Kong Gateway Enterprise vs Tyk comparison

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85% willing to recommend

Kong Gateway Enterprise

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

Tyk and Kong Gateway Enterprise are competing products in the API management space. Tyk stands out due to its pricing and ease of deployment, while Kong Gateway Enterprise is favored for its comprehensive features and greater value for larger enterprises.

Features: Tyk is known for its open-source capabilities, flexible deployment options, and customizable API management features such as versioning and catalogs. Kong Gateway Enterprise is praised for its advanced security options, seamless integrations, and robust feature sets, offering features like load balancing, rate limiting, and extensive plugin support.

Room for Improvement: Tyk can improve by enhancing its cloud version, maturing its features for broader enterprise use, and expanding its workflow capabilities. Kong Gateway Enterprise could work on simplifying its deployment process, offering more user-friendly documentation, and reducing the complexity of its integrations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tyk's deployment is appreciated for its simplicity and quick setup, along with responsive customer support. Kong Gateway Enterprise, although providing extensive resources and community engagement, is considered more challenging to deploy due to its complexity.

Pricing and ROI: Tyk offers a cost-effective pricing structure with low setup costs, ideal for companies with budget constraints, ensuring strong ROI. Kong Gateway Enterprise has higher initial costs, yet its features justify this investment for enterprises looking for enhanced capabilities and long-term value.

To learn more, read our detailed Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. Tyk Report (Updated: February 2026).

Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. Tyk

February 2026

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Helped 881,733 peers since 2012

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

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Tyk

Ranking in API Management

18th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Kong Gateway Enterprise is 5.8%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tyk is 2.0%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

API Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Kong Gateway Enterprise	5.8%
Tyk	2.0%
Other	92.2%

API Management

Featured Reviews

Evgeny Shkard

Enterprise Architect at El Al

Seamless integration and efficient security boost API management capabilities

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 with .NET solutions. I mostly missed local resellers or partners that we could use within our enterprise, because it was difficult for some tech personnel to work with remote tech support.

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reviewer2113719

Technical Support Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Internal API gateway has improved security frameworks and now provides unified API visibility

The best features Tyk offers are highly customizable options, effective traffic management, and security, making it easy to configure and use. The customizability of Tyk is evident in our validation of the token—specifically with our internal identity and access management. There were challenges on the network side and in managing token validity and the public key, but Tyk allowed us to configure these aspects effectively. I believe those are the standard out-of-the-box capabilities provided by Tyk that we are using, particularly regarding traffic management and security. Tyk has positively impacted my organization by providing standard API management capabilities, such as a single view for all APIs, discoverability, and role-based access control for overseeing who can see which APIs.

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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

"Based on my experience, I would definitely recommend Kong Gateway Enterprise to other people."

"Kong Gateway helped to improve performance. It's good enough for our users."

"In our buying companies' perspective, it was easier to use compared to other platforms. The markets were pretty familiar with the solutions."

"Good at intercepting traffic and modeling APIs around that."

"Kong Enterprise has excellent plugin support."

"Kong Gateway Enterprise is quite comprehensive."

"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it seamlessly supports a vast number of tools."

"The solution's technical support is good and fast in terms of responsiveness and problem-solving skills."

More Kong Gateway Enterprise pros

"You can set up workflows and write limited pieces of logic."

"The feature I find most valuable is that this solution allows us to manage our security."

"The scalability is very good. That was a key factor in the selection, like how it could be pushed to high volume and scalability, which seemed to be very good."

"The most valuable feature is the load balancing with the circuit-breaker function."

"It is a good product for API management."

"The portal for developers that this solution provides has great functionality."

"Customer support is excellent, and their support personnel, along with professional services, know the product really well, resulting in a good experience dealing with them."

Cons

"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."

"The developer portal needs to be improved."

"The OS upgrades are not as frequent as they should be and they are bulky."

"There should be an easier way to integrate with other solutions, even though it's the same API solution layer. Comparability will be a good improvement."

"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."

"The main challenge, in my opinion, is the price. It's difficult to convince our management to approve the budget to purchase it from our vendor. There are no technical problems."

"The technical support team's response time needs to be improved."

"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 with .NET solutions."

More Kong Gateway Enterprise cons

"In terms of our usage, the main area of concern is that they tend to build enhancements slightly ahead of the considerations for what those enhancements and extensions are. So it could be slightly better communication with the customer base that would be my main issue with them."

"We would like a better tool for generating documentation for the APIs to be developed."

"Compared to Apigee or Kong, I find they excel beyond Tyk, which is the reason for my score."

"Sometimes when new features are released, they are not immediately stable."

"I would like to see some additional features like having some extensions for .NET core because we use it for our back-end language."

"It is a young product and does not have the kind of brand recognition that would make it a more popular solution with our clients."

"We ran it for a while, but then we decided to move away from Tyk, because Tyk's cloud version, the SaaS version, has a significant limitation of limited flexibility, so you can't program very much."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is really reasonable compared to that of alternative solutions."

"The licensing fees are paid yearly."

"There is a need to pay towards the licensing charges...In some areas, the functionalities are available free of charge."

"The product is reasonably priced because it goes by the SaaS model."

"I don't have any information on licensing costs currently."

"Basically, my company uses the tool's open-source version."

"Kong Enterprise is cheaper than Apigee. I rate its pricing as four out of ten."

"It's expensive in Thailand (10 million baht, in Thai currency)."

More Kong Gateway Enterprise pricing and cost advice

"The cost curve is far smoother, both in terms of volume and the number of calls it's running on, compared to most competitors. So it's a tad more expensive at the very low end, but the curve is nothing like Apigee or some of the others."

"There are different versions and plans available depending on the requirements, so there is flexibility in terms of the pricing."

"It had a free version, which suited many of our needs, but not all, but we were happy to go ahead with the licensed version as well, which is the paid version."

"We are using the open-source version of this product, so there are no licensing costs for its use."

"The price is low compared to other products of a similar type."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Large Enterprise	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	2

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?

What needs improvement with Tyk?

Tyk can improve in terms of AI capabilities, and the developer portal could benefit from enhancements such as user onboarding workflows. The developer community could be better, especially compared...

What is your primary use case for Tyk?

My main use case for Tyk is for internal API gateway. For a banking customer, I have internal APIs and external APIs, where internal APIs are mostly on Kubernetes. For internal API gateway, we have...

What advice do you have for others considering Tyk?

While we could not quantify any commercial improvement, developer experience has definitely improved. I would rate Tyk around an eight on a scale of one to ten because I have worked with other API ...

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Product Reports

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Kong Gateway Enterprise

January 2026

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January 2026

Overview

Kong delivers a next generation API platform built for modern architectures. With a lightnight-fast, lightweight, and flexible core, Kong delivers sub-millisecond latency across all your services. Kong's is deployment-, vendor-, and pattern-agnostic, allowing you to run your services how you want, where you want, and with who you want - from baremetal to cloud, monolith to microservices, service mesh, and beyond.

Kong

Tyk is an open source API Gateway that is fast and scalable, an API management platform featuring an API gateway, analytics, developer portal and dashboard. Available in three flavours to best suit your architecture and governance. We offer full cloud or on-premises options, and the best of both worlds with our unique hybrid model. www.tyk.io

Sample Customers

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

Trip Advisor, Juniper Networks, AT&T