Kong Gateway Enterprise Reviews

We have several microservices that are secure using Kong Enterprise. Our microservices are managed through Kong Enterprise API management.

We have integrated with IDP to secure it. We use multiple plugins that are bundled with Kong Enterprise.

The features of Kong are plugin-based network services. It enables us to include our security policy when creating customers.

Kong Enterprise has excellent plugin support. This is a feature that I was looking for.

The price could be lower.

I have been using Kong Enterprise for more than one year.

Kong Enterprise's stability has never been an issue for us.

Kong Enterprise scales easily.

We have more than 300 people who use this solution.

We have teams of 30 to 40 people running multiple products that are used with Kong Enterprise.

We had a problem with the 1.2 EMT enablement, and they provided a solution. They've been very helpful. The technical team is always available to help us with our problems.

In my previous company, I used an API.

The installation went well. It was good. This installation was completed by another team.

When I have installed this solution, I found it to be easy. For me, the installation takes about 15 to 20 minutes on average.

Because it is open-source, it should be less expensive than others.

The licensing fees are paid yearly.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I would rate Kong Enterprise an eight out of ten.

We mostly use this as an intrusion prevention system.

It gives us a good product to offer our clients that fits with our local economy.

The combination of IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) and the antivirus feature included in that firewall provides a unified advantage. We need one solution and not two. That is one of the main features our customers are really interested in.

Mainly, I would say they need to improve the updates. The updates of the OS for Fortinet seem to require a lot of bandwidth. It would be good if they required fewer resources. Also, they might improve the frequency of the releases.

I say this because here in East Africa the Internet is not as reliable or as fast as in the UK — or other places outside Africa. The OS for the Fortinet is great — super, even — but the releases are bulky and cause some problems.

Even though I like the way that both the intrusion prevention and antivirus are incorporated in this one solution, I think they should improve how you switch between one feature and the other. It's not very user-friendly for someone who's not experienced with the product. It is also quite different from other firewalls, like Check Point. 

As far as the stability of the solution: so far so good. I've not had any complaints from the customer side at all. That means the installations and the product are solid, so I can say with confidence that it is stable.

I think the product is scalable. That's a great feature of the product in the sense that it is easier to show the return on investment while using it because it's easier to scale. You do not have to reinvest in a lot of other new equipment as an upgrade.

I haven't contacted technical support, because when we deploy the system administrator uses the product. We have not heard of problems from administrators and according to them, they didn't experience any kind of difficulties. The only problem that a client had was the problem or the electricity. So that's different than actually having a problem with the firewall. They had no issues with the firewall itself.

I had some experience with the Check Point UTM firewall, but it was brief. All I can say is that Fortinet is more user-friendly compared to Check Point it's not as complex to deploy as Check Point. 

The other thing is regarding support. The support for Check Point is a bit slow, at least it is not as fast as Fortinet. 

For me, I think the installation was straightforward and we do that ourselves. The deployment doesn't take very long — it was a maximum of three hours. That is for the initial setup. There are not many places to change settings or that need customization.

For the deployments, we use two to three people and that is enough. We use one person for the metric and then one or even two for the systems. It is probably more than we need, but we do that just to be sure things go well.

The provider is Microsoft Azure. But we do all the installations by ourselves.

For us, the benefit of being able to scale without it having to cost a lot of money is good for our clients in our economic environment, so it is also good for us.

I rate the product as an eight out of ten. It is an eight because their updates are not regular and easier to work with.

The clients that we have already deployed are happy with it. So for now, if any new project needs a firewall solution, we are confident that we get positive feedback from the people using this product. For our future plans, I would hope we can deploy it more, but I cannot be sure about that because of the economic situation and how many new clients we will have.

The only advice I have for people considering this as a solution is to make sure that they have a proper internet connection and good bandwidth. That's the thing I feel is the biggest problem for my case.

It's user-friendly, at least for now. It is hard to predict if they will add complexity if they upgrade features.

We use it to provide API services to our clients.

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.

The plugin architecture is simple and easy to implement.

There is room for improvement in the licensing model. It charges differently for each geography. If I have to use Kong in two different geographies for the same organization, it charges me twice. When it comes to Azure, it doesn't charge me twice. Azure has a more economical model.

The licensing in the Middle East, where we work. The licensing of Kong and Azure is a lengthy process. It was not readily available. We had to talk to the product owner to make the Kong Gateway available as a solution on the Azure marketplace. The licensing is only as an on-prem or separate product. 

The difference between billing on the cloud and outside the cloud is if I purchase Kong outside, I have to pay the AMC every year or so. The purpose of cloud implementation is to have a consolidated billing for all resources purchased on the cloud. You don't need to deal with multiple vendors. If you have purchased five applications on the cloud marketplace, you get a single consolidated bill every month. 

The ease of billing is lost when Kong is not available directly on the Azure marketplace. This is one area where they can improve. There could be a problem with the Middle East geography. They may have Kong available on the Azure marketplace in other geographies, but this is how it is in the Middle East.

I have been using it for two and a half years. 

It is a very stable product. 

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten, with one being one scalability and ten being high. 

The scalability aspect has a limitation with geography. I can expand it to any country within one region, but not beyond. There are licensing implications. 

Technologically, it is scalable to whatever extent required, without any limitations. The limitation is only across geography. It cannot be scaled beyond one region.

There are around 25 technical people using this solution in my organization. We use it daily.

Kong is the first API solution we used. We started API solutions with Kong.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy. 

The first implementation took three months.

The deployment was done by a vendor. 

Kong Gateway doesn't save anything, actually. It is not for that purpose. It's a technological solution, we cannot directly attribute revenue to Kong alone. Multiple applications work together to offer the APIs, and those API solutions have brought in some revenue, but not entirely because of Kong, so I cannot quantify that.

The licensing is expensive. I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive. 

Our parent organization has been using Kong and evaluated all the possibilities. We took their reference. Recently, we did an evaluation and migrated to Azure API Management from Kong.

I would recommend using it. It is a very powerful tool with lots of features. It's stable, user-friendly, and easy to learn.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Our primary use case of this solution was a secure API Gateway hosted on public cloud infrastructure. The  manageability, deployment architecture options and scalability were key considerations. Kong is great at organising our API ecosystem and providing the required manageability, scalability observability and  security.

I'm the vice president of technology and architecture and we are customers of Kong Enterprise. 

Kong is our API and Micro-services backbone. 

Simplicity, its plugin architecture and scalability.
The new Developer Portal,  intercepting traffic and modeling APIs around that is great.

vibrant community support and an open source DNA

Kong has a huge community and lot of open source implementations and satisfied users. 

The motivation to move to Enterprise edition is still license and cost based. Kong can look at different options like managed and Hosted PaaS, different consumption tiers to make the transition practical and easier. 

I've been using Kong for the past 3+ years. Have done two opensource API Gateway Implementations. Evaluated and considered Enterprise edition more than once. No qualms or complaints. There open source version works for most of the cases. Solid product.

The stability is fine. We had one outage because of our own infrastructure operations. Other than that, from a stability  perspective it runs smoothly because of the very good underlyingKong  platform architecture. 

Misconfigured plug-ins mess up your environment. Always have the configuration preserved or implement Kong using Terraform scripts or using other config as code options.

Kong is a super scalable product as far as my current experience goes. The scalability is awesome. We could scale up easily and could organise our as multiple clusters and secure them.

I believe the technical support is good although I haven't had to use it much.

Mulesoft, Tibco Mashery, Oracle SOA, webMethods,WsO2 and SAP products  and all of them 

The initial setup was relatively straightforward. There were some small issues with documentation.  Deployment took a couple of weeks. One of the neat things about Kong is the huge community they have and there's a lot of help that comes from there. It gives you the plugins and solutions  for you to be self-sufficient. 

Implemented on our own

Zero Investment on open source version. It works like enterprise grade. The enterprise version has lot of great features. Interms of ROI it’s intangible, we could deliver APIs for business needs Ina very agile manner. 

I'm not sure of the licensing costs because they like to keep it confidential. As far as I know their enterprise license  is all or none one big bundle.

Well seen all of them. 
Kong is a developer friendly,  and ground up community supported platform. 

I would highly recommend Kong, especially for people who are experiencing a cost bloat using other platforms. Great choice for startup,  scale ups and enterprises. 

I would rate this solution an 8 out of 10.