HashiCorp Consul vs Kong Mesh comparison

HashiCorp and Kong are both solutions in the Service Mesh category. HashiCorp is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.5, while Kong is ranked #3. HashiCorp holds a 7.1% mindshare in SM, compared to Kong’s 15.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of HashiCorp users are willing to recommend the solution.

HashiCorp Consul

Read 4 HashiCorp Consul reviews

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793 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Kong Mesh

Read 1 Kong Mesh review

1,127 Views
1,127 Comparison Views

0% willing to recommend

HashiCorp Consul

Kong Mesh

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HashiCorp Consul and Kong Mesh based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, HAProxy, Kong and others in Service Mesh.

To learn more, read our detailed Service Mesh Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Service Mesh

December 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

HashiCorp Consul

Ranking in Service Mesh

6th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Kong Mesh

Ranking in Service Mesh

3rd

Average Rating

6.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of HashiCorp Consul is 7.1%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kong Mesh is 15.3%, down from 19.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Service Mesh Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Kong Mesh	15.3%
HashiCorp Consul	7.1%
Other	77.6%

Service Mesh

Featured Reviews

reviewer2784477

Cloud Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Service discovery has improved and developers access services without managing IP addresses

One of the best features HashiCorp Consul offers is access for our developers. HashiCorp Consul is making it easier for developers, but we have limited use cases at the moment. Since we are still in the proof of concept phase with HashiCorp Consul, I am not able to say exactly how it has impacted my organization positively, but it should help our applications talk to each other better. We are looking for our applications to communicate more easily without having to define IP addresses and other configuration details.

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Arjun Pandey

Engineering Lead- Cloud and Platform Architecture at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Provides a unique advantage by offering a global view for all workloads and clusters within the mesh but lack of a robust community for open-source support

There are a number of areas where Kong Kuma can improve. One is in terms of product delivery, such as Helm charts. There are a lot of gaps in the Helm charts currently. Another is in terms of the default monitoring and logging setup. It is not as production-ready as it could be. By default, Kuma comes with Loki, Yagger, and Prometheus to monitor the control plane and data plane, but the unified dashboarding and logging solution should be closer to production-grade. It is good for trying out the product, but I would not recommend taking it to production without setting up your own monitoring and logging solution. Additionally, Kuma recently released Fivecarless Mesh, which was built on top of Envoy. The challenge with this is that it adds overhead. If you want to run 100 containers in production, you will actually need to run 200 containers because you need to run one sidecar container per pod. Overall, I think Kong Kuma is a moderate product, but I would not personally recommend it for production use.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"HashiCorp Consul is scaling great; I think we are seeing exactly what we need for communication, so it is scaling wonderfully."

"The documentation is good."

"The product's most valuable features are support for Service Mesh TLS and canary deployment."

"HashiCorp Consul's most valuable feature is the automation of many processes, which limits the errors from user interaction."

"It is a scalable product."

Cons

"They could improve issues related to triggering generic deployments for the platform."

"Health check outputs are delayed sometimes."

"The command line of HashiCorp Consul could be more intuitive to make it easier to use."

"I think the documentation sometimes can be better; it needs to make it easier for our developers to understand how to interact with it."

"The initial setup is complicated. Although Kuma has its own CLI, CTL, and they say to use their CLI, if I have to build a generic solution, my personal preference would be to use Helm or another similar solution other than Kuma. If you have your own library CLI, it becomes hard for others to adopt it. For example, if I have to write some automation, infrastructure automation, I can't just use Kuma. I have to change my code to use Kuma's CTL, which is unfair because it doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit with my current automation structure. I have to do something extra, something additional, which I really don't like."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In case of budget constraints, we opt for the product's business support licenses and use an open-source version"

"I have tried for my personal research and all those things. I have tried only the open-source version. So, for me, it was always free."

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881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

University

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HashiCorp Consul?

The product's most valuable features are support for Service Mesh TLS and canary deployment.

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What needs improvement with HashiCorp Consul?

I think the documentation sometimes can be better; it needs to make it easier for our developers to understand how to interact with it. At this time, I do not think there are any other improvements...

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What advice do you have for others considering HashiCorp Consul?

I would appreciate clarification on what advice I should give to others looking into using HashiCorp Consul. I gave this review a rating of 8.

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Comparisons

VMware Tanzu Platform vs HashiCorp Consul

Compared 27% of the time

Istio vs HashiCorp Consul

Compared 19% of the time

Envoy vs HashiCorp Consul

Compared 18% of the time

NGINX Service-Mesh vs HashiCorp Consul

Compared 9% of the time

HAProxy vs HashiCorp Consul

Compared 8% of the time

More HashiCorp Consul Competitors

Istio vs Kong Mesh

Compared 37% of the time

Envoy vs Kong Mesh

Compared 32% of the time

HAProxy vs Kong Mesh

Compared 8% of the time

AWS App Mesh vs Kong Mesh

Compared 5% of the time

NGINX Service-Mesh vs Kong Mesh

Compared 5% of the time

More Kong Mesh Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Service Mesh

December 2025

Download HashiCorp Consul product report

Buyer's Guide

Service Mesh

December 2025

Download Kong Mesh product report

Also Known As

No data available

Kuma

Overview

Multiple clouds and private datacenters with dynamic IPs, ephemeral containers, dominated by east-west traffic, no clear network perimeters.

CONSUL APPROACH
-Centralized registry to locate any service
-Services discovered and connected with centralized policies
-Network automated in service of applications
-Zero trust network enforced by identity-based security policies

HashiCorp

Kong Mesh is the ultimate universal service mesh designed for enterprise organizations, offering simplicity and scalability with Kuma and Envoy technologies. This cloud-native solution is versatile, deployable on Kubernetes, VMware, and various environments. Kong Mesh excels in ease of installation, configuration, and management, making it a top choice for organizations seeking streamlined service mesh implementation. With robust features like fine-grained traffic control, observability tools for in-depth monitoring, and comprehensive security mechanisms such as authentication and encryption, Kong Mesh ensures that microservices are both secure and high-performing. Its multi-zone and multi-mesh support allow for distributed deployments, making it a flexible and powerful choice for those looking to enhance their service infrastructure.

Kong

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

First AbuDhabi Bank, CISCO, Papa johns pizza, Samsung, Expedia

Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, HAProxy, Kong and others in Service Mesh. Updated: December 2025.

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