Kong Konnect Reviews

My main use case for Kong Konnect, at least with the clients that I work with, is to create a centralized single pane of glass for all of their control planes, whether it be for their API gateways or their AI gateways, so the SaaS control plane can control and configure and give visibility to all of those data plane nodes.

One of the last clients I worked with was a large automotive enterprise company that uses Kong Konnect to control or house all of their API gateway control planes. Kong Konnect gives you the ability to roll out a federated operating model so that you can have multiple teams; they had about 80 teams, allowing them to not only get self-service to manage their own configurations but also have isolation from anyone else, reducing the blast radius of there being any issues.

Some other use cases or features that Kong Konnect gives you that I've seen other customers use include a really good analytics feature that allows you to get information about requests, specifically getting latency information when requests go through the gateway and on which features and plugins are being used. Additionally, having the ability to use an IDP called Kong Identity is a really nice way of doing machine-to-machine identity management rather than bringing in options like Entra. Obviously, I've mentioned API gateways, but the same plays out with AI gateways as well, and having the ability to add the capabilities needed, whether it's linking out to guardrails or being able to use open telemetry to see what's going on. I think the feature set is very rich within Kong.

Kong Konnect reduces the operational overhead of being able to run a control plane, as well as gives you that single pane across large enterprises when you want to work in a federated operating model, which I think is quite a major benefit. It means there's no operational tasks of doing things like updating licenses when you are very federated across an organization, and it just opens up the visibility of what's going through your gateways. I think it's a really great tool, and I've seen a number of enterprise companies using it.

The whole area of API and AI management is quite complex, with so many different ways of being able to do things. I think a positive of Kong is that it's so configurable and extendable, but that is also a con because there are so many ways of achieving the same thing that I think often people are either confused or struggle to get going as to how to solve a particular problem. In my mind, a more opinionated deployment of Kong itself or even how to solve certain use cases would be something I would like to see, so a more opinionated use of their products and configuration of their products on how to solve the most common use cases.

That's probably the main thing about needed improvements for Kong Konnect. It's a pretty fully-fledged platform; there obviously are portions of it that could be improved. But I think overall as a platform, it's really good, and I think it can help the majority of organizations looking to manage their throughput of APIs or AI traffic.

The majority of what I've said before probably covers the improvements needed for Kong Konnect. There probably are some API Ops and AI Ops changes that could be improved, which is not necessarily the Kong Konnect product, but some of the toolchains around it. I'm thinking around, especially if it's API Ops, about topics like better GitOps processes and the ways of being able to roll back changes when there are issues. At the moment, a lot of that is either non-existent or is hand-cranked. I would like to see the ability to roll back configurations when there are issues being added to the product.

I've been using Kong's product for about seven or eight years, and Kong Konnect has only really been around probably in the last three years, so I've been using Kong Konnect since it first hit the market.

Kong Konnect is very stable. Kong Konnect is just the control plane; the data planes or the proxies, which are the gateways, have been around and running for I would say 8 to 10 years, and I've seen them run at major scale in large companies across the whole of Europe. In my opinion, it is very stable.

Kong Konnect can handle scalability. Kong Konnect is the control plane, and there is the ability to add more teams and more control planes based on the number of teams you have onboarding. From that aspect, there's absolutely no problem. When it comes to increased traffic, that's effectively down to how you deploy it. The scalability of the infrastructure, whether it's EKS or ECS as an example in AWS, depends on being able to configure those correctly so that it scales; I have seen some performance metrics that show how well it scales. It can definitely handle growth for any organization.

Customer support for Kong Konnect is really good. Different tiers of support are available depending on how much you want to pay. Overall, the support team is very responsive; it's 24/7 support, so it goes around the world, and you will always have someone in support to talk to. If you aren't getting what you need, there's also the community where they have Kong champions who can answer questions for you as well.

I have helped companies migrate from other providers, but I haven't necessarily used those myself. Some of the major reasons behind moving are Kong's ability to follow a proper GitOps model and the simplicity of being able to configure the product as well. Not only that, there is really great support and a great community.

I have seen a return on investment from Kong Konnect, though sharing specific numbers is really difficult to do. From my previous client, who was a large enterprise automotive company, what I have seen there is the ability for a smaller team to be able to manage more federated consumers of the services because of how well the federated operating model works with Kong Konnect. Although I can't put a specific number on it, I have seen the scalability of being able to manage 80 to 100-plus teams with a small team of about three or four people.

The processing of the license for Kong Konnect is normally handled by procurement, so in large enterprises, that's not something I've had to deal with, so I can't really comment on that at all. Setup cost is pretty easy to get set up and get going once everything has been licensed and the contract signed, so I wouldn't say that the setup cost is much more compared to using any other product.

Before choosing Kong Konnect, I and my clients evaluated other options like the cloud providers' options, such as AWS API Gateway or the Azure API Gateway. Those are often the tools that get compared at least from an API standpoint. When it comes to the AI gateway, there are options like LiteLLM that I've worked with with customers, but I think the features that you get from the full platform of Kong Konnect just outshine something like LiteLLM.

The most simplest case would be a reduction in cost, because you don't have these additional operational tasks that need to happen anymore. Not only does that reduce cost and day-to-day cost, which is time, but it also means allowing teams to self-serve themselves and onboard themselves is a reduction in bottlenecks for platform teams and just works hand-in-hand with the federated operating model.

There is a measurable reduction in onboarding time and certainly a certain percentage of cost savings or resource hours saved after adopting Kong Konnect. I wouldn't be able to put a number on it because I think it will be dependent on the size of the organization, the size of the teams, how federated they are, and how many teams are using the products throughout the organization. It would very much depend on the size of the company for the measurable savings you would have with respect to financial as well as time-based outcomes, but I've definitely seen it improve the self-service capability that a platform team can offer to an organization.

My advice for others looking into using Kong Konnect would be to try it out yourself and just see whether it works and solves what you want within your organization. There is an open-source version, not of Kong Konnect but of the gateway, so you could use that to see whether it works for what you're looking for. I think you can get a two-week trial if you sign up at cloud.konghq.com, so that would be my advice.

I would rate customer support for Kong Konnect with a nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We use Kong Konnect primarily for centralized API management, API security, Kubernetes ingress management, traffic control, observability, and governance across multiple environments. Additionally, we leverage custom plugins and AI Gateway capabilities to secure and manage both traditional APIs and AI-driven workloads.

I have used Kong Konnect in such a way that sometimes the upstreams are also authenticated. So we used to add some upstream auth plugin first so that the upstream will get authenticated. Then we used to add our own plugins, such as the OpenID plugin, so that we can authenticate from our end too.

Kong Konnect has positively impacted our organization by enabling us to create a single platform for all the APIs where we can monitor all the APIs together on one platform. This centralized platform has significantly reduced our time, and compared to other platforms or API platforms, I think it is more cost-effective than any other option in the market.

The best part of Kong Konnect is the Konnect UI, and it has a very user-friendly interface where we can easily onboard the APIs by just adding the services and passing the hostname onto that and giving a specific name to the services. Then we add the endpoints on the routes. It also has an observability platform where we can see all the logs of Kong.

For automations, Kong Konnect has a very out-of-the-box approach. I can say that automations run deck commands to connect with it and also to set up the automations using the deck tools.

I would recommend that Kong add the capability to sort the routes by name, date, or size, as the current setup does not support this. I would suggest that Kong make the routes or services appear in alphabetical order or sort by date modified or date added. Additionally, I suggest adding an alert system in Kong so that whenever we receive any non-200 response, we will get alerts to third-party tools such as Teams or Slack or any other channels.

I have been using Kong Konnect for four years.

Kong Konnect is stable.

Kong Konnect's scalability allows it to give us logs and enables easy setup and installation in any type of cloud or platform. It supports everything, whether it is Linux, Kubernetes, or others, and helps us in automations by using just the deck tools.

Customer support for Kong Konnect is very good. They are very helpful, and whenever we raise a ticket at any time, we just need to submit the ticket and we receive feedback or a response very soon.

This is the first time that I am using Kong Konnect product since the beginning of my career; I have not used any different solution before Kong Konnect.

The pricing is good, and the setup is very easy. Licensing is also obtained very easily.

I have not seen a direct return on investment personally, as I was not part of the compliance team handling this, but I would say that it has saved us money, and the supporting team is very helpful.

I have not evaluated other options before choosing Kong Konnect; we decided to go with Kong because it matches our organization's requirements.

I have not worked much on the AI capabilities of Kong Konnect, but I have gone through all the plugins, and it has very out-of-the-box plugins and capabilities. As per the market, it is now necessary for APIs to have AI capabilities, so I think Kong is extending in that area.

I have not worked much on accuracy and reliability either, but during my POCs, I found that it has very good capabilities and accuracy is also very good. Whatever content we are passing and adding some plugins onto that, it is providing us with responses as per our expectations.

My advice for others looking into using Kong Konnect is to please go with it. It is very good compared to other tools in the market. It is low cost, has a user-friendly interface, is easy to set up, and customer support is also very good. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

Kong Konnect serves as my main API Gateway for microservices, and it manages traffic between OpenShift and Kubernetes services, making it very helpful for monitoring API performance in my day-to-day operations.

A specific example of how I use Kong Konnect as an API gateway involves deploying multiple applications in OpenShift. Whenever we need API connectivity, the user connects to Kong Gateway data plane, which forwards that traffic to the back-end service with Kong Konnect control plane, ensuring that security and all processes work seamlessly on the microservices.

Kong Konnect has impacted my organization positively, particularly in enhancing security and providing a compliance dashboard for applications, making it a very positive impact on my organization.

The positive impacts I have observed include improvements such as acting as a security gate where requests come from any identity provider on JWT without passwords being sent repeatedly during the session, resulting in a very stateless application with no stored credentials.

The best features Kong Konnect offers include central control for all APIs, better security with auth, OAuth, JWT, very easy traffic management, and it is very helpful in Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters. It is also lightweight, super-fast, and allows for easy integration with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Tekton, or Argo CD.

The security features of Kong Konnect have helped my team mainly by allowing us to use auth and JWT for applications needing external identity provider authentications, such as LDAP or other authentication providers that need to be connected to back-end applications, which we can easily integrate using Kong Konnect with those identity providers for API integrations.

Kong Konnect can be improved by enhancing documentation and increasing support, as token integration presents challenges and has implementation complexities that need addressing.

I do not rate Kong Konnect a nine out of ten because the configuration can be complex and not beginner-friendly. The UI is acceptable but not the best since many features are managed through CLI and YAML, and full enterprise power comes only with a high paid subscription.

I have been using Kong Konnect for the last three to four years.

Kong Konnect is very stable with no issues regarding reliability in my experience.

Kong Konnect's scalability is very high, handles growth well, and since it is a stateless gateway, it scales easily in Kubernetes using horizontal scaling, allowing us to scale its workload in a very short time while remaining stable.

The customer support for Kong Konnect is very good because we have portal access to raise issues, mail support available, and they offer twenty-four-hour support with SLA-based response times.

I have not used a different solution before Kong Konnect. I have been using Kong Konnect from the start and do not have experience with other tools.

Kong Konnect is deployed in my organization as software as a service, deployed using Helm chart on OpenShift in one of our multiple clusters, and we have also deployed it on Microsoft Azure.

Kong Konnect is deployed in the public cloud with Microsoft Azure and not in a hybrid setup, as we primarily use Azure.

I have seen a return on investment with Kong Konnect, as it helps manage security very well, allows for faster API deployments saving developer time, and reduces salary costs with better uptime and minimal downtime, thus preventing potential business loss.

I do not have detailed information about the pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Kong Konnect, as these are managed by the sales teams.

I have not evaluated other options before choosing Kong Konnect, as I have been using this one.

My advice for others looking into using Kong Konnect is that if someone needs an API gateway, Kong Konnect is an excellent choice due to its good features and ease of integration with multiple developer tools, whether in the cloud or on-premises. I would rate Kong Konnect an eight point five out of ten.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

I have experience with both Apigee and Kong API Gateway. I have migrated from Apigee to Kong Konnect for organizations.

I am working currently with Kong Konnect SaaS Enterprise, which is the SaaS version of Kong. I have also worked on Kong Gateway Enterprise.

With Kong Konnect, AWS is the provider by default. However, the gateway runtime can be installed anywhere, the Kong Gatewa runtime also called the Kong Data Plane is platform agnostic. It does not have to be in AWS. It can be in Azure or on-prem as well.

Kong has been working on their documentation. They have developed a separate portal for the documentation. They are trying to improve that.

Their tech support is excellent. When I raise an incident or a support ticket, it got answered in four hours.

When comparing documentation, Kong's documentation is not on par with Google, Amazon, or other cloud providers. If a new person joins a team and wants to start using Kong's product and their associated tools, they would find it difficult initially compared to Google, Amazon, or Microsoft products, or even Azure from the deployment perspective. Kong has been working on their documentation and has developed a separate portal for the documentation. They are trying to improve that area.

I have been using both Kong Konnect and Kong Gateway Enterprise for three years at the level of API Technical Architect.

Kong Konnect includes managed and self-hosted runtimes, allowing different business units to independently control their gateways while maintaining central governance, security, and logging policies.

Their tech support is excellent. When I raise an incident or a support ticket, it gets answered in four hours.

Positive

One thing to keep in mind is Kong Konnect has professional services which often gets involved in the initial phases of implementation. Their professional services are very expensive. That is one reason why a client should hire an API technical architect to get things done because I am much more cost-effective than the professional services team.

Significant improvement in the performance of APIs.

It is more suitable to purchase Kong license from Kong vendors, not from the cloud marketplace because the cloud marketplace has a limitation on the number of API services it supports. If the customer has many APIs, it is always better to go through the vendor route to purchase the license.

I would rate Kong Konnect 8.5 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My main use case for Kong Konnect is routing to different backends and implementing enhanced security. For security purposes in my day-to-day work, we are currently implementing security features that Kong Konnect offers, such as API keys.

The best features Kong Konnect offers are ease of use and scalability.

When I mention scalability, it means that when we experience peak traffic, Kong made it easy for us to scale and spawn new machines.

Kong Konnect has positively impacted my organization by making our development easier and helping us push new routes to our current customers. It made development easier because we used to need to deploy the route everywhere, but now we can deploy at once and everything works.

Kong Konnect needs improvement in the UI. The fields are unclear about what they do, and the UI for the Dev Portal is rough around the edges.

I have been using Kong Konnect for four years.

Kong Konnect is stable.

Scalability is great with Kong Konnect.

Customer support for Kong Konnect is fantastic, and I have no complaints.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

I was not part of the decision regarding the experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing.

I was not part of the decision regarding the experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing.

I have seen a return on investment with Kong Konnect. Time saved is a relevant metric; it used to take us a week, but now it takes us only a day.

We evaluated MuleSoft before choosing Kong Konnect.

My advice for others looking into using Kong Konnect is to try it because it is a great product. I give Kong Konnect a rating of 9 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I use Kong Konnect most often as a current gateway. A specific example of how I use Kong Konnect as a current gateway involves onboarding microservices into Kong Konnect where we pass the host map pattern and pass the endpoint in the route path. This is how we are configuring our setup.

The best features Kong Konnect offers include security, scalability, and latency, which is the most important to me.

Security, scalability, and load handling are so valuable for me because we have multiple built-in plugins such as open authentication, authentication, OpenID, and basic authentication.

Our features, such as being able to see all the logs and traces by integrating with multiple third-party applications including Jaeger, are worth mentioning.

Kong Konnect has positively impacted our organization by securing our APIs, which is one of the main concerns for us. Securing our APIs has benefited our organization by improving compliance and reducing incidents.

I wish Kong Konnect could improve by having a built-in notification system whenever any APIs get pinged so that we can receive alerts and send them to the developer.

I have been using Kong Konnect for about three and a half years.

Kong Konnect is stable.

Kong Konnect's scalability is good.

The customer support is good.

I did not previously use a different solution before Kong Konnect.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing indicates that licensing is a bit high in comparison.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Kong Konnect.

My advice to others looking into using Kong Konnect is to go with it. My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. I gave this product a rating of 10.

On-premises

Other

The clients mainly were using Proofpoint for email security, which is the primary use case.

We have used Proofpoint for email security.

Spam filtering from our partner perspective was very efficient; we were very happy with the functionality, as only relevant emails were allowed for mailboxes.

We used the Sandbox feature, and it was very beneficial concerning the Advanced Threat Protection feature.

From a business perspective, it was very helpful; it sped up our business flow and increased email delivery, and from a technical perspective, it was very effective.

Pricing might be a topic to consider regarding improvements.

I may advise Proofpoint to adjust marketing solutions based on each country itself.

I had experience with Proofpoint for more than 5 or 6 years.

Everything was very nice from a technical perspective, and we were very happy, especially since we used it for more than 5 or 6 years.

Everything was fully functional, and I cannot think of advanced features; all existing features were very suitable for our business flow.

It was very stable, so I would rate it as excellent.

It was very fast, and we did not experience any interruptions.

The scalability of Proofpoint was excellent and very scalable.

Technical support from Proofpoint was absolutely excellent.

We were very satisfied with the performance and efficiency of the product.

Positive

We are still using Microsoft Exchange, but left Proofpoint.

We stopped using this product last year, approximately ten months ago.

The product was very straightforward to install; it was very easy because we used the web interface, and simple settings definitions on the ISP site were enough for the whole setup.

At the very beginning we were working directly with the UK, but then we were redirected to a local partner, and we worked almost one year with the local partner.

We used to get a business partner in my country.

The pricing deserves a high rating for consideration.

Cost was the reason we stopped using it.

Pricing was the issue as it becomes very expensive due to the nature of local circumstances.

The integration with our on-prem Exchange was very straightforward; the only thing we did was redirect all email traffic over Proofpoint, so Proofpoint did everything independently, and we were very happy.

I am still receiving emails from Proofpoint's site.

Not using it at the moment, but in the short term we will be tackling that portion of the product as well.

We cannot provide feedback regarding Dynamics because we are not experienced enough at the moment; we have initiatives going on but did not get enough feedback from end users.

Based on my overall experience with Proofpoint, considering the cost perspective, I would rate it a 7 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Other

I use Kong Konnect as an API Gateway or API management solution. I have several use cases, including securing internal APIs within Siemens network by deploying Kong Gateway on Amazon EKS. This acts as an API management layer to expose other internal services such as logging and Jira APIs. Additionally, I utilize it for external use cases by deploying an API Gateway for consumers accessing services from the internet. My aim is to create a federated API management platform where various business units can still use their preferred choice of gateways while maintaining a central federation layer to control security and logging policies.

Kong Konnect is a SaaS version of Kong Gateway, and it offers a hybrid deployment. The configuration can be controlled centrally via the SaaS offering, and each team can manage their own gateway or runtime part. It is lightweight, suitable for smaller use cases without heavy initial costs, and comes in various flavors such as open source and enterprise. The documentation is excellent, and it includes a developer portal, which helps create a common distribution channel for APIs within and outside the enterprise.

Kong Konnect's RBAC needs to evolve more, as they currently offer only one or two levels of RBAC in terms of organization and teams. Additionally, the licensing model could be simplified, especially in how they charge and track usage. There are also some technical restrictions around exposing GRPC APIs, but I have not explored this yet.

I have been working with Kong Konnect for the last six or seven months.

The deployment is straightforward because it's a hybrid model. The control plane is a SaaS offering, so there's not much difficulty there.

The solution is stable.

The platform is fully scalable, providing various ways to manage data planes or runtimes. They offer managed runtimes, but it's preferred that consumers manage their own runtime, which can be deployed in a containerized manner.

The technical support from Kong is satisfactory.

Neutral

I was previously using Azure Logic Apps but moved to Kong API Gateway. This decision was influenced by the need to create a service around Kong API Gateway with a federated API management platform.

The initial setup is very straightforward due to its hybrid deployment model, with the configuration and control plane managed as a SaaS offering.

I have not yet seen a return on investment because the project is still in its early stages.

While the pricing model isn't very clear on how usage is tracked, the initial cost and setup for using Kong Konnect are reasonable.

The knowledge base provided by Kong is excellent, offering various learning paths not just for the technical aspects of Kong Konnect, but also for innovation within the application. It's a highly customizable platform. I would rate Kong Konnect an eight overall.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)