Kong Gateway Enterprise vs WSO2 API Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 30, 2023
 

Categories and Ranking

Kong Gateway Enterprise
Ranking in API Management
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
WSO2 API Manager
Ranking in API Management
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Market share comparison

As of June 2024, in the API Management category, the market share of Kong Gateway Enterprise is 4.9% and it decreased by 20.6% compared to the previous year. The market share of WSO2 API Manager is 4.6% and it increased by 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
Unique Categories:
No other categories found
No other categories found
 

Featured Reviews

AmitKanodia - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 2, 2022
Provides role-based access control and can be easily customized with Lua script
I lead the integration practices in my organization and have been working in integration for the past 16 years, managing API integrations with various API manager tools such as Kong Enterprise. We are primarily using Kong for the API gateway functionality. For example, we've had a couple of mobile…
PS
Dec 31, 2020
Easy to adopt and lets us extend functionality at any time
From a product perspective, the first thing is that although the documentation provided by WSO2 is good, it could be much better. We're in the middle of a complex migration, moving away from VMs to Kubernetes with the latest version of WSO2 and good documentation is essential to us right now. If you are doing some basic implementation, that's easy enough to do with the current documentation, but suppose you are stuck with an error or you're engineering a complex scenario. In this case, when diving deep into the documentation, it's very helpful to find more information on how things are connected, what each file does, and what the various configuration settings do. Although they do have paid support which may help in cases where documentation is lacking, we aren't paying for a support license at the moment so we would definitely like to see better documentation for those in our kind of situation. Especially since we're using WSO2 API Manager to such a large extent. Beyond documentation, they have provided a caching mechanism which I believe could also use some improvement. Once you have set up and implemented WSO2, caching becomes very important and I think they could work on the cache parameters, etc., to make it easier to work with. Regarding the code itself, there are some bugs which we have encountered among the many different enterprise-level scenarios we have faced. Once again, because we are not paying for the licensed version, it becomes more difficult to request changes and bug fixes to the WSO2 codebase. So, for example, when we find a bug, we would like to be able go to GitHub and get better help on creating a solution that we can quickly push into production.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 companies and must ensure they adhere to their allocated usage limits. Without rate limiting, there's a risk of excessive usage, which could result in significant costs."
"I like everything about it. It provides the security we need."
"Kong Enterprise has excellent plugin support."
"Protocol transformation is the most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise."
"It boasts remarkable speed and stability, and these qualities, particularly the gateway's resilience, are standout features for me."
"In our buying companies' perspective, it was easier to use compared to other platforms. The markets were pretty familiar with the solutions."
"The tool's scalability is good...The solution's technical support is good."
"This is a solid intrusion prevention system that combines a firewall and antivirus in a single solution."
"WSO2 API Manager is a stable solution."
"It's very scalable, which is one of the best features."
"The user interface is easy to navigate, and the documentation is extensive. It's open-source, so everything is available, and we can create what we need. That's not necessarily a feature, but it's an advantage."
"The documentation is good."
"Most of the time, we need to install a plug-in without having any lapse in services or restarting the application. The WSO2 platform can do all deployments without any downtime."
"There are a lot of tools to help the manager. WSO2 is very easy to install. It has all the principal functionalities that you think about when you want to put up the management solution. It's a very friendly tool."
"WSO2 API Manager's most valuable features are the simple interface that is easy to use and the APIs lifecycle."
"The scalability is fine for our purposes."
 

Cons

"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 Enterprise can improve the customization to be able to do the integration properly."
"Because it is open-source, it should be less expensive than others."
"The technical support team's response time needs to be improved."
"It becomes difficult if you try to scale it up to multiple clusters."
"From an improvement perspective, the product should offer more readily available connectors and also allow for more seamless AI integrations."
"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."
"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."
"API Manager is not easy to scale because some of its components lack scalability. It's a difficult point. Especially because companies are so cloud-based these days, microservice scalability is a major thing."
"From what I have experienced from the versions I have tried, they could improve on the multi-tenant environments to allow some kind of SSO single sign-on between tenant."
"WSO2 API Manager can be improved a lot relating to usability"
"The tool's commercial aspect could be improved. Pricing varies with partners, so selecting the appropriate pricing can be challenging."
"The product hasn’t been updated for some time."
"The technical support must be improved."
"Based on our recent large scaling project, the latency needs to be improved."
"WSO2 API Manager should improve its marketplace subscription model and documentation in order to reach a higher level in the market."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a need to pay towards the licensing charges...In some areas, the functionalities are available free of charge."
"Kong Enterprise's pricing is reasonable for our company size."
"The licensing fees are paid yearly."
"Kong Enterprise's pricing is at par compared to the other technologies."
"There are many factors that influence the price of Kong Enterprise, such as scale, licenses, and usage."
"The licensing is expensive."
"Kong Enterprise is cheaper than Apigee. I rate its pricing as four out of ten."
"I don't have any information on licensing costs currently."
"We have not opted for the paid version of WSO2 but we have implemented the free and open source WSO2 software to a great extent and it is working as per our expectation."
"We use the open-source version of WSO2 API Manager, there is no cost."
"WSO2 API Manager is a costly solution, and its pricing is not competitive enough compared to other products."
"I think the other competitors that are providing the same solution are quite expensive. WSO2 API Manager is quite cheap."
"The solution costs less than 20,000 euros a year. I'm not sure of the exact number."
"WSO2 API Manager is quite an expensive tool. I rate the product's pricing a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is low and ten is high."
"There is a subscription-based pricing structure and also the open-sourced version available."
"It's not expensive, but it could be cheaper."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
7%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 ease of integration offered by the tool is strong. The security is being built in the tool. In terms of the connectivity part of the tool, I haven't had a chance to comment on the challenges si...
What do you like most about WSO2 API Manager?
It is possible to scale up and scale down with the solution...I can say that I have not seen any issues related to scalability.
What needs improvement with WSO2 API Manager?
WSO2 team recommends mTLS as security. Recently, my company faced some issues when implementing mTLS between the DB and front-end applications. My company needs Technical help from WSO2's team to d...
What is your primary use case for WSO2 API Manager?
I use the solution in my company as an enterprise application that will be placed in more than 175 places across the world, which would be in different countries. As an API management tool, it will...
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cargill, Zillow, Ferrari, WeWork, Healthcare.gov, Yahoo! Japan, Giphy, SkyScanner
1. eBay 2. StubHub 3. Cisco 4. Verizon 5. T-Mobile 6. Vodafone 7. Orange 8. BT Group 9. Telstra 10. Deutsche Telekom 11. Swisscom 12. AT&T 13. Sprint 14. Telefonica 15. O2 16. British Airways 17. Lufthansa 18. Emirates 19. Qatar Airways 20. Etihad Airways 21. Air France 22. KLM 23. American Express 24. Visa 25. Mastercard 26. PayPal 27. Western Union 28. Citibank 29. HSBC 30. Barclays 31. Santander 32. Goldman Sachs
Find out what your peers are saying about Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. WSO2 API Manager and other solutions. Updated: June 2024.
787,061 professionals have used our research since 2012.