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Kong Gateway Enterprise vs SwaggerHub comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

Kong Gateway Enterprise
Ranking in API Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SwaggerHub
Ranking in API Management
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Kong Gateway Enterprise is 7.1%, up from 5.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SwaggerHub is 1.4%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

Featured Reviews

Sudhanshu Dev - PeerSpot reviewer
Custom plugin capability with enhanced high traffic handling and lightweight performance
We use Kong for our API gateway, handling all public traffic. It is an open-source tool, and even though we are a startup, it provides us with stability without incurring high costs initially Kong has helped us by performing smoothly even when we receive millions of requests, which prevents any…
SwaminathanSubramanian - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitating enterprise-wide API governance and management
Some areas of SwaggerHub that could be improved include the interface between the code editor and the visual editor, the integration with private APIs, which currently requires an upgraded account. The scalability also needs enhancement, as it becomes flaky under increased load. Additionally, the versioning management could be improved to be on par with source code management tools.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It offers a wide range of plugins that we leverage, including OIDC, Rate Limiting, Lambda functions, and more."
"The solution provides good performance."
"Based on my experience, I would definitely recommend Kong Gateway Enterprise to other people."
"Kong's most valuable features are its lightweight performance when handling millions of requests and the ability to write custom plugins to enhance security, such as end-to-end encryption, even in the open-source version."
"We use the solution for load-balancing, caching, and rate-limiting APIs."
"The tool's feature that I find most beneficial is rate limiting. In our usage, especially in the financial sector, we prioritize limiting API usage. This is crucial because we provide APIs to other companies and must ensure they adhere to their allocated usage limits. Without rate limiting, there's a risk of excessive usage, which could result in significant costs."
"This is a solid intrusion prevention system that combines a firewall and antivirus in a single solution."
"The most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise is its capability to integrate with various security tools."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy and not at all difficult."
"I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten."
"One of the best features of SwaggerHub is how it allows me to create APIs and control the evolution of APIs within an organization."
"The scalability is endless."
"It is quite a useful tool. It is quite good with the validation of the spec. It works quite well in terms of errors and conformity to the OpenAPI standard. It is better than Visual Studio Code in terms of editing."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable features are the collaboration between multiple teams and the control and distribution of specifications."
"One of the best features of SwaggerHub is how it allows me to create APIs and control the evolution of APIs within an organization."
 

Cons

"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The OS upgrades are not as frequent as they should be and they are bulky."
"The technical support team's response time needs to be improved."
"From an improvement perspective, the product should offer more readily available connectors and also allow for more seamless AI integrations."
"Kong Enterprise needs to improve its pricing, which starts at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pricing should be based on API usage rather than monthly. It should improve its documentation as well."
"Kong Enterprise can improve the customization to be able to do the integration properly."
"We would like to see an automatic data API when we have a table in the database."
"Understanding the configurations and knowing what needs to be done can be a bit difficult initially."
"The scalability aspect of SwaggerHub can be improved. It becomes a bit unreliable when the load is increased and isn't up to par with expectations for scalability."
"It has limited functionality...Unfortunately, some of its features are not what we need."
"SwaggerHub could be improved with better integration for tools."
"Some areas of SwaggerHub that could be improved include the interface between the code editor and the visual editor, the integration with private APIs, which currently requires an upgraded account."
"It could be more intuitive compared to one of its competitors."
"The review process should be improved. There seem to be some gaps, at least for us, for the editing part because we would like to have a full request review mechanism. They support some comments, but it is really hard to manage those comments. We would like to use the full request. Therefore, we are now looking to integrate with repositories. It has integration with Bitbucket and GitHub, but we have some internal constraints, and we need to move some of the repositories to GitHub. Our source code is on-premise in Bitbucket, and it was a bit of a problem for us to integrate. Now we are transitioning our repositories to GitHub, and hopefully, we can enable the integration. This will probably solve the problem with the review and approval. Its customization should also be improved. There are limitations around the support for the developer portal. There should be more customization options for the website that you can use as a developer portal. Currently, it has only Swagger UI with minimal customization. You cannot actually add additional pages and documentation for explaining concepts and general things. That's why we have started to look around to see what other tools are doing. They should also allow tagging on the API. We would like to add some tagging on the API to reflect certain things. Currently, any metadata that you would like to have has to be a part of the spec. You cannot do anything else. It should also have support for Open API 3.1, which was released at the beginning of the year. It would be great to be able to switch to that."
"We have to use additional tools to test APIs."
"More integration and usability with the cloud microservices would be nice"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't have any information on licensing costs currently."
"Basically, my company uses the tool's open-source version."
"It's expensive in Thailand (10 million baht, in Thai currency)."
"Kong Enterprise's pricing is at par compared to the other technologies."
"The licensing fees are paid yearly."
"The product is reasonably priced because it goes by the SaaS model."
"The licensing is expensive."
"Kong Enterprise is cheaper than Apigee. I rate its pricing as four out of ten."
"The tool is cheap."
"It has a yearly subscription, but I am not sure."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Kong Enterprise compare with Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager?
The Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager was designed with its users in mind. Though it is a reasonably complex piece of software, it is easy to install and upgrade. While there are different things that ...
What do you like most about Kong Enterprise?
The tool's feature that I find most beneficial is rate limiting. In our usage, especially in the financial sector, we prioritize limiting API usage. This is crucial because we provide APIs to other...
What needs improvement with Kong Enterprise?
More plugins for additional integrations would be helpful and openness for traditional development languages, such as .NET, because many enterprises are looking for .NET solutions or incorporating ...
What do you like most about SwaggerHub?
The tool's most valuable feature is licensing.
What needs improvement with SwaggerHub?
Some areas of SwaggerHub that could be improved include the interface between the code editor and the visual editor, the integration with private APIs, which currently requires an upgraded account....
What is your primary use case for SwaggerHub?
I started using SwaggerHub in its previous version, SmartMiner, with a tool called SoapUI. I used it to create mock web services to test web services and create test scripts and mock APIs. This usa...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cargill, Zillow, Ferrari, WeWork, Healthcare.gov, Yahoo! Japan, Giphy, SkyScanner
Sonic, Zuora, Woolworths, CrowdFlower
Find out what your peers are saying about Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. SwaggerHub and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.