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Kong Gateway Enterprise pros and cons

Vendor: Kong

4.0 out of 5

26 reviews
92% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Kong Gateway Enterprise combines an intrusion prevention system with firewall and antivirus features, offering plugin support like OIDC, Rate Limiting, and Lambda for flexibility. Its strengths include role-based access control, speed, and resiliency under heavy usage. Challenges include bulky OS upgrades, complex integration, high pricing, and technical support delays. Improvements are needed in live tracing, policy features, and documentation, with pricing strategies requiring attention.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Kong Gateway Enterprise excels at combining an intrusion prevention system with firewall and antivirus capabilities.

It features excellent plugin support, notably OIDC, Rate Limiting, and Lambda functions, enhancing its flexibility and utility.

The platform offers significant benefits in authentication and authorization, especially with role-based access control (RBAC).

Its capability to seamlessly integrate with various security tools boosts its overall value.

Kong Gateway Enterprise demonstrates remarkable speed, stability, and resiliency, especially under heavy usage.

CONS

OS upgrades are infrequent and bulky, and the software version upgrade process should be improved.

Integration with existing tools is challenging, requiring more effort than implementing MuleSoft or Azure APIM.

Pricing is a significant concern, with costs starting at hundreds of thousands of dollars, necessitating improvements in pricing strategies.

Kong Enterprise should include policy features available in other management systems and improve live tracing capabilities.

Technical support team response time needs improvement, and Kong Enterprise would benefit from enhanced documentation.

Kong Gateway Enterprise Pros review quotes

ES

Enterprise Architect at El Al

May 12, 2025

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

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KS

Business Consultant at Ernst & Young

Feb 1, 2026

Kong Gateway Enterprise is quite comprehensive.

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RY

Engineer at Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand

Jun 5, 2024

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

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Kong Gateway Enterprise

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Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 26, 2024

It offers a wide range of plugins that we leverage, including OIDC, Rate Limiting, Lambda functions, and more.

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Senior Principal DevOps Engineer at barq

Oct 15, 2024

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.

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GenAI Strategist at Wipro Limited

May 9, 2024

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

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AV

Ashok Vedantham

Dev lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 2, 2024

The features I like include ease of operation and implementation in a cloud environment, the dashboarding features for API statistics, and the user-friendly developer portal.

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Pega Solution Architect at Rabobank

Sep 4, 2023

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

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Karthick Sampangi

Practice Head - Enterprise Integration & Process Automation at Happiest Minds Technologies

Aug 25, 2023

Protocol transformation is the most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise.

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Yogesh Khandelwal

Api Solution Architecture Lead at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Feb 28, 2024

The most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise is its capability to integrate with various security tools.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 26)

Kong Gateway Enterprise Cons review quotes

ES

Enterprise Architect at El Al

May 12, 2025

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.

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KS

Business Consultant at Ernst & Young

Feb 1, 2026

For us, implementing Kong Gateway Enterprise with existing infrastructures and the cloud in tandem requires more effort than implementing MuleSoft or Azure APIM or AWS.

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RY

Engineer at Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand

Jun 5, 2024

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.

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Kong Gateway Enterprise

Free Report: Kong Gateway Enterprise Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Kong Gateway Enterprise. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2026.

893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 26, 2024

The software version upgrade process should be improved.

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Senior Principal DevOps Engineer at barq

Oct 15, 2024

The open-source version of Kong does not support a dashboard, which would be very helpful.

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GenAI Strategist at Wipro Limited

May 9, 2024

From an improvement perspective, the product should offer more readily available connectors and also allow for more seamless AI integrations.

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AV

Ashok Vedantham

Dev lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 2, 2024

The ease of billing is lost when Kong is not available directly on the Azure marketplace. This is one area where they can improve.

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Pega Solution Architect at Rabobank

Sep 4, 2023

Kong Enterprise fails to provide live tracing of the APIs, which is possible nowadays.

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Karthick Sampangi

Practice Head - Enterprise Integration & Process Automation at Happiest Minds Technologies

Aug 25, 2023

The solution should include policy features that are available in other solutions like MuleSoft API manager but missing in Kong Enterprise.

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Yogesh Khandelwal

Api Solution Architecture Lead at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Feb 28, 2024

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

Read full review

Show 10 more reviews (out of 26)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Popular Comparisons

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Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

Microsoft Azure API Management vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

Amazon API Gateway vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

Apigee vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

webMethods.io vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

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IBM API Connect vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

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