Apigee and Kong Gateway Enterprise are two leading solutions in the API management space. Apigee has an upper hand in comprehensive features and analytics, while Kong excels in flexibility and performance.
Features: Apigee provides advanced API management, robust analytics, and a feature-rich developer portal with Smart Docs. Kong Gateway Enterprise offers lightweight performance, effective scalability, and a plugin architecture allowing for greater customization and rapid deployment.
Room for Improvement: Apigee could simplify deployment processes, enhance integration support, and improve documentation for non-technical users. Kong Gateway Enterprise could improve developer portal usability, expand feature documentation, and offer more transparent pricing.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Apigee supports diverse deployment options from cloud to on-premise but faces complexity in hybrid setups. Kong Gateway Enterprise is user-friendly with strong technical support and excels in hybrid cloud environments, though integration documentation could be improved.
Pricing and ROI: Apigee is priced by API call volume, making it costly for small businesses. Its complex pricing with potential hidden costs justifies its extensive features for larger enterprises. Kong Gateway Enterprise offers a competitive pricing model with benefits for startups through its open-source version and lower enterprise costs, though infrastructure expenses may vary.
They are responsive and provide assistance even during production issues.
The customer service and support are cooperative and effective in providing insights and solutions during challenges.
In the past two years, I have been experiencing less assistance.
The technical support from Kong Gateway Enterprise would be rated about eight, as we missed local technical support.
Adding extra Cassandra databases is complex.
The scalability of this solution would be rated about eight or nine.
Apigee is stable, and we have had the system running on Apigee servers for more than four years without any stability issues.
Apigee only allows validation of transactions up to a four-hour period, which requires manual hovering over the date and time.
Apigee should also incorporate these capabilities, especially in the on-premises version.
Analytics is one of the areas needing enhancement, specifically more visibility and control over traffic to improve capacity management and high availability.
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.
Apigee is costlier compared to other solutions.
Apigee is perceived as slightly costly compared to other tools in the market.
Apigee is high-priced, suitable for large enterprises where the benefit aligns with the cost.
It provides all the necessary capabilities for current technologies, enabling communication and translation between protocols, along with supporting stringent security features.
Apigee provides catalog management, onboarding of new customers, an API portal, and security features.
We rely on Elasticsearch to monitor traffic, which provides high visibility and control and surpasses Apigee in certain features.
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.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Apigee | 8.8% |
| Kong Gateway Enterprise | 5.9% |
| Other | 85.3% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 20 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 9 |
| Large Enterprise | 65 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 19 |
Apigee is a platform for developing and managing APIs. Apigee offers an interface for your core services by wrapping them with a proxy layer which is then accessed by other developers. With Apigee, you can design and build APIs and then securely share their services and data without exposing any code.
Because app developers make HTTP requests to an API proxy rather than directly to your services, your services are separated from the developers. All the developer needs to know is the URL of the API proxy endpoint, necessary query parameters, authorization credentials (if they exist), and the response data format.
The API proxy isolates the app developer from your backend service. Therefore, you are free to change the service implementation if the public API remains consistent. By maintaining a consistent frontend API, existing client apps will continue to work regardless of changes on the backend.
Key capabilities of the Apigee API management platform include:
Reviews from Real Users:
Apigee stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its rich developer portal, its advanced analytics, and its central monitoring system.
Carlos R., a software architect at Caja Los Andes writes, “The central monitoring feature is the most valuable. It also provides security for the APIs and high availability for our use cases. Apigee is the best product in the industry in comparison to other API management solutions. It helps in fast development, which is a top point. It also supports a lot of industry standards and has excellent documentation.”
An associate vice president at a tech services company notes, “The analytics function and the developer portal are the two valuable features of Apigee. The analytics part is very good, and the developer portal is quite rich in features. The authentication mechanisms are quite easily built into Apigee, which is something that most of the other products have also now started supporting.”
Kong delivers a next generation API platform built for modern architectures. With a lightnight-fast, lightweight, and flexible core, Kong delivers sub-millisecond latency across all your services. Kong's is deployment-, vendor-, and pattern-agnostic, allowing you to run your services how you want, where you want, and with who you want - from baremetal to cloud, monolith to microservices, service mesh, and beyond.
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