Apigee vs Kong Gateway Enterprise vs WSO2 API Manager 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 88 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

WSO2 API Manager

Read 41 WSO2 API Manager reviews

6,382 Views
4,570 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Apigee

Kong Gateway Enterprise

WSO2 API Manager

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Apigee, Kong Gateway Enterprise, and WSO2 API Manager based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in API Management.

To learn more, read our detailed API Management Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

API Management

April 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:

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. The mindshare of WSO2 API Manager is 4.8%, up from 4.1% 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.

Read full review

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.

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VishalSingh14

IT Engineer at Reliance Industries Ltd

Easy to deploy APIs and easy to manage CORS configuration

I have used WSO2 Store and WSO2 API Manager at the architecture level. I worked on two versions, namely WSO2 API Manager 2.6.0 and 5.7.0. I have also worked with WSO2 Identity Server versions 5.7 and 5.11. There are certain things that Apigee handles better than WSO2 API Manager. The user interface of WSO2 API Manager is much easier than that of Apigee. The scope of flexibility was much greater in Apigee. In WSO2 API Manager, we had little flexibility and were restricted to a specific software or tool. On the other hand, we had the scope of customization in Apigee.

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

"The most valuable features of Apigee for me are analytics, security, ease of use, and integration capabilities."

"The ease of creating policies has been the most useful of the solution's features. It's a quick ramp-up time. It's easy for our support staff to implement the policies in the API management layer."

"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."

"Highly scalable from any initial topology to horizontal extension"

"Apigee is a very lightweight solution."

"I think the most valuable features are the security features. Of course, the user access control is the same as the security. The other very important issue is the sandboxing capability of Apigee."

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

More Apigee pros

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

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

"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."

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

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

"The tool's scalability is good...The solution's technical support is good."

"In terms of stability, the tool's team has made some good efforts, and my company is very happy with the product's approach."

"The route limiting feature is very valuable."

More Kong Gateway Enterprise pros

"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."

"It's very scalable, which is one of the best features."

"The solution is open-source."

"WSO2 API Manager is open-source, which offers a range of features not found in other open-source API tools."

"The documentation is good."

"WSO2 API Manager provides strong internal API security, including token-based authentication and HTTPS support for various formats like REST. However, the newer API security features that are emerging are not available yet. They might be in development, but for now, internal API security is well-covered."

"We use the vanilla version of the WSO2 API Manager and integrate additional features ourselves. The basic features of the API Manager, such as blacklisting and whitelisting, are very helpful. We also created dashboards."

"WSO2 API Manager is easy to use."

More WSO2 API Manager pros

Cons

"The pricing for the product was a bit higher. I also found it challenging to manage sometimes."

"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."

"The analytical aspect of it could be better. I think it is fair if Apigee lets you configure some of the metrics of the key details you want to monitor in terms of analytics."

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

"The company needs to better support webhooks. It used to support webhooks and their policies and they have since stopped. They had some issues in the product and they abandoned the support for them. It's not come back since."

"There is potential for improvement in specific domain integrations, such as standard integration capabilities needed for banking or retail sectors."

"Integration should be improved."

"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 tool needs improvement in UX."

"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"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."

"We are facing issues with the solution's features like reports and traffic analysis."

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

"The software version upgrade process should be improved."

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

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

More Kong Gateway Enterprise cons

"We found WSO2 API Manager to be a bit complex."

"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."

"The interface needs to be modernized and made more user friendly so the product continues to have a growing community of users."

"I can say that user management is not really flexible. So, if I want to create 1,000 store users, I can't do it as a publisher. You have to register as a store user using the store URL."

"They don't have different URLs for administrators."

"We had some problems with the reverse proxy not being able to invoke fully qualified domain names, so we have to build some custom scripts to solve this issue."

"In WSO2 API Manager, we had little flexibility and were restricted to a specific software or tool."

"The solution’s interface should be more user-friendly."

More WSO2 API Manager cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If the budget is not a concern then I will choose to go with Apigee over WSA-2, but if it is then I would prefer the latter 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."

"In Latin America, Apigee is expensive. It's not for small businesses; it's more for big businesses."

"Apigee is subject to licensing fees."

"The price of Apigee could be less expensive. The solution can be purchased monthly or annually."

"The solution’s pricing could be more competitive."

"Apigee is slightly expensive, but again, it can depend on the type of usage. All things considered, it is slightly expensive."

"You do not necessarily pay for the license. The cloud solution is based more on transactions. So, you pay for it either way."

More Apigee pricing and cost advice

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

"The licensing fees are paid yearly."

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

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

"The licensing is expensive."

"There is a need to pay towards the licensing charges...In some areas, the functionalities are available free of charge."

"I don't have any information on licensing costs currently."

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

More Kong Gateway Enterprise pricing and cost advice

"It is an open-source product."

"For our projects, we found the pricing to be a little high."

"WSO2 API Manager is a costly solution, and its pricing is not competitive enough compared to other products."

"My previous company paid about 1.2 million dollars, and my current company pays about 300k. Both companies are at the enterprise level."

"The solution costs less than 20,000 euros a year. I'm not sure of the exact number."

"The challenge is the increasing pricing, which has led some customers to consider alternatives, like using Spring Boot solutions instead. The rising costs, especially as cores and usage increase, have been a concern, prompting some to migrate to other products."

"It is costly, around ten thousand per year, per instance"

"I am using the free version."

More WSO2 API Manager pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

18%

Government

Manufacturing 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 clou...

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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...

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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 sof...

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...

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...

See all answers

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 sc...

See all answers

What needs improvement with WSO2 API Manager?

One area for improvement is monitoring. Dashboards for application monitoring of the APIs would be beneficial, allowi...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for WSO2 API Manager?

We use WSO2 API Manager for our microservices and our APIs, both internally and externally.

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure API Management vs Apigee

Compared 27% of the time

IBM API Connect vs Apigee

Compared 10% of the time

Layer7 API Management vs Apigee

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon API Gateway 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

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

Layer7 API Management vs Kong Gateway Enterprise

Compared 6% of the time

More Kong Gateway Enterprise Competitors

Apache APISIX vs WSO2 API Manager

Compared 15% of the time

Amazon API Gateway vs WSO2 API Manager

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Azure API Management vs WSO2 API Manager

Compared 11% of the time

3scale API Management vs WSO2 API Manager

Compared 5% of the time

MuleSoft API Manager vs WSO2 API Manager

Compared 3% of the time

More WSO2 API Manager Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apigee

April 2025

Download Apigee product report

Buyer's Guide

Kong Gateway Enterprise

April 2025

Download Kong Gateway Enterprise product report

Buyer's Guide

WSO2 API Manager

March 2025

Download WSO2 API Manager 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

WSO2 API Manager is a comprehensive platform that allows organizations to design, publish, and manage APIs.

It provides a centralized interface for API governance, security, and analytics.

With features like API monetization and developer portal, it enables businesses to drive innovation and create new revenue streams.

WSO2

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

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 Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in API Management. Updated: April 2025.

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