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Kong

Cloud-native API gateway and service connectivity platform

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Overview

What Kong does

Kong is a lightweight, fast, and flexible open-source API gateway built on top of Nginx. It enables organizations to manage, secure, and monitor APIs and microservices with advanced features like authentication, rate limiting, and load balancing.

What people use it for

  • Running an API gateway in front of internal and public services
  • Publishing and governing APIs through a developer portal

Related searches

The honest half

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Kong.

  • The Plus plan includes 1M API requests a month and charges $200 a month for each additional million
  • Plus is capped at 10M requests a month, so growth past that forces an Enterprise contract
  • Plus limits published APIs to 20 and includes one Developer Portal, with a second at $200 a month
  • SSO and audit logging are Enterprise only
  • Enterprise pricing is custom and billed annually

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Kong

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

  • Kong logo
    Kong    vs
    Appwrite logo
    Appwrite

    Appwrite: Open-source Backend as a Service with REST API and SDKs

  • Kong logo
    Kong    vs
    Hasura logo
    Hasura

    Hasura: GraphQL engine that instantly creates production-ready GraphQL API from databases

  • Kong logo
    Kong    vs
    PocketBase logo
    PocketBase

    PocketBase: Open-source backend with REST API, real-time subscriptions and Admin UI

  • Kong logo
    Kong    vs
    Sanity logo
    Sanity

    Sanity: Headless CMS with real-time collaborative editing and structured content APIs

Pricing

What Kong costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Community

Free

  • Core API gateway
  • Community support

Enterprise

On request

  • Advanced features
  • Priority support
  • SLA
  • Custom plugins

Capabilities

Features

  • API Gateway

    API Gateway capability

  • Authentication & Authorization

    Authentication & Authorization capability

  • Rate Limiting

    Rate Limiting capability

  • Kubernetes

    Integration with Kubernetes

  • Consul

    Integration with Consul

  • Eureka

    Integration with Eureka

  • PostgreSQL

    Integration with PostgreSQL

  • Linux support

    Available on Linux

  • Docker support

    Available on Docker

  • Kubernetes support

    Available on Kubernetes

Behind it

Who makes Kong

Company
Kong Inc.
Based in
San Francisco, California, USA
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Keep looking

Where to go from Kong

Best API Management software for

Compare Kong with

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Kong, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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