Kong Konnect's most valuable features include central API control, excellent security with auth, OAuth, and JWT, easy traffic management, and Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters support. It integrates smoothly with CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Tekton, and Argo CD. It offers lightweight and scalable hybrid deployments, robust documentation, and an efficient developer portal. Users appreciate its scalability, ease of use, and positive impact on API security, compliance, and reduced incidents.
- "Kong Konnect provides centralized API management, which means there is one place to manage all the APIs, with a good plugin subsystem for authentication, logging, and rate limiting, plus a hybrid architecture that improves scalability and developer productivity while reducing engineering time and costs."
- "From that standpoint, the core of it is that our debugging time during regression cycles reduced roughly by 25% to 30%, mainly because the gateway layer helped us quickly identify whether issues were coming from authentication policies, rate limiting, throttling, or the backend services."
- "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."
Kong Konnect requires enhanced documentation and increased support, particularly in token integration and configuration complexity. Pricing and licensing models could benefit from simplification. Improvements in UI usability are needed, as well as a built-in notification system for pinged APIs. RBAC features need expansion beyond current levels. Users face difficulties due to reliance on CLI and YAML, limiting Kong Konnect's user-friendliness.
- "The learning curve is the first issue when starting with Kong Konnect, as understanding the concepts such as services, routes, plugins, and the control and data planes takes time."
- "Kong Konnect requires some improvement, but overall the experience is quite positive."
- "I do not rate Kong Konnect a nine out of ten because the configuration can be complex and not beginner-friendly."
