Istio vs Kong Mesh comparison

Isito and Kong are both solutions in the Service Mesh category. Isito is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.4, while Kong is ranked #3. Isito holds a 17.0% mindshare in SM, compared to Kong’s 15.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Isito users are willing to recommend the solution.

Istio

Read 12 Istio reviews

1,753 Views
1,753 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Kong Mesh

Read 1 Kong Mesh review

1,127 Views
1,127 Comparison Views

0% willing to recommend

Istio

Kong Mesh

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Istio 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

Istio

Ranking in Service Mesh

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

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 Istio is 17.0%, down from 23.3% 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 (%)
Istio	17.0%
Kong Mesh	15.3%
Other	67.7%

Service Mesh

Featured Reviews

Redentor Del Rosario

Sr. Solution Architect at Civatech Solutions

Leverage cloud security monitoring across multiple providers with robust integration

The best features Istio offers in my experience stand out because my job requires me to look for and use this type of tool, and this fits what I'm looking for, not just because it's free, not just because of the monitoring side, but simply because a lot of what pertains to my project is useful for Istio. One of the good things about the features is that due to the nature of the tool, it is really good for enterprise projects, and it can be helpful for every company. Istio has positively impacted my organization by helping our architecture design and development, and we use this as a mesh, applying it for every single application and using those components, which is helping our company and our clients to do many different aspects for all the use of Istio.

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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

"The tool's mutual TLS stands out. It provides secure communication between services within the cluster. Additionally, Istio offers built-in telemetry and tracing with tools like Jaeger, which aids monitoring and troubleshooting."

"The security feature with mutual TLS authentication, which is identity-based, and the traffic management using cloud load balancers are very valuable."

"Istio can save you time in terms of network troubleshooting."

"We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic."

"The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application."

"Istio has positively impacted my organization by helping our architecture design and development, and we use this as a mesh, applying it for every single application and using those components, which is helping our company and our clients to do many different aspects for all the use of Istio."

"The load balancing, service application, and monitoring of the life of the service are valuable features. We use it for authentication of call services, load balancing the calls among the service providers on service instances, and monitoring the health of the services."

"Istio's best feature is that it's easy to use."

More Istio pros

"It is a scalable product."

Cons

"Istio has issues with performance."

"Based on my experience, the solution could be improved. They could simplify the learning process so that users can understand how its features work together, especially with components like Kibana. Learning about the different components is necessary. For instance, you need to understand the traffic flow, potential bottlenecks, and the architecture within Istio."

"For our use case that we applied it to, there were graph queues and the calls that were coming in. There were the things that we couldn't apply at the time, but it kind of worked."

"Handling large-scale environments with proxies can strain resources, but horizontal scaling can improve fault tolerance."

"Istio needs to be more mature and user-friendly."

"If someone doesn't understand Kubernetes, they'll have issues working with Istio."

"It would be beneficial if Istio offered paid support options, similar to AWS's enterprise support, to quickly resolve issues that might affect production."

"It would be good if the solution had more community forums."

More Istio cons

"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

"You can deploy Istio free of cost and don't need to pay for it."

"We use the tool's open-source version, so there are no hidden fees or additional costs associated with it."

"It is on the less expensive side. It provides a significant saving for us in terms of cost and other things. It is open-source. We just download it from the open-source framework and use it."

"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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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	3

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Istio?

Istio provides a significant saving for us in terms of costs since it is open source. However, Istio can still come at a price. It has a steep learning curve and might require more manpower hours ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Istio?

We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Istio?

The positive changes include improvements in efficiency, and while I think the free aspect is good, it's crucial to be aware that sometimes cost will give you a good way for your needs, meaning it ...

See all answers

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Comparisons

HAProxy vs Istio

Compared 29% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Istio

Compared 8% of the time

HashiCorp Consul vs Istio

Compared 7% of the time

Traefik Enterprise vs Istio

Compared 7% of the time

Envoy vs Istio

Compared 6% of the time

More Istio Competitors

Envoy vs Kong Mesh

Compared 33% of the time

HashiCorp Consul vs Kong Mesh

Compared 9% of the time

HAProxy vs Kong Mesh

Compared 8% of the time

NGINX Service-Mesh vs Kong Mesh

Compared 5% of the time

AWS App Mesh vs Kong Mesh

Compared 5% of the time

More Kong Mesh Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Istio

January 2026

Download Istio product report

Buyer's Guide

Service Mesh

December 2025

Download Kong Mesh product report

Also Known As

No data available

Kuma

Overview

Connect
Intelligently control the flow of traffic and API calls between services, conduct a range of tests, and upgrade gradually with red/black deployments.

Secure
Automatically secure your services through managed authentication, authorization, and encryption of communication between services.

Control
Apply policies and ensure that they’re enforced, and that resources are fairly distributed among consumers.

Observe
See what's happening with rich automatic tracing, monitoring, and logging of all your services.

Isito

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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