Kong Gateway Enterprise Reviews

A central API gateway solution.

The concept of using central API gateway is the change, not the product. Kong was selected based on our CBA (choose between alternative) process.

Almost everything needed is there.

We would like to see an automatic data API - when we have a database table or a store procedure - we want to be able to select it and the data API will be created automatically for GET and CRUD operations in OData format. This feature already exists in other solution and it is a game changer - reducing efforts, risks, and reliability.

I've used it for almost three or four years. I first implemented it eight or nine years ago.

The setup of Kong itself was very easy.

The price is reasonable compared to that of alternative solutions.

Everyone should conduct a CBA based on his requirements in order to choose the right solution for his organization.

Yes.

I would rate Kong Enterprise at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We have several microservices that are secure using Kong Enterprise. Our microservices are managed through Kong Enterprise API management.

We have integrated with IDP to secure it. We use multiple plugins that are bundled with Kong Enterprise.

The features of Kong are plugin-based network services. It enables us to include our security policy when creating customers.

Kong Enterprise has excellent plugin support. This is a feature that I was looking for.

The price could be lower.

I have been using Kong Enterprise for more than one year.

Kong Enterprise's stability has never been an issue for us.

Kong Enterprise scales easily.

We have more than 300 people who use this solution.

We have teams of 30 to 40 people running multiple products that are used with Kong Enterprise.

We had a problem with the 1.2 EMT enablement, and they provided a solution. They've been very helpful. The technical team is always available to help us with our problems.

In my previous company, I used an API.

The installation went well. It was good. This installation was completed by another team.

When I have installed this solution, I found it to be easy. For me, the installation takes about 15 to 20 minutes on average.

Because it is open-source, it should be less expensive than others.

The licensing fees are paid yearly.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I would rate Kong Enterprise an eight out of ten.

Our e-commerce customers use Kong Enterprise.

Customers cannot use the public cloud because of regulations. Kong Enterprise can be used in any environment, like the Red Hat and Openshift environments. Kong Enterprise comes with some ready plug-ins, which is very good for the customers. Kong Enterprise supports hierarchy and redundancy.

Kong Enterprise has decided not to support the web portal feature anymore, but I think that feature should stay in the on-premises solution.

I have been using Kong Enterprise for four to five years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

The solution's technical support is good and responsive.

Positive

The initial setup of the solution is very straightforward.

You can install Kong Enterprise in five minutes or half an hour. If the customer is ready for deployment with the Kubernetes or VMware environment, Kong Enterprise's installation is very easy.

The solution's scalability is very nice. Kong Enterprise is a key product in the market with good stability and high availability. Our customers can easily integrate their existing CICD pipelines with Kong Enterprise.

We chose Kong Enterprise because it is a software-based company, and latency and redundancy are very important for our client. Most of the other vendors use the old-school appliance-based solution. Kong Enterprise is very keen to apply the existing CI/CD pipeline. I would recommend Kong Enterprise to other users because of its scalability, security, and redundancy.

Overall, I rate Kong Enterprise ten out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution was a secure API Gateway hosted on public cloud infrastructure. The  manageability, deployment architecture options and scalability were key considerations. Kong is great at organising our API ecosystem and providing the required manageability, scalability observability and  security.

I'm the vice president of technology and architecture and we are customers of Kong Enterprise. 

Kong is our API and Micro-services backbone. 

Simplicity, its plugin architecture and scalability.
The new Developer Portal,  intercepting traffic and modeling APIs around that is great.

vibrant community support and an open source DNA

Kong has a huge community and lot of open source implementations and satisfied users. 

The motivation to move to Enterprise edition is still license and cost based. Kong can look at different options like managed and Hosted PaaS, different consumption tiers to make the transition practical and easier. 

I've been using Kong for the past 3+ years. Have done two opensource API Gateway Implementations. Evaluated and considered Enterprise edition more than once. No qualms or complaints. There open source version works for most of the cases. Solid product.

The stability is fine. We had one outage because of our own infrastructure operations. Other than that, from a stability  perspective it runs smoothly because of the very good underlyingKong  platform architecture. 

Misconfigured plug-ins mess up your environment. Always have the configuration preserved or implement Kong using Terraform scripts or using other config as code options.

Kong is a super scalable product as far as my current experience goes. The scalability is awesome. We could scale up easily and could organise our as multiple clusters and secure them.

I believe the technical support is good although I haven't had to use it much.

Mulesoft, Tibco Mashery, Oracle SOA, webMethods,WsO2 and SAP products  and all of them 

The initial setup was relatively straightforward. There were some small issues with documentation.  Deployment took a couple of weeks. One of the neat things about Kong is the huge community they have and there's a lot of help that comes from there. It gives you the plugins and solutions  for you to be self-sufficient. 

Implemented on our own

Zero Investment on open source version. It works like enterprise grade. The enterprise version has lot of great features. Interms of ROI it’s intangible, we could deliver APIs for business needs Ina very agile manner. 

I'm not sure of the licensing costs because they like to keep it confidential. As far as I know their enterprise license  is all or none one big bundle.

Well seen all of them. 
Kong is a developer friendly,  and ground up community supported platform. 

I would highly recommend Kong, especially for people who are experiencing a cost bloat using other platforms. Great choice for startup,  scale ups and enterprises. 

I would rate this solution an 8 out of 10. 

We define our enterprise architect and Kong has been selected as an API integration layer solution. We deploy in some of the markets if they're ready to go, and some of the markets are not really ready because we have 10 different markets at the moment. It's an API integration layer so that we can expedite our microservices to the market.

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

It can be our personal, our company's issue, but when we were doing separate projects, we were facing a lot of solutions. For some of our major projects, the API was not using Kong as a group platform. Sometimes they use Microsoft Azure or AWS. That's not a problem, but I think it's wasting some of our budget. We set Kong as an enterprise standard. 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. 

We implemented it around May time. 

It is a stable solution. 

Compared to other products, I think it's pretty scalable.

I think we have around 100 users. 

Our plan to increase usage depends on the market deployment plan. I think we should because we just started that journey last year and it's ramping up at the moment. We do have a plan to increase the manpower.

I would rate their support a seven or eight out of ten. I'm pretty okay with the technical support.

We previously used Axway. We switched to Kong because of its reliability and scalability.

We have a lot of other platforms that we're using as the API integration platform, but from the enterprise architect's perspective, Kong is the standard.

The initial setup was relatively okay, but it depends on the market. Some of the markets we had easier solutions to deploy but we had trouble with some other markets we had trouble to make them understand and go through the legacy systems so that we could link different layers to Kong's API platform. The difficulty depends on the market.

The dependency on the legacy has to be very minimal so that you can leverage your new platform or integration layer and it will be easier to build up to scale. I think those parts are the important ones you have to think through.

There are so many new technologies, and I think at the moment low-code is very popular to use. If we get into the no-code or low-code aspect, sometimes coding can be easier. If they can provide relevant no-code or low-code service to the customers, not making the process very complex, I think that will be the main winner for the platform service providers.

I would rate Kong an eight out of ten. 

We mostly use this as an intrusion prevention system.

It gives us a good product to offer our clients that fits with our local economy.

The combination of IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) and the antivirus feature included in that firewall provides a unified advantage. We need one solution and not two. That is one of the main features our customers are really interested in.

Mainly, I would say they need to improve the updates. The updates of the OS for Fortinet seem to require a lot of bandwidth. It would be good if they required fewer resources. Also, they might improve the frequency of the releases.

I say this because here in East Africa the Internet is not as reliable or as fast as in the UK — or other places outside Africa. The OS for the Fortinet is great — super, even — but the releases are bulky and cause some problems.

Even though I like the way that both the intrusion prevention and antivirus are incorporated in this one solution, I think they should improve how you switch between one feature and the other. It's not very user-friendly for someone who's not experienced with the product. It is also quite different from other firewalls, like Check Point. 

As far as the stability of the solution: so far so good. I've not had any complaints from the customer side at all. That means the installations and the product are solid, so I can say with confidence that it is stable.

I think the product is scalable. That's a great feature of the product in the sense that it is easier to show the return on investment while using it because it's easier to scale. You do not have to reinvest in a lot of other new equipment as an upgrade.

I haven't contacted technical support, because when we deploy the system administrator uses the product. We have not heard of problems from administrators and according to them, they didn't experience any kind of difficulties. The only problem that a client had was the problem or the electricity. So that's different than actually having a problem with the firewall. They had no issues with the firewall itself.

I had some experience with the Check Point UTM firewall, but it was brief. All I can say is that Fortinet is more user-friendly compared to Check Point it's not as complex to deploy as Check Point. 

The other thing is regarding support. The support for Check Point is a bit slow, at least it is not as fast as Fortinet. 

For me, I think the installation was straightforward and we do that ourselves. The deployment doesn't take very long — it was a maximum of three hours. That is for the initial setup. There are not many places to change settings or that need customization.

For the deployments, we use two to three people and that is enough. We use one person for the metric and then one or even two for the systems. It is probably more than we need, but we do that just to be sure things go well.

The provider is Microsoft Azure. But we do all the installations by ourselves.

For us, the benefit of being able to scale without it having to cost a lot of money is good for our clients in our economic environment, so it is also good for us.

I rate the product as an eight out of ten. It is an eight because their updates are not regular and easier to work with.

The clients that we have already deployed are happy with it. So for now, if any new project needs a firewall solution, we are confident that we get positive feedback from the people using this product. For our future plans, I would hope we can deploy it more, but I cannot be sure about that because of the economic situation and how many new clients we will have.

The only advice I have for people considering this as a solution is to make sure that they have a proper internet connection and good bandwidth. That's the thing I feel is the biggest problem for my case.

It's user-friendly, at least for now. It is hard to predict if they will add complexity if they upgrade features.