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Kong Gateway Enterprise vs SwaggerHub comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Kong Gateway Enterprise
Ranking in API Management
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SwaggerHub
Ranking in API Management
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Kong Gateway Enterprise is 5.9%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SwaggerHub is 1.5%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Kong Gateway Enterprise5.9%
SwaggerHub1.5%
Other92.6%
API Management
 

Featured Reviews

ES
Enterprise Architect at El Al
Seamless integration and efficient security boost API management capabilities
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.
Manish Indupuri - PeerSpot reviewer
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Has streamlined API documentation and integration workflows across cross-functional teams
Documenting SwaggerHub has a standard and consistent structure of API definitions, and it automatically generates interactive documentation which helps the developers to understand everything. There are certain areas where SwaggerHub can go beyond here as formatting options for documentation pages are restricted, and the import and export options of API collections are complex in SwaggerHub. It provides various collaboration tools where we can work and do it. The strong validation against the API maintains conformity and reduces errors. That part is very great in SwaggerHub. Overall, scalability and stability-wise, it varies high compared to the competitors, but there are still certain areas where competitors are providing various customizations. SwaggerHub can understand those aspects and implement them as well. The complex import and export of API calls and collaborations can be challenging in SwaggerHub. If they can make it easier for us, that would be great. Their performance is degraded if there is too much load on the API. The customization and doc formatting options for documentation pages are restricted in SwaggerHub. A few of my teammates have complained that they find the UI unintuitive where it requires multiple clicks for simple tasks. SwaggerHub is a great tool, but these limitations can be addressed to make things better and easier.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable features of Kong Enterprise are the out-of-the-box open source easy functionality."
"The solution provides good performance."
"In our buying companies' perspective, it was easier to use compared to other platforms. The markets were pretty familiar with the solutions."
"Good at intercepting traffic and modeling APIs around that."
"Kong Enterprise has excellent plugin support."
"The route limiting feature is very valuable."
"Protocol transformation is the most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise."
"There are a few features that I like about Kong when it comes to authentication and authorization. Specifically, being able to use Kong for role-based access control (RBAC), and then further being able to integrate the RBAC mechanism with our enterprise directory, was very useful."
"SwaggerHub plays a crucial role in order to bring teams and automate things faster and also reduce the man-hours and increase the work efficiency."
"It is quite a useful tool. It is quite good with the validation of the spec. It works quite well in terms of errors and conformity to the OpenAPI standard. It is better than Visual Studio Code in terms of editing."
"You can click & play and add the notation in a human-readable form. Spotlight is also very good in the graphical design of APIs."
"The tool's most valuable feature is licensing."
"SwaggerHub has significantly improved how my organization designs, documents, and manages APIs, centralizing API management so that all API definitions are stored in one location, which makes it easy for stakeholders, developers, QA, DevOps, and products to access the latest version."
"One of the best features of SwaggerHub is how it allows me to create APIs and control the evolution of APIs within an organization."
"It is a stable solution."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy and not at all difficult."
 

Cons

"The OS upgrades are not as frequent as they should be and they are bulky."
"Kong is meant for north-south communications, so it will be interesting to see what solutions they can come up with in the realms of east-west communications, service-to-service communications, and Zero Trust architecture. I believe that if they can provide for these areas, then they will be able to solve the overall integration and security concerns for microservices architecture in general."
"The technical support team's response time needs to be improved."
"The open-source version of Kong does not support a dashboard, which would be very helpful."
"The software version upgrade process should be improved."
"Kong Enterprise fails to provide live tracing of the APIs, which is possible nowadays."
"They could focus more on pricing."
"The developer portal needs to be improved."
"SwaggerHub could be improved with better integration for tools."
"We have to use additional tools to test APIs."
"It has limited functionality...Unfortunately, some of its features are not what we need."
"It could be more intuitive compared to one of its competitors."
"The customization and doc formatting options for documentation pages are restricted in SwaggerHub."
"More integration and usability with the cloud microservices would be nice"
"Some areas of SwaggerHub that could be improved include the interface between the code editor and the visual editor, the integration with private APIs, which currently requires an upgraded account."
"The review process should be improved. There seem to be some gaps, at least for us, for the editing part because we would like to have a full request review mechanism. They support some comments, but it is really hard to manage those comments. We would like to use the full request. Therefore, we are now looking to integrate with repositories. It has integration with Bitbucket and GitHub, but we have some internal constraints, and we need to move some of the repositories to GitHub. Our source code is on-premise in Bitbucket, and it was a bit of a problem for us to integrate. Now we are transitioning our repositories to GitHub, and hopefully, we can enable the integration. This will probably solve the problem with the review and approval. Its customization should also be improved. There are limitations around the support for the developer portal. There should be more customization options for the website that you can use as a developer portal. Currently, it has only Swagger UI with minimal customization. You cannot actually add additional pages and documentation for explaining concepts and general things. That's why we have started to look around to see what other tools are doing. They should also allow tagging on the API. We would like to add some tagging on the API to reflect certain things. Currently, any metadata that you would like to have has to be a part of the spec. You cannot do anything else. It should also have support for Open API 3.1, which was released at the beginning of the year. It would be great to be able to switch to that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Kong Enterprise's pricing is at par compared to the other technologies."
"Basically, my company uses the tool's open-source version."
"The licensing is expensive."
"There are many factors that influence the price of Kong Enterprise, such as scale, licenses, and usage."
"I don't have any information on licensing costs currently."
"The licensing fees are paid yearly."
"There is a need to pay towards the licensing charges...In some areas, the functionalities are available free of charge."
"The price is really reasonable compared to that of alternative solutions."
"It has a yearly subscription, but I am not sure."
"The tool is cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

How does Kong Enterprise compare with Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager?
The Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager was designed with its users in mind. Though it is a reasonably complex piece of software, it is easy to install and upgrade. While there are different things that ...
What do you like most about Kong Enterprise?
The tool's feature that I find most beneficial is rate limiting. In our usage, especially in the financial sector, we prioritize limiting API usage. This is crucial because we provide APIs to other...
What needs improvement with Kong Enterprise?
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 ...
What needs improvement with SwaggerHub?
In SwaggerHub, I appreciate that it is a powerful platform for API design and collaboration, but currently, the access control is somewhat limited. I would love to see enhanced permissions allowing...
What is your primary use case for SwaggerHub?
I have worked for Arden University, University of Sheffield, and Nanyang Technological University. For those institutions, I used Amazon AppStream for backend validations. When working for Prolific...
What advice do you have for others considering SwaggerHub?
Based on my limited experience with SwaggerHub, I can share a few practical recommendations for implementing it effectively. Before onboarding multiple teams, it's important to define naming conven...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cargill, Zillow, Ferrari, WeWork, Healthcare.gov, Yahoo! Japan, Giphy, SkyScanner
Sonic, Zuora, Woolworths, CrowdFlower
Find out what your peers are saying about Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. SwaggerHub and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
880,490 professionals have used our research since 2012.