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Logo of Kong Gateway

Kong Gateway

byKong
in API Management
4.4

Overview

Product Information on Kong Gateway

Updated 5th August 2025

What is Kong Gateway?

High-performance, cloud-native API gateway that handles routing, authentication, rate limiting, and traffic management for APIs across the enterprise. Built on NGINX, it processes millions of requests with microsecond latency while providing plugins for security, analytics, and transformations.

Kong Gateway Pricing

Kong Gateway Product Images

Gateway manager
Gateway manager
Choose your own plugins
Choose your own plugins

Overall experience with Kong Gateway

IT Consultant
3B - 10B USD, Consumer Goods
FAVORABLE

“Powerful and Flexible API Gateway with Steep Learning Curve, but Strong Long-Term Value”

4.0
Jul 23, 2025
As someone who interacts daily with Kong, my overall experience has been positive. It is a powerful and flexible API gateway that supports a wide range of plugins for customization and integrations. The performance is solid, and the scalability makes it a great fit as our company solution. The documentation is generally helpful, but there is room for improvement in that a lot of the information is not consolidated and tends to lead you around the site through various links that, when you need an answer to a typical question, can lead to you getting lost in the weeds of all of the processes that may not be completely relevant. Once set up, Kong is reliable and simplifies API management significantly.
DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING
1B - 3B USD, Software
CRITICAL

“User Reactions to Kong - Its Strengths and Weaknesses Unveiled”

3.0
Jan 8, 2025
Kong fell short in some areas. Specifically, our team identified a couple of bugs and issues in the Gateway. It took too long to recognise and to solve the bugs. Some of those issues seemed to highlight that Kong wasn't being used use cases as large as ours. While Kong provides a large plugin ecosystem, it is still hard to customize some specific aspects (e.g., rate limits).

About Company

Company Description

Updated 10th November 2023

Kong enables any company to become an API-first company with a unified platform for API management, service mesh, and ingress controller. From growing startups to Fortune 500 companies, more than 600 organizations rely on Kong to help them deliver fast, reliable, and secure digital experiences.

Company Details

Updated 12th June 2024
Company type
Private
Year Founded
2017
Head office location
San Francisco, United States
Number of employees
501 - 1000
Website
https://konghq.com/

Key Insights

A Snapshot of What Matters - Based on Validated User Reviews

User Sentiment About Kong Gateway
Reviewer Insights for: Kong Gateway
Deciding Factors: Kong Gateway Vs. Market Average
Performance of Kong Gateway Across Market Features

Kong Gateway Likes & Dislikes

Like

What I like most is its flexibility and extensibility. The wide range of plugins and integrations allows us to customize API management to fit our exact needs. It's also great that Kong supports both open-source and enterprise options, giving teams the freedom to scale as needed. Kong's ability to handle authentication, rate limiting, logging, and monitoring integrations all in one place really streamlines operations.

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Like

Documentation is good, large availability of plugins.

Read Full Review
Like

Kong support is responsive and quick with an answer. They have around the clock support, helping our use case quite a bit. Kong itself its a pretty straight forward product and its easy to see how the pieces fit together. Its lightweight enough that customers can deploy in the cloud easily.

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Dislike

The biggest drawback is the initial setup and the learning curve that is required. The Kong certification does its best to provide you with the knowledge required, but falls a bit short of the mark. While Kong is powerful, configuring it, especially with custom plugins or more advanced features can be complex and time-consuming. Documentation is helpful, but sometimes lacks depth or clarity for edge cases. Troubleshooting issues, even ones such as basic timeouts, can be a challenge due to the confusing nature of some areas of documentation.

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Dislike

- Plugin customizations can be hard to do or not flexible enough to cover the use cases for your company. - Responses to customer support enquiries and bug reporting can be slow. - We've discovered a couple of issues related to the ability to handle large amount of configuration data

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Dislike

The built in logging is really lacking. You have to include a third party technology (which the plugins admittedly help with), but the logging is already there, in a database. Giving us access to this through either API's or allowing us to make RO SQL calls against it would make life much easier. They have deprecated some features that people still use in favor of bringing everyone into their cloud. It works well for some, but not our use case. Their docs are terrifically difficult to read if you don't know exactly what you are looking for ahead of time and sometimes support will point you to an article hidden in their blogs or support pages instead of official docs because the docs are insufficient.

Read Full Review

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Peer Discussions

Kong Gateway Reviews and Ratings

4.4

(147 Ratings)

Rating Distribution

5 Star
45%
4 Star
52%
3 Star
3%
2 Star
0%
1 Star
0%
Why ratings and reviews count differ?

Customer Experience

Evaluation & Contracting

4.4

Integration & Deployment

4.5

Service & Support

4.4

Product Capabilities

4.5

Last 12 Months
Filter Reviews
Sort By:
Most helpful
Star Rating
Reviewer Type
Reviewer's Company Size
Reviewer's Industry
Reviewer's Region
Reviewer's Job Function
  • IT Consultant
    1B-10B USD
    Consumer Goods
    Review Source

    Powerful and Flexible API Gateway with Steep Learning Curve, but Strong Long-Term Value

    4.0
    Jul 23, 2025
    As someone who interacts daily with Kong, my overall experience has been positive. It is a powerful and flexible API gateway that supports a wide range of plugins for customization and integrations. The performance is solid, and the scalability makes it a great fit as our company solution. The documentation is generally helpful, but there is room for improvement in that a lot of the information is not consolidated and tends to lead you around the site through various links that, when you need an answer to a typical question, can lead to you getting lost in the weeds of all of the processes that may not be completely relevant. Once set up, Kong is reliable and simplifies API management significantly.
  • Software Developer
    1B-10B USD
    Software
    Review Source

    Kong Support Shows Responsiveness But Prefers Email Over Faster Communication Methods

    4.0
    Dec 18, 2025
    Kong team is pretty responsive to emails and followups. They have a good understanding of your product in general. Some advisors are more knowledgeable about our use case and are more helpful with that. Primary communication is from email, and things would go faster sometimes if it was Teams meetings or phone calls. Sometimes it would be helpful if they sought to understand more of what I was trying to do before providing an answer. A couple things were deprecated that we were using and I wonder if some of this stems from some startup growing pains of finding what works best.
  • Senior Cloud Engineer
    10B+ USD
    Banking
    Review Source

    "Kong Gateway: A Scalable, Secure API Management Powerhouse"

    5.0
    Jul 22, 2025
    Kong Gateway has really helped us manage and connect our API connects. We are using 2 different like Internal and External and it's working well.
  • IT Associate
    50M-1B USD
    IT Services
    Review Source

    Flexibility and Auto-Scaling Features Shape User Experience With Kong API Gateway

    5.0
    Dec 19, 2025
    I'm truly impressed by Kong, we have been using Kong API Gateway for a long time now and the flexibility that it offers is truly amazing. We can auto scale easily as it's very lightweight, easy to manage and easy to customise.
  • DevSecOps Engineer
    10B+ USD
    IT Services
    Review Source

    Enhance Operations with Kong Gateway's User-Friendly Maintenance

    5.0
    Dec 18, 2025
    The Kong Gateway is an excellent API management solution offering remarkable flexibility and extensibility. One of the standout features is the ability to create custom plugin, enabling us to tailor the gateway to specific use cases. it is also well regarded for being easy to maintain with comprehensive documentation that make troubleshooting the updates.
...
Showing Result 1-5 of 154

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