as a managed platform with Kong Connect; we quickly realized how to work with it and how to deploy it and work with GitOps.

Our deployment was done in-house, as it is a private enterprise and closed.

I did not work with the AI capabilities of this solution, so I cannot measure it.Based on my experience, I would definitely recommend Kong Gateway Enterprise to other people.I would rate the whole solution about nine.

Within Kong Gateway Enterprise, we utilize Kong Ingress and the Com API Gateway. It offers a wide range of plugins that we leverage, including OIDC, Rate Limiting, Lambda functions, and more. We also configure multiple deployments and utilize plugins like the OIDC Registration plugin for authentication and authorization. Additionally, we ensure schema validation for incoming requests and utilize security scanning. Kong Gateway provides a Request Transformer plugin that allows us to add or remove header values as needed.

Upgrading Kong Gateway Enterprise should be more sophisticated and innovative. The main issue is with the update process. Our DevOps and admin teams need to update multiple files, which is cumbersome. For instance, in cases where Palantir countries are involved, they have to update many files, which is not ideal. However, for other tasks like configuring the message routing and services and handling all the configurations, the process is acceptable.

The software version upgrade process should be improved. Additionally, the DevOps portal should be integrated more natively. There are a few other areas for improvement, such as implementing automatic load balancing. The status of the office team, whether it is up or down, should be checked at the API gateway level to facilitate load balancing. 

I have been using Kong Gateway Enterprise as a partner for three years.

It is scalable. 5,000 people are using this solution. We need 10 administrators to manage this solution.

When architects work, there should be some flexibility. We are currently receiving support from both the AWS and the Kong sites. You can raise the ticket immediately on the AWS site, and people will get involved quickly. However, Kong's support is not as good. They tend to have market delays, and tickets are not addressed promptly, which is a problem with Kong's support. I can give 75 points out of 100.

There are multiple options in the market, such as Apigee. We opted for Kong because it's scalable to meet our needs and integrates well with our technical stack. Therefore, we recommend adopting it quickly.

We had to develop the image for Kong Gateway Enterprise. In AWS, there's a concept of imaging, so we needed to focus on that. We must scan the image for security and ensure all necessary measures are in place. Therefore, we must first create the image and proceed with deployment and other related tasks.

Pricing is fine.

We use plugins for Kong Gateway for authorization and authentication. It supports connectivity with IDP providers to enable authentication and authorization. There are request plugins available to handle validation and inspect incoming requests. Most importantly, the OIDC plugin, consumer plugin, rate limiting plugin, schema validation plugin, and request validation plugin are some of the key plugins.

Version upgrades should be more sophisticated and innovative. Currently, the upgrade process lacks efficiency and could be improved. Previous versions required significant effort to update and should be made easier. The process needs to be streamlined, reducing the complexity and number of steps involved.

High gateway uptime is okay. It ensures high uptime for your gateways, although some latency may occur due to the added layer of processing. The benefits of using a gateway, such as enhanced security and control, outweigh the drawbacks. The gateway acts as an intermediary, preventing direct access to microservices by requiring traffic to pass through it. This setup enables features like authorization and authentication, including integration with IDPs. The gateway can handle these processes before forwarding requests to the microservices.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We use Kong for our API gateway, handling all public traffic. It is an open-source tool, and even though we are a startup, it provides us with stability without incurring high costs initially.

Kong has helped us by performing smoothly even when we receive millions of requests, which prevents any latency issues impacting our applications. We have also been able to enhance security by writing our own plugins and easily integrating with various tools and platforms.

Kong's most valuable features are its lightweight performance when handling millions of requests and the ability to write custom plugins to enhance security, such as end-to-end encryption, even in the open-source version.

The open-source version of Kong does not support a dashboard, which would be very helpful. We use an open-source tool called Konga for basic dashboard needs, but it lacks support. It would be better if there was a comprehensive dashboard included in the open-source community version.

We have been using Kong for about five years.

Initially, we faced stability issues during an upgrade process due to migration problems with the schema. However, Kong has improved significantly, and maintaining stability is easier now when following their improved documentation and using Helm for deployment.

We've put in place SPA auto-scaling within our Kubernetes deployment, which efficiently handles increased traffic by automatically spinning up new pods, ensuring smooth scalability.

I am currently using a new gateway called Tyk. However, Kong is far better as an open-source tool.

Kong's pricing is reasonable, as the open-source version provides sufficient functionality for a startup like ours without requiring a high initial investment.

We evaluated Tyke as a new gateway solution.

If you are looking for a stable open-source gateway, Kong is a solid choice. It performs well under high traffic with low latency. For newcomers, it is advisable to explore its robust features and ability to manage high TPS effectively.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I use it as a gateway for our APIs. We have several hundred APIs here, so we use Kong Gateway Enterprise to manage and monitor them. In this application platform, we prefer to use the Kong Enterprise UI instead of the Kong Community Edition GUI.

We use both authorization and header-based methods. Additionally, we connect with our identity provider (IdP) using single sign-on (SSO) and OAuth 2.0. We also enable OpenID Connect.

The traffic control capabilities in Kong Gateway are effective. It helps me manage the usage of each API and monitor any anomalies. I can see any strange behavior or illegal usage from developers, which allows me to notify management about potential issues. Sometimes, it might just be a typo or a bug in the application, but other times, it could be something more serious. The Kong Gateway's traffic control helps detect these anomalies in usage.

The main challenge, in my opinion, is the price. It's difficult to convince our management to approve the budget to purchase it from our vendor. There are no technical problems.

It's expensive in Thailand (10 million baht, in Thai currency).

One thing I've seen in a competitor's product is the ability to create a simple API within their platform using a low-code/no-code GUI. It connects to databases and allows you to drag and drop to create basic API functions. I think this feature would be a valuable addition to Kong Gateway Enterprise.

So, they should create a single API for the platform.

Moreover, if Kong Gateway Enterprise could integrate AI, that would be great. It could automatically scale itself, assess request rates for each API, or even detect attacks. That would be great.

I have been using it for one and a half years. 

Kong Gateway helped to improve performance. It's good enough for our users.

I would rate the availability an eight out of ten, we experienced some hiccups.

It's very easy to scale and create another adapter.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. We around thousands of end users using it. 

Kong is my first API gateway.

The initial setup had moderate complexity. You have to know a lot of things. 

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a five out of ten, with ten being easy. 

The Community Edition requires a lot of technical knowledge to implement and use. It's okay for me, but you need to know a lot about Linux, Docker, and networking.

• Deployment time: From scratch, it took about three months. 

• Deployment process: The main thing is the configuration and combining it with our existing APIs. Adding them one by one is the most tedious part.

I implemented it. I deploy it in Docker and use it with my team.

It helps us mitigate the time to detect problems since we can look up the monitoring system and logs very easily.

It's free for the community edition.

It's expensive in Thailand. 

As far as I know from one of our vendors, it's about 10 million baht per year.

I'm comparing Kong Gateway Enterprise with other software for potential use in our enterprise. We're looking at management, monitoring, and ease of use. 

I would recommend it because its performance is great. It's reliable. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

My company uses Kong Enterprise for ISC, so if we need data in one place or one application, we use the solution to retrieve the data with the help of REST API.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it seamlessly supports a vast number of tools. The integration capabilities the tool offers are smooth, and I don't see any hiccups there.

There is a tool called Apigee. Apigee has a portal where you can inspect the APIs and do a live tracing of the API, features that are missing in Kong Enterprise and Azure API Management. I am unsure if something else needs to be considered for improvement. Kong Enterprise fails to provide live tracing of the APIs, which is possible nowadays. With live tracing of the APIs, you can see how the request is going and where it gets stuck, what the actual input was, what the response is, and all that information we can see with the help of live requests, which is impossible in Kong Enterprise. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the solution. With Kong Enterprise, you can examine after the fact, but why it happens can't be examined.

I have experience with Kong Enterprise. My company is a customer of the solution.

The solution has been stable so far in my company.

I can't comment on the solution's stability since my company is still in its development phase.

For support, a group was created with the help of Microsoft Teams. My company hasn't contacted the actual support team of Kong Enterprise.

I have used Apigee in the past. You can do the live tracing of APIs in Apigee, but it is not possible in Kong Enterprise.

The solution's deployment was done in a couple of weeks.

Our company has not gone live with the product since we are still in the solution's development phase.

The solution's deployment model has changed from an on-premises to a cloud one.

It was not my company but our company's service provider who gave us Kong Enterprise.

Kong Enterprise is a good solution with a few missing features, especially the one provided by Apigee, which is the live tracing of APIs.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We had worked for a client from the travel industry who wanted to propose an API manager. They had built microservices on Java and another integration tool. They wanted to apply policies, register their APIs in the API manager, and enforce policies and plugins, like client ID, client secret, throttling, rate limiting, and protocol transformation. The client wanted to apply these things to their APIs.

Protocol transformation is the most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise.

Kong Enterprise allows a lot of customizations that provide a specific UI experience for each client.

The solution should include policy features that are available in other solutions like MuleSoft API manager but missing in Kong Enterprise.

I have been using Kong Enterprise for the past six to eight months.

We have not seen any stability issues so far with Kong Enterprise. None of our customers have reported any issues with the solution.

Kong Enterprise is a scalable solution.

No setup is required for Kong Enterprise because it has a complete cloud setup. You pay for a license, get credentials, and start registering your API and applying policies. It's completely cloud-based. We also have some open-source options where you set up the API manager on your Kubernetes clusters or dockers and register your API in the on-prem Kong API manager.

The solution requires maintenance, but I haven’t heard of any maintenance challenges so far.

A user's decision to choose Kong Enterprise or MuleSoft varies from use case to use case. Users should do a detailed technical assessment before choosing Kong Enterprise, MuleSoft API manager, or any other API manager tools available in the market.

Overall, I rate Kong Enterprise an eight out of ten.

The product seems to be good, especially in terms of API creation and management. The tool is seamlessly easy to use, and offers ease of configuration and management. The tool has some very good options for infusing some API security parts. The tool also offers some readily available connectors as well. From an overall perspective, I am handling both B2B integrations and cloud integrations. In our company, we had multiple products in place of Kong Gateway Enterprise.

Kong Gateway Enterprise enhances our company's API security in a strong way, and it is compliant with most of the security compliance issues, which is good from an assurance standpoint and acts as a strong point when it comes to the product. In terms of ease of configuration and maintenance of the APIs, the tool offers a very good dashboard, specifically API dashboards, which can provide you insights into how you can use the dashboard for monetizing your solution. For example, for some of the APIs that accompany the product and become a part of the ecosystem, be it for opening new services with different partners, the tool is able to provide good insights in terms of integration touchpoints, which not only caters to the internal ecosystem but also into a partner ecosystem, giving an agnostic view. Depending on the exact need of the hour and based on the requirements, Kong Gateway Enterprise is useful in terms of integration, ease of use, and dashboard.

Though I have not tested the tool, I can say that the product supports AI-driven applications. Nowadays, in most language models, especially when we talk about the edge deployment model, any of the platforms provide you with seamless integration, which is advantageous because most of the applications are consumed by end users. It also boils down to the fact associated with the latencies. For some of the services and requirements, it doesn't always have to be some public cloud infrastructure that one needs to experience. I believe that I will be better off with edge deployment, where things can be run on a nearby location where the customer proximity is there. A combination of AI and edge deployment will be an advantage.

The ease of integration offered by the tool is strong. The security is being built in the tool. In terms of the connectivity part of the tool, I haven't had a chance to comment on the challenges since we have not tried it on a large enterprise.

With Kong Gateway Enterprise, since users want more readily available connectors that can be used in head offices or back offices, it is an area that needs to be considered for improvement. For example, if I give out a setup tomorrow for the systems in head offices or back offices, like SAP or ERP systems, then you should be able to provide connectors, and it is an area where my company has not been able to test the product yet. The aforementioned features should not only be available in Kong Gateway Enterprise but also across the product stack offered by others.

From an improvement perspective, the product should offer more readily available connectors and also allow for more seamless AI integrations. Most of the products nowadays are becoming more AI-native because of the needs of the industry. The introduction of GenAI and the use of the integration part to make the tool more of an industry-based solution can make a difference.

I have been using Kong Gateway Enterprise for two to three years.

Speaking about scalability, I would say that I would not be able to comment on it since the product is not used in large enterprises from a scalability standpoint. The way the tool has been built and the way the API integrations are happening on the cloud solutions, I think it should not have a problem scaling up, but my company has not tested it. To see if the product can be scalable, my company needs to test it in large enterprises with the help of agents. I don't think the scalability part of the product will be an issue, but only if I deal with larger implementations can I be in a better position to comment on the scalability part.

The solution's technical support is good and fast in terms of responsiveness and problem-solving skills. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

The product is reasonably priced because it goes by the SaaS model. When it comes to Kong Gateway Enterprise, I don't see much of a price point difference from other tools in the market.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for managing microservices and in-built APIs.

Kong Enterprise has induced the API governance we need for our banking operations. It has increased the security and improved the gateway features such as rate limiting, throttling, and security.

The most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise is its capability to integrate with various security tools. For OAuth implementation, we connect it to the external OAuth providers. Some inbuilt out-of-the-box features of the solution, like API key generation and usage of client credentials, are also very good.

The technical support team's response time needs to be improved. Kong Enterprise should improve its resiliency when it comes to the active DR setup.

I have been using Kong Enterprise for more than six months.

Kong Enterprise is a stable solution.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for stability.

Kong Enterprise has seamless scalability. Around 240 developers are working with the solution in our organization, and we are planning to increase our usage.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for scalability.

The technical support team's response time needs to be improved. The support engineer's capability should be improved because we have to induct them often regarding the problem. A lot of data needs to be provided before they start looking into the problem.

Neutral

We previously used TIBCO and MuleSoft.

The solution’s initial setup was easy.

Since we are a financial institution, setting up and onboarding the solution took around one and a half months. It took some time to go through all the security and run through the different stakeholders.

Kong Enterprise's pricing is at par compared to the other technologies.

Before choosing Kong Enterprise, we evaluated Tyk. We chose Kong Enterprise because we felt it was more secure than Tyk.

Kong Enterprise is a gateway that we leverage. From an API security perspective, it has excellent features. We have used a couple of plugins, such as the OIDC plugin and rate-limiting plugin, for our APIs. Our experience with the plugins has been pretty good, and they solve the purpose of security. Since Kong Enterprise is just a gateway, the onboarding services were very seamless. I rate the solution five out of ten for integration.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

It serves as an API gateway and microservices management platform, facilitating the creation, deployment, and oversight of APIs and microservices. It serves as a solution for measuring requests, managing upstreams, and handling internal APIs within the bank.

It is an excellent tool for managing data. It boasts remarkable speed and stability, and these qualities, particularly the gateway's resilience, are standout features for me. The shared features are also commendable. One of the aspects I appreciate is the effective rate limiting, achieved through the use of the throttling plugin for our APIs. Additionally, the straightforward automated deployment process for the gateway makes it exceptionally easy for everyone on the team to adapt without complications.

I find that expressing information can be a bit challenging, especially for those who are new to installing email configs or using it for the first time. Understanding the configurations and knowing what needs to be done can be a bit difficult initially.

It is a crucial part of my daily workflow.

I encounter no issues with deployments, and it reliably performs its duties on a daily basis. It proves to be both resilient and stable.

It's scalable to your needs, and if you have the financial resources, you can scale it as much as you want.

Before adopting Kong, I utilized X-ray, which is another API gateway. I believe the strength of Kong lies in its agnostic nature. It allows deployment across various cloud environments, providing flexibility for implementation in any infrastructure. It is inherently cloud-native, enabling deployment and maintenance on platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This sets it apart from other gateways that may not offer the same level of versatility.

The initial setup is relatively easy, but it requires a clear idea of your objectives.

When it comes to deployment, my team and I handle the entire process. We are responsible for managing all aspects of it. It is possible to deploy it within ten minutes in a cloud-native environment using our current CI process.

My advice is to approach it with careful consideration. While it is a powerful tool, gaining expertise is crucial. It's essential to try it out firsthand, build confidence that Kong aligns with your requirements, and recognize its reliability as a gateway. In my experience, it has proven to be a top choice. If you encounter challenges, I recommend visiting the website and delving into the documentation, as it often holds solutions for various scenarios. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.