Kong Gateway Enterprise vs SwaggerHub comparison

Kong and SmartBear are both solutions in the API Management category. Kong is ranked #4 with an average rating of 7.9, while SmartBear is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.6. Kong holds a 7.1% mindshare in APIM, compared to SmartBear’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Kong users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of SmartBear users who would recommend it.

Kong Gateway Enterprise

Read 25 Kong Gateway Enterprise reviews

6,455 Views
6,455 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

SwaggerHub

Read 12 SwaggerHub reviews

1,306 Views
1,306 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Kong Gateway Enterprise

SwaggerHub

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

SwaggerHub and Kong Gateway Enterprise are both leading API management solutions competing in the API lifecycle space. While SwaggerHub shines with its competitive pricing and focus on API design, Kong Gateway Enterprise holds the upper hand in API management and performance capabilities.

Features: SwaggerHub offers robust API design and documentation tools, integration capabilities, and versioning, fostering collaboration among teams. Kong Gateway Enterprise excels in traffic control, security, and scalability, catering to enterprises with complex API needs. It also provides plugin support and role-based access control for extensive API governance.

Room for Improvement: SwaggerHub could enhance its API management capabilities to compete more effectively with high-demand environments. It might also benefit from offering more advanced security features. Kong Gateway Enterprise could improve in terms of user-friendliness, especially for those without deep technical expertise. Reducing its complexity in deployment and enhancing ease of integration for smaller teams would be beneficial.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SwaggerHub is straightforward and user-friendly, focusing on accessibility for designers and developers, with solid support infrastructure ensuring seamless deployment. Kong Gateway Enterprise, while powerful, requires more technical expertise for deployment. However, it mitigates this with comprehensive customer support and resources to handle detailed configurations.

Pricing and ROI: SwaggerHub stands out for its competitive initial setup costs and flexible pricing models, offering high ROI for teams focused on API design and collaboration. Kong Gateway Enterprise, although with higher upfront costs, provides substantial ROI through long-term value in managing demanding API environments, addressing the needs of enterprises seeking comprehensive solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. SwaggerHub Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. SwaggerHub

September 2025

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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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

SwaggerHub

Ranking in API Management

16th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Kong Gateway Enterprise is 7.1%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SwaggerHub is 1.4%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

API Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Kong Gateway Enterprise	7.1%
SwaggerHub	1.4%
Other	91.5%

API Management

Featured Reviews

ASHOK YADAV

Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Offers OIDC, Rate Limiting, Lambda functions but lacks software upgrades

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.

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SwaminathanSubramanian

Director/Enterprise Solutions Architect, Technology Advisor at Kyndryl

Facilitating enterprise-wide API governance and management

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 scalability also needs enhancement, as it becomes flaky under increased load. Additionally, the versioning management could be improved to be on par with source code management tools.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution provides good performance."

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

"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."

"Good at intercepting traffic and modeling APIs around that."

"In our buying companies' perspective, it was easier to use compared to other platforms. The markets were pretty familiar with the solutions."

"In terms of stability, the tool's team has made some good efforts, and my company is very happy with the product's approach."

"The most valuable features of Kong Enterprise are the out-of-the-box open source easy functionality."

"It boasts remarkable speed and stability, and these qualities, particularly the gateway's resilience, are standout features for me."

More Kong Gateway Enterprise pros

"It is a stable solution."

"One of the best features of SwaggerHub is how it allows me to create APIs and control the evolution of APIs within an organization."

"I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten."

"The scalability is endless."

"The tool's most valuable feature is licensing."

"The most valuable features are the collaboration between multiple teams and the control and distribution of specifications."

"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."

"One of the best features of SwaggerHub is how it allows me to create APIs and control the evolution of APIs within an organization."

More SwaggerHub pros

Cons

"We are facing issues with the solution's features like reports and traffic analysis."

"The tool needs improvement in UX."

"They could focus more on pricing."

"We would like to see an automatic data API when we have a table in the database."

"Kong Enterprise has decided not to support the web portal feature anymore, but I think that feature should stay in the on-premises solution."

"The open-source version of Kong does not support a dashboard, which would be very helpful."

"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 OS upgrades are not as frequent as they should be and they are bulky."

More Kong Gateway Enterprise cons

"More integration and usability with the cloud microservices would be nice"

"In SwaggerHub, I appreciate that it is a powerful platform for API design and collaboration, but currently, the access control is somewhat limited."

"We have to use additional tools to test APIs."

"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."

"SwaggerHub's UI needs to be improved as it looks very old school."

"The scalability aspect of SwaggerHub can be improved. It becomes a bit unreliable when the load is increased and isn't up to par with expectations for scalability."

"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."

"It has limited functionality...Unfortunately, some of its features are not what we need."

More SwaggerHub cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are many factors that influence the price of Kong Enterprise, such as scale, licenses, and usage."

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

"There is a need to pay towards the licensing charges...In some areas, the functionalities are available free of charge."

"I don't have any information on licensing costs currently."

"Kong Enterprise is cheaper than Apigee. I rate its pricing as four out of ten."

"The price is really reasonable compared to that of alternative solutions."

"The product is reasonably priced because it goes by the SaaS model."

"The licensing is expensive."

More Kong Gateway Enterprise pricing and cost advice

"The tool is cheap."

"It has a yearly subscription, but I am not sure."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Large Enterprise	19

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Large Enterprise	8

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 ...

See all answers

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...

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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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about SwaggerHub?

The tool's most valuable feature is licensing.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 23% of the time

Apigee vs SwaggerHub

Compared 18% of the time

MuleSoft API Manager vs SwaggerHub

Compared 11% of the time

Postman Enterprise vs SwaggerHub

Compared 10% of the time

Gravitee vs SwaggerHub

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Kong Gateway Enterprise

October 2025

Download Kong Gateway Enterprise product report

Buyer's Guide

SwaggerHub

October 2025

Download SwaggerHub product report

Overview

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.

Kong

SwaggerHub is an integrated API Development platform, built for teams, that brings the core capabilities of the Swagger framework to design, build, document and deploy APIs. SwaggerHub enables development teams to collaborate and coordinate the entire lifecycle of an API with the flexibility to integrate with the toolset of your choice.

SmartBear

Sample Customers

Cargill, Zillow, Ferrari, WeWork, Healthcare.gov, Yahoo! Japan, Giphy, SkyScanner

Sonic, Zuora, Woolworths, CrowdFlower

Buyer's Guide

Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. SwaggerHub

September 2025

Free Report: Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. SwaggerHub

Find out what your peers are saying about Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. SwaggerHub and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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