Kong Mesh vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

Kong and Broadcom are both solutions in the Service Mesh category. Kong is ranked #3, while Broadcom is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.7. Kong holds a 15.3% mindshare in SM, compared to Broadcom’s 4.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Broadcom users are willing to recommend the solution.

Kong Mesh

Read 1 Kong Mesh review

1,127 Views
1,127 Comparison Views

0% willing to recommend

VMware Tanzu Platform

Read 23 VMware Tanzu Platform reviews

6,615 Views
265 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Kong Mesh

VMware Tanzu Platform

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Kong Mesh and VMware Tanzu Platform 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

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

VMware Tanzu Platform

Ranking in Service Mesh

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (14th), PaaS Clouds (11th), Cloud Management (25th), Development Platforms (3rd), Container Management (5th), Agile and DevOps Services (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of Kong Mesh is 15.3%, down from 19.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 4.2%, up from 3.2% 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%
VMware Tanzu Platform	4.2%
Other	80.5%

Service Mesh

Featured Reviews

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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ErmiasGirma

Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Safaricom Ethiopia plc

Has supported container-based deployments and improved infrastructure visibility through monitoring tools

Aria Operations, formerly known as VMware vRealize Operations, has been renamed to vROps. We are currently using this for monitoring purposes. For orchestration, we are using VCD to automate Telco Cloud. VCD is an automation tool, and we are also using VMware Tanzu Platform for the Kubernetes environment, alongside TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. These are also other solutions for the Tanzu Kubernetes environment. For Telco Cloud, we are using it to automate our company's operations, which is for a telecom company. We are familiar with these products, especially vCenter, ESXi, VCD, vCF, and vROps. It is very easy to integrate applications when we deploy vCenter and ESXi since we can enable vSphere with Tanzu feature. We can build namespaces and provide application developers the platform to deploy their applications on pods within containerization. We can easily manage, pull results, and create containers efficiently, making it a simple way to handle applications. We provide namespace labels for application developers, and we can manage their resources along with other aspects easily. Regarding security, we use many tools such as CDX and LDAP, AD for integrating our Kubernetes cluster with the developer teams. We can manage roles and permissions simply. It is very straightforward to integrate with EDX and other third-party tools, Active Directory, to the Kubernetes cluster, allowing easy access and management.

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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

"It is a scalable product."

"The initial setup is easy."

"The observability platform and end-to-end service portal provided by Tanzu are the most valuable features."

"We never experienced any problems with scalability."

"A feature we find valuable is that other products can also be integrated with Mission Control. This means that we can see the status of specific clusters, as well as view the monitoring application logs all from one point."

"Tanzu is easy to upgrade and scale, whether we're talking about horizontal or vertical scaling. It is as smooth as possible without any downtime. The platform maintenance, upgrading, and operations part is very smooth."

"Tanzu Mission Control has quite a set of rich features when compared to OpenShift."

"The Day 2 operations support is the most vital feature"

"We feel very good about these features."

More VMware Tanzu Platform pros

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."

"I would like to see additional support for things outside of Cloud Foundry."

"Tanzu could provide more granular control over whatever networking is being done on the containers. I would also like to see a slightly more detailed view of application-level tracing. I'm referring to the connections between different microservices. If they added a service-matching feature, that would be helpful for the customers to build or be more effective."

"We want to see a new feature that helps build more security architecture like Zero Trust Security or shifting left in Kubernetes."

"The product should support integration with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)"

"Cost is always a concern. Smaller companies might find the price a bigger issue."

"The infrastructure is quite challenging."

"Another area of improvement is pricing."

"The solution could improve by having better integration with other solutions such as HPE."

More VMware Tanzu Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The solution is only for large or medium size enterprises because it is expensive."

"The least expensive licensing cost for VMware is around $350 per core."

"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."

"The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution"

"There are different licenses available. You have to upgrade your license if you want to scale the solution more."

"One of our Spanish customers told us that VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is a very expensive product for their data center."

"VMware Tanzu Mission Control is cheaper than Red Hat OpenShift."

"Since we were at a large data center, the price might not have been a concern for us."

More VMware Tanzu Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	10

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

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Which is better - OpenShift Container Platform or VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

Red Hat Openshift is ideal for organizations using microservices and cloud environments. I like that the platform is auto-scalable, which saves overhead time for developers. I think Openshift can b...

See all answers

What do you like most about VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

It definitely gives the end customer a good overview and perspective of running applications in terms of overall workload footprint. TMC provides a very detailed description of your cloud-native ap...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution. I would rate the pricing of VMware Tanzu Mission Control as four out of ten.

See all answers

Comparisons

Istio vs Kong Mesh

Compared 36% of the time

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

More Kong Mesh Competitors

Rancher Labs vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 13% of the time

Kubernetes vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 8% of the time

Docker vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 5% of the time

More VMware Tanzu Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Service Mesh

December 2025

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Buyer's Guide

VMware Tanzu Platform

January 2026

Download VMware Tanzu Platform product report

Also Known As

Kuma

Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu

Overview

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

VMware Tanzu Platform is designed for cloud-native development and management of Kubernetes, CI/CD processes, microservices, and containerized workloads. It supports deployments both on cloud and on-premises, providing centralized management via Mission Control.

VMware Tanzu Platform offers seamless integration with vSphere, ESX, and vSAN, supporting centralized cluster management and lifecycle management. The platform provides a GUI for monitoring CI/CD pipelines and network policies, enhancing multi-tenancy and Day 2 operations. Users can easily manage Kubernetes clusters, monitor applications, and integrate with tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Cloud Foundry, and Azure. It ensures compliance and security for service providers, financial institutions, and businesses.

What are the key features of VMware Tanzu Platform?

Integration with vSphere, ESX, and vSAN: Enhances compatibility and flexibility.
Seamless Cluster Management: Centralized control over Kubernetes clusters.
CI/CD Pipelines and Network Policies: Simplifies monitoring and management.
Multi-tenancy Support: Facilitates resource sharing among multiple users.
Comprehensive Lifecycle Management: Streamlines deployment and scalability.
Observability Platform: Provides enhanced visibility and control.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in VMware Tanzu Platform reviews?

Centralized Management: Simplifies operations and reduces manual effort.
Enhanced Compliance and Security: Meets regulatory requirements.
Flexibility in Deployment: Supports both cloud and on-premises options.
Seamless Integration: Works with multiple vendors and tools.
Developer-Friendly Environment: Improves productivity and innovation.

Industries such as financial institutions, service providers, and businesses requiring rigorous compliance and security deploy VMware Tanzu Platform. These entities benefit from centralized management, streamlined DevOps processes, and integrated tools, enhancing their capabilities in cloud-native developments and containerized workloads.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

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

Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq

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

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