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Kong Gateway Enterprise vs WSO2 API Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
WSO2 API Manager
Ranking in API Management
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Kong Gateway Enterprise is 6.6%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WSO2 API Manager is 4.8%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

Featured Reviews

AmitKanodia - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
VishalSingh14 - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to deploy APIs and easy to manage CORS configuration
I have used WSO2 Store and WSO2 API Manager at the architecture level. I worked on two versions, namely WSO2 API Manager 2.6.0 and 5.7.0. I have also worked with WSO2 Identity Server versions 5.7 and 5.11. There are certain things that Apigee handles better than WSO2 API Manager. The user interface of WSO2 API Manager is much easier than that of Apigee. The scope of flexibility was much greater in Apigee. In WSO2 API Manager, we had little flexibility and were restricted to a specific software or tool. On the other hand, we had the scope of customization in Apigee.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This is a solid intrusion prevention system that combines a firewall and antivirus in a single solution."
"The most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise is its capability to integrate with various security tools."
"Good at intercepting traffic and modeling APIs around that."
"The route limiting feature is very valuable."
"Kong enterprise has significantly enhanced our ability to manage and secure our Microservices. Its most valuable feature is monitoring."
"The most valuable features of Kong Enterprise are the out-of-the-box open source easy functionality."
"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."
"It is possible to scale up and scale down with the solution...I can say that I have not seen any issues related to scalability."
"Helped us to quickly publish our Microservice APIs and enforcing different policies against them, it comes up with features like Security, Throttling policy and it provides complete access to customize API's which actually saves development effort and time."
"It's a good product."
"WSO2 API Manager is easy to use."
"The documentation is good."
"WSO2 API Manager is a stable solution."
"WSO2 is very stable."
"The product is easy to use."
 

Cons

"We would like to see an automatic data API when we have a table in the database."
"The ease of billing is lost when Kong is not available directly on the Azure marketplace. This is one area where they can improve."
"It becomes difficult if you try to scale it up to multiple clusters."
"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."
"The software version upgrade process should be improved."
"They could focus more on pricing."
"Understanding the configurations and knowing what needs to be done can be a bit difficult initially."
"We are facing issues with the solution's features like reports and traffic analysis."
"Dashboards for application monitoring of the APIs would be beneficial, allowing us to check for faulty APIs."
"The solution’s interface should be more user-friendly."
"For fresh graduates and engineers, the setup process can be very difficult."
"WSO2 API Manager should improve its marketplace subscription model and documentation in order to reach a higher level in the market."
"They are developing another platform called Choreo that allows you to create API itself using the WSO2 programming language Ballerina. It would be great if they added a direct connection between Choreo and API Manager, that would be great. I think they are working on that, but I'm not sure."
"API Manager is not easy to scale because some of its components lack scalability. It's a difficult point. Especially because companies are so cloud-based these days, microservice scalability is a major thing."
"WSO2 API Manager could increase their security compliance."
"The stability is pretty good, but it could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Kong Enterprise's pricing is at par compared to the other technologies."
"The licensing fees are paid yearly."
"I don't have any information on licensing costs currently."
"There is a need to pay towards the licensing charges...In some areas, the functionalities are available free of charge."
"Basically, my company uses the tool's open-source version."
"Kong Enterprise is cheaper than Apigee. I rate its pricing as four out of ten."
"Kong Enterprise's pricing is reasonable for our company size."
"The price is really reasonable compared to that of alternative solutions."
"It is costly, around ten thousand per year, per instance"
"WSO2 API Manager is quite an expensive tool. I rate the product's pricing a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is low and ten is high."
"For our projects, we found the pricing to be a little high."
"We have not opted for the paid version of WSO2 but we have implemented the free and open source WSO2 software to a great extent and it is working as per our expectation."
"We use the open-source version — the free version."
"The challenge is the increasing pricing, which has led some customers to consider alternatives, like using Spring Boot solutions instead. The rising costs, especially as cores and usage increase, have been a concern, prompting some to migrate to other products."
"I am using the free version."
"My previous company paid about 1.2 million dollars, and my current company pays about 300k. Both companies are at the enterprise level."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
18%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 WSO2 API Manager?
It is possible to scale up and scale down with the solution...I can say that I have not seen any issues related to scalability.
What needs improvement with WSO2 API Manager?
One area for improvement is monitoring. Dashboards for application monitoring of the APIs would be beneficial, allowing us to check for faulty APIs.
What is your primary use case for WSO2 API Manager?
We use WSO2 API Manager for our microservices and our APIs, both internally and externally.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cargill, Zillow, Ferrari, WeWork, Healthcare.gov, Yahoo! Japan, Giphy, SkyScanner
1. eBay 2. StubHub 3. Cisco 4. Verizon 5. T-Mobile 6. Vodafone 7. Orange 8. BT Group 9. Telstra 10. Deutsche Telekom 11. Swisscom 12. AT&T 13. Sprint 14. Telefonica 15. O2 16. British Airways 17. Lufthansa 18. Emirates 19. Qatar Airways 20. Etihad Airways 21. Air France 22. KLM 23. American Express 24. Visa 25. Mastercard 26. PayPal 27. Western Union 28. Citibank 29. HSBC 30. Barclays 31. Santander 32. Goldman Sachs
Find out what your peers are saying about Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. WSO2 API Manager and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.