Apigee vs Kong Gateway Enterprise comparison

Google and Kong are both solutions in the API Management category. Google is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.3, while Kong is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.6. Google holds a 14.2% mindshare in APIM, compared to Kong’s 6.6% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Kong users who would recommend it.

Apigee

Read 86 Apigee reviews

20,170 Views
15,653 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Kong Gateway Enterprise

Read 24 Kong Gateway Enterprise reviews

8,512 Views
6,571 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Apigee

Kong Gateway Enterprise

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Apigee and Kong Gateway Enterprise compete in the API management category. Apigee appears to have the upper hand in analytics and comprehensive features, while Kong excels in flexible integration through its plugin-based structure.

Features: Apigee is renowned for its API management and comprehensive analytics, offering sophisticated tools such as a Drupal-based developer portal with Smart Docs and extensive monetization capabilities. It ensures detailed control over API documentation along with support for numerous analytics dimensions. Kong Gateway Enterprise focuses on integration with its plugin-based architecture, allowing for flexible customization via Lua scripts and effective rate-limiting essential for managing API usage.

Room for Improvement: Apigee has challenges with role-based access management, complex on-premises setups, and high pricing, requiring improvements in predictive analytics and integration ease. Kong Gateway Enterprise could enhance isolated data plans for federated teams, user-friendly interfaces, documentation, and its pricing model.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Apigee offers versatile deployment models across public, private, hybrid clouds, and on-premises. Customer support is generally satisfactory but inconsistent, with some slow response times. Kong Gateway Enterprise provides flexible deployment options for various environments but needs to improve technical support response times and simplify its deployment process.

Pricing and ROI: Apigee generally has higher pricing, particularly challenging for smaller companies, with pricing based on API call volume allowing negotiation. It tends to provide a substantial ROI through its comprehensive API management. Kong Gateway Enterprise, although also perceived as expensive, features a more reasonable pricing structure based on SaaS models and offers a cost-effective entry through its open-source version. Both solutions offer good ROI, but Apigee is viewed as offering more advanced functionality at a higher cost, while Kong provides more accessible entry points.

To learn more, read our detailed Apigee vs. Kong Gateway Enterprise Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Apigee vs. Kong Gateway Enterprise

March 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

Apigee

Ranking in API Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

API Testing Tools (8th)

Kong Gateway Enterprise

Ranking in API Management

6th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Apigee is 14.2%, down from 15.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kong Gateway Enterprise is 6.6%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

API Management

Featured Reviews

ShawkyFoda

Senior Consultant at Goverment

Provides high visibility and control with good traffic monitoring

Analytics is one of the areas needing enhancement, specifically more visibility and control over traffic to improve capacity management and high availability. The replication process between Master and Slave for disaster recovery takes too long. Dependencies on analytics impact the performance of the user interface, which should be separate. The complex setup process on-premises, especially with multi-node installations, could also be improved. Additional control in product declarations, based on operations like POST and GET, is needed.

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AmitKanodia

Cloud & Integration CoE Head at Capgemini

Provides role-based access control and can be easily customized with Lua script

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's stable."

"Apigee is a very lightweight solution."

"The following features are most valuable: API Management, Analytics, Quota, and the Developer Portal."

"Apigee provides out-of-the-box policies, so it is ready to use with minimal configuration to those policies. You can govern your API and manage the life cycle of the API completely with the Apigee tool."

"Technical support has been decent."

"Apigee has proven to be one of the best of the breed."

"Apigee is a pioneer in the industry and has good features and functionalities. It is a good tool for API management and it has more advancements than all other tools in the market in certain areas."

"The analytics feature is quite good."

More Apigee pros

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

"Kong Enterprise has excellent plugin support."

"There are a few features that I like about Kong when it comes to authentication and authorization. Specifically, being able to use Kong for role-based access control (RBAC), and then further being able to integrate the RBAC mechanism with our enterprise directory, was very useful."

"Kong enterprise has significantly enhanced our ability to manage and secure our Microservices. Its most valuable feature is monitoring."

"We use the solution for load-balancing, caching, and rate-limiting APIs."

"The most valuable features of Kong Enterprise are the out-of-the-box open source easy functionality."

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

"This is a solid intrusion prevention system that combines a firewall and antivirus in a single solution."

More Kong Gateway Enterprise pros

Cons

"I have heard there maybe be some security issues that need to be addressed. If this is the situation I would encourage taking a look at the security matters."

"Drag and drop of features would be more beneficial, rather than manually working on the configuration and updates."

"We do not have control over the installation."

"The ability to work across different management solutions in a plug and play fashion would make it easier for faster uptake."

"They should improve the monitoring tools for on-premises environments."

"Better functionality for validating inputs and outputs would be helpful."

"iPaaS is something that we would like to see. For example, MuleSoft is kind of an integrated platform as a service (iPaaS), and it provides a lot of out-of-the-box connectors and other such things. This is where Apigee lacks. I'm not sure if that's the roadmap for Apigee, but any improvements on those lines would be helpful where things become easier to implement."

"Since it is based on various open sourced projects, we might have to depend on the fixes provided by those components rather than Apigee directly fixing the issues."

More Apigee cons

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

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

"Understanding the configurations and knowing what needs to be done can be a bit difficult initially."

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

"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."

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

"We would like to see an automatic data API when we have a table in the database."

More Kong Gateway Enterprise cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive solution."

"They need to work on the cost of the solution."

"It is a bit on the expensive side. Its licensing cost is a bit high, and that's where we've seen people going back on their decisions."

"Apigee is subject to licensing fees."

"The prices are comparable."

"Its price is reasonable for the features they provide and the maturity of the platform."

"The cost of the licensing is based on the number of API calls that are made."

"Apigee is expensive and not cost-effective. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate it an eight for the high cost. The changes individuals need to make on their side are costly."

More Apigee pricing and cost advice

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

"There are many factors that influence the price of Kong Enterprise, such as scale, licenses, and usage."

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

"The licensing fees are paid yearly."

"Kong Enterprise's pricing is reasonable for our company size."

"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."

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

More Kong Gateway Enterprise pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

How does Apigee differ from Azure API Management?

Apigee offers both cloud-based and on-prem options while Microsoft Azure API Management currently only offers a cloud-based solution. Both solutions are easy to use. Apigee allows for the ability...

See all answers

Which is better - Apigee or Amazon API Gateway?

Amazon API Gateway is a platform that supports the creation and publication of API for web applications. The platform can support thousands of simultaneous API calls, and it provides monitoring, ma...

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What do you like most about Apigee?

We can customize the dashboard.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Kong Enterprise?

The open-source version of Kong does not support a dashboard, which would be very helpful. We use an open-source tool called Konga for basic dashboard needs, but it lacks support. It would be bette...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure API Management vs Apigee

Compared 28% of the time

IBM API Connect vs Apigee

Compared 10% of the time

WSO2 API Manager vs Apigee

Compared 8% of the time

Layer7 API Management vs Apigee

Compared 6% of the time

IBM DataPower Gateway vs Apigee

Compared 4% of the time

More Apigee Competitors

Microsoft Azure API Management vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

Compared 13% of the time

WSO2 API Manager vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

Compared 12% of the time

Kong Konnect vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon API Gateway vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

Compared 7% of the time

IBM API Connect vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

Compared 6% of the time

More Kong Gateway Enterprise Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apigee

March 2025

Download Apigee product report

Buyer's Guide

Kong Gateway Enterprise

March 2025

Download Kong Gateway Enterprise product report

Overview

Apigee is a platform for developing and managing APIs. Apigee offers an interface for your core services by wrapping them with a proxy layer which is then accessed by other developers. With Apigee, you can design and build APIs and then securely share their services and data without exposing any code.

Because app developers make HTTP requests to an API proxy rather than directly to your services, your services are separated from the developers. All the developer needs to know is the URL of the API proxy endpoint, necessary query parameters, authorization credentials (if they exist), and the response data format.

The API proxy isolates the app developer from your backend service. Therefore, you are free to change the service implementation if the public API remains consistent. By maintaining a consistent frontend API, existing client apps will continue to work regardless of changes on the backend.

Key capabilities of the Apigee API management platform include:

Security: Protect APIs, messages, and backends with configurable policies such as OAuth, API key verification, XML/JSON threat protection, and access control.
API gateway: Secure and mediate the traffic between clients and backends, and between a company’s APIs and the developers who use the APIs.
Developer portal: Attract and engage application developers, enabling them to discover, explore, purchase, and test APIs and register to access and use the APIs.
API console: The console helps developers learn and work with APIs.
API lifecycle management: Manage the process of designing, developing, publishing, deploying, and versioning APIs.
Automated documentation: Automate the development of API documentation and software development kits.
Machine learning: Utilize machine learning and analytics to generate actionable insights and reports.

API monitoring: Apigee offers monitoring tools for API troubleshooting, security, and optimization.

Reviews from Real Users:

Apigee stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its rich developer portal, its advanced analytics, and its central monitoring system.

Carlos R., a software architect at Caja Los Andes writes, “The central monitoring feature is the most valuable. It also provides security for the APIs and high availability for our use cases. Apigee is the best product in the industry in comparison to other API management solutions. It helps in fast development, which is a top point. It also supports a lot of industry standards and has excellent documentation.”

An associate vice president at a tech services company notes, “The analytics function and the developer portal are the two valuable features of Apigee. The analytics part is very good, and the developer portal is quite rich in features. The authentication mechanisms are quite easily built into Apigee, which is something that most of the other products have also now started supporting.”

Google

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

Sample Customers

Adobe, advance.net, Amadeus, AT&T, Bechtel, Belly, Burberry, Chegg, Citrix, Dell, eBay, Equifax, GameStop, First Data, Globe, HCSC, Intralinks, Kao, Meredith, Mitchell, Orange, Pearson

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

Buyer's Guide

Apigee vs. Kong Gateway Enterprise

March 2025

Free Report: Apigee vs. Kong Gateway Enterprise

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