Kong Gateway Enterprise vs Tyk comparison

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Kong Gateway Enterprise

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Tyk and Kong Gateway Enterprise are competing API management solutions. Tyk has the upper hand with better pricing and stronger customer support, while Kong Gateway Enterprise stands out with advanced features.

Features: Tyk excels with its integration capabilities, sophisticated analytics, and a robust API management system. Kong Gateway Enterprise offers extensive plugin support, a versatile customization framework, and effective traffic control capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Tyk could enhance its cloud version, improve hosting options for self-hosted environments, and expand its maturity in some areas. Kong Gateway Enterprise could improve its flexibility in deployment, increase customer support options, and reduce complexity in its advanced features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tyk provides a straightforward deployment process and comprehensive customer support. In contrast, Kong Gateway Enterprise offers a more complex deployment with an emphasis on flexibility, supported by efficient but limited customer service.

Pricing and ROI: Tyk is perceived as offering better initial value with lower setup costs and a quicker ROI. Kong Gateway Enterprise, though with higher upfront costs, delivers a strong ROI over time due to its enhanced feature set, making it suitable for large-scale operations.

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

Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. Tyk

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Helped 849,686 peers since 2012

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

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Tyk

Ranking in API Management

19th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Kong Gateway Enterprise is 6.7%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tyk is 2.0%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

API Management

Featured Reviews

AmitKanodia

Cloud & Integration CoE Head at Capgemini

Provides role-based access control and can be easily customized with Lua script

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.

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MarkDoherty

Founding Director at Point Group

Fastest to get up and running and fewer idiosyncrasies than competitors

In terms of our usage, the main area of concern is that they tend to build enhancements slightly ahead of the considerations for what those enhancements and extensions are. So it could be slightly better communication with the customer base that would be my main issue with them. But as a product, it's very difficult to find any major faults.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It offers a wide range of plugins that we leverage, including OIDC, Rate Limiting, Lambda functions, and more."

"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."

"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."

"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it seamlessly supports a vast number of tools."

"Protocol transformation is the most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise."

"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."

More Kong Gateway Enterprise pros

"You can set up workflows and write limited pieces of logic."

"The portal for developers that this solution provides has great functionality."

"It is a good product for API management."

"The scalability is very good. That was a key factor in the selection, like how it could be pushed to high volume and scalability, which seemed to be very good."

"The most valuable feature is the load balancing with the circuit-breaker function."

"The feature I find most valuable is that this solution allows us to manage our security."

Cons

"It becomes difficult if you try to scale it up to multiple clusters."

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

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

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

"From an improvement perspective, the product should offer more readily available connectors and also allow for more seamless AI integrations."

"Kong Enterprise can improve the customization to be able to do the integration properly."

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

"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."

More Kong Gateway Enterprise cons

"Sometimes when new features are released, they are not immediately stable."

"It is a young product and does not have the kind of brand recognition that would make it a more popular solution with our clients."

"We would like a better tool for generating documentation for the APIs to be developed."

"We ran it for a while, but then we decided to move away from Tyk, because Tyk's cloud version, the SaaS version, has a significant limitation of limited flexibility, so you can't program very much."

"In terms of our usage, the main area of concern is that they tend to build enhancements slightly ahead of the considerations for what those enhancements and extensions are. So it could be slightly better communication with the customer base that would be my main issue with them."

"I would like to see some additional features like having some extensions for .NET core because we use it for our back-end language."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"The licensing is expensive."

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

"Kong Enterprise's pricing is reasonable for our company size."

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

"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."

More Kong Gateway Enterprise pricing and cost advice

"The price is low compared to other products of a similar type."

"The cost curve is far smoother, both in terms of volume and the number of calls it's running on, compared to most competitors. So it's a tad more expensive at the very low end, but the curve is nothing like Apigee or some of the others."

"There are different versions and plans available depending on the requirements, so there is flexibility in terms of the pricing."

"It had a free version, which suited many of our needs, but not all, but we were happy to go ahead with the licensed version as well, which is the paid version."

"We are using the open-source version of this product, so there are no licensing costs for its use."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

27%

Computer Software Company

15%

Healthcare Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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?

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 bette...

What do you like most about Tyk?

The scalability is very good. That was a key factor in the selection, like how it could be pushed to high volume and scalability, which seemed to be very good.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tyk?

The pricing is actually quite competitive. In Azure environments, it gets beaten by Microsoft API Gateway, but on the other hand, it offers some features that Microsoft lacks. So it really comes do...

What needs improvement with Tyk?

Microsoft Azure API Management vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

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Product Reports

Kong Gateway Enterprise

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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

Tyk is an open source API Gateway that is fast and scalable, an API management platform featuring an API gateway, analytics, developer portal and dashboard. Available in three flavours to best suit your architecture and governance. We offer full cloud or on-premises options, and the best of both worlds with our unique hybrid model. www.tyk.io

Sample Customers

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

Trip Advisor, Juniper Networks, AT&T

Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. Tyk