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Kong Gateway Enterprise vs Traefik Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Traefik Enterprise
Ranking in API Management
18th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Service Mesh (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Kong Gateway Enterprise is 6.6%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Traefik Enterprise is 1.2%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

Featured Reviews

AmitKanodia - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides role-based access control and can be easily customized with Lua script
Kong is meant for north-south communications, so it will be interesting to see what solutions they can come up with in the realms of east-west communications, service-to-service communications, and Zero Trust architecture. I believe that if they can provide for these areas, then they will be able to solve the overall integration and security concerns for microservices architecture in general.
Anurag Bandyopadhyay - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a good dashboard that provides a great overview to users
I would say that maybe along the same path that Traefik Enterprise is currently on, you have most of the things straight up in the UI that you can check even with minimal training. You can just use, understand, and debug things from the UI. There is still work to be done in the tool, which can ensure that anyone with just minimal know-how of the product doesn't have to really go into the terminal and see the status of routes, concierge routes, or whether certain things are up or not. One should be able to just check things straight up from the UI and get to know what kind of issues are there in the solution, and even though such a feature is already there in the tool, there is more work to be done in it. I would not particularly recommend any improvements when it comes to the security of traffic. I think the tool is pretty pluggable in terms of whatever security we want to put in our routes, even though it is just as a middleware or just as a supporting product for whatever we have in our services.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of Kong Enterprise are the out-of-the-box open source easy functionality."
"Kong Gateway helped to improve performance. It's good enough for our users."
"The solution provides good performance."
"Kong Enterprise has excellent plugin support."
"It offers a wide range of plugins that we leverage, including OIDC, Rate Limiting, Lambda functions, and more."
"The route limiting feature is very valuable."
"Kong enterprise has significantly enhanced our ability to manage and secure our Microservices. Its most valuable feature is monitoring."
"We use the solution for load-balancing, caching, and rate-limiting APIs."
"The tool handles scalability pretty easily. Adding more instances of services and all are pretty intuitive to do using Traefik Enterprise."
 

Cons

"Because it is open-source, it should be less expensive than others."
"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."
"The ease of billing is lost when Kong is not available directly on the Azure marketplace. This is one area where they can improve."
"Kong is meant for north-south communications, so it will be interesting to see what solutions they can come up with in the realms of east-west communications, service-to-service communications, and Zero Trust architecture. I believe that if they can provide for these areas, then they will be able to solve the overall integration and security concerns for microservices architecture in general."
"We would like to see an automatic data API when we have a table in the database."
"Kong Enterprise has decided not to support the web portal feature anymore, but I think that feature should stay in the on-premises solution."
"Understanding the configurations and knowing what needs to be done can be a bit difficult initially."
"One should be able to just check things straight up from the UI and get to know what kind of issues are there in the solution, and even though such a feature is already there in the tool, there is more work to be done in it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is expensive."
"The price is really reasonable compared to that of alternative solutions."
"The licensing fees are paid yearly."
"I don't have any information on licensing costs currently."
"Kong Enterprise's pricing is at par compared to the other technologies."
"Kong Enterprise's pricing is reasonable for our company size."
"There is a need to pay towards the licensing charges...In some areas, the functionalities are available free of charge."
"It's expensive in Thailand (10 million baht, in Thai currency)."
"I would say that Traefik Enterprise is cheaper than the other alternatives in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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?
The open-source version of Kong does not support a dashboard, which would be very helpful. We use an open-source tool called Konga for basic dashboard needs, but it lacks support. It would be bette...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Traefik Enterprise?
One of the reasons why my company moved from Envoy, as well as the other in-house options, to Traefik Enterprise was because doing many things in-house was overkill. Traefik Enterprise was a relati...
What needs improvement with Traefik Enterprise?
I would say that maybe along the same path that Traefik Enterprise is currently on, you have most of the things straight up in the UI that you can check even with minimal training. You can just use...
What is your primary use case for Traefik Enterprise?
At Razorpay, the tool is used as a reverse proxy, ingress controller, and CRD management. A year and a half ago, my company started to move from Traefik Enterprise v1.0 to Traefik Enterprise v2.0. ...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cargill, Zillow, Ferrari, WeWork, Healthcare.gov, Yahoo! Japan, Giphy, SkyScanner
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