Istio vs Kong Mesh comparison

Isito and Kong are both solutions in the Service Mesh category. Isito is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.4, while Kong is ranked #5 with an average rating of 6.0. Isito holds a 23.0% mindshare in SM, compared to Kong’s 20.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Isito users are willing to recommend the solution.

Istio

Read 10 Istio reviews

3,081 Views
2,518 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Kong Mesh

Read 1 Kong Mesh review

1,591 Views
1,466 Comparison Views

0% willing to recommend

Istio

Kong Mesh

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Istio and Kong Mesh based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, Envoy, HAProxy and others in Service Mesh.

To learn more, read our detailed Service Mesh Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Service Mesh

January 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

Istio

Ranking in Service Mesh

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Kong Mesh

Ranking in Service Mesh

5th

Average Rating

6.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of Istio is 23.0%, up from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kong Mesh is 20.7%, up from 12.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Service Mesh

Featured Reviews

JETTI DINESH REDDY

Infra , DevSecOps & Automation Architect at Zuellig Pharma

Enhanced microservice security and advanced traffic management and good authentification

When our developers are building the microservices, instead of imposing additional burdens or additional thinking on them, especially as part of network features such as traffic management, security, or observability, we deploy something from the infrastructure side, so developers need only focus…

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Arjun Pandey

Engineering Lead- Cloud and Platform Architecture at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Provides a unique advantage by offering a global view for all workloads and clusters within the mesh but lack of a robust community for open-source support

There are a number of areas where Kong Kuma can improve. One is in terms of product delivery, such as Helm charts. There are a lot of gaps in the Helm charts currently. Another is in terms of the default monitoring and logging setup. It is not as production-ready as it could be. By default, Kuma comes with Loki, Yagger, and Prometheus to monitor the control plane and data plane, but the unified dashboarding and logging solution should be closer to production-grade. It is good for trying out the product, but I would not recommend taking it to production without setting up your own monitoring and logging solution. Additionally, Kuma recently released Fivecarless Mesh, which was built on top of Envoy. The challenge with this is that it adds overhead. If you want to run 100 containers in production, you will actually need to run 200 containers because you need to run one sidecar container per pod. Overall, I think Kong Kuma is a moderate product, but I would not personally recommend it for production use.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Istio provides tremendous value, particularly in offering TLS and authentication over microservice-to-microservice communication."

"Istio makes all that much easier - traffic splits, percentage traffic splits, doing some sort of chaos testing to see how it works."

"Istio's best feature is that it's easy to use."

"We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic."

"The load balancing, service application, and monitoring of the life of the service are valuable features. We use it for authentication of call services, load balancing the calls among the service providers on service instances, and monitoring the health of the services."

"We can implement load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple service instances. Istio also offers traffic routing capabilities and circuit-breaking functionality. For security, it handles authentication using mutual TLS (mTLS) between services. It can authorize services using JWT tokens. Istio also allows defining policies for rate limiting to control traffic within services."

"The tool's mutual TLS stands out. It provides secure communication between services within the cluster. Additionally, Istio offers built-in telemetry and tracing with tools like Jaeger, which aids monitoring and troubleshooting."

"The security feature with mutual TLS authentication, which is identity-based, and the traffic management using cloud load balancers are very valuable."

More Istio pros

"It is a scalable product."

Cons

"If you're a beginner in infrastructure management and networking, learning Istio might pose some challenges. However, if you have some knowledge of networking or service meshes, you should find it manageable. Istio's website offers documentation to guide you through learning."

"If someone doesn't understand Kubernetes, they'll have issues working with Istio."

"Istio's documentation is basic and would benefit from more examples."

"For our use case that we applied it to, there were graph queues and the calls that were coming in. There were the things that we couldn't apply at the time, but it kind of worked."

"Based on my experience, the solution could be improved. They could simplify the learning process so that users can understand how its features work together, especially with components like Kibana. Learning about the different components is necessary. For instance, you need to understand the traffic flow, potential bottlenecks, and the architecture within Istio."

"Istio needs to be more mature and user-friendly."

"Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial."

"I've seen applications where they had such strict time constraints, they couldn't use Istio because it was too much overhead."

More Istio cons

"The initial setup is complicated. Although Kuma has its own CLI, CTL, and they say to use their CLI, if I have to build a generic solution, my personal preference would be to use Helm or another similar solution other than Kuma. If you have your own library CLI, it becomes hard for others to adopt it. For example, if I have to write some automation, infrastructure automation, I can't just use Kuma. I have to change my code to use Kuma's CTL, which is unfair because it doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit with my current automation structure. I have to do something extra, something additional, which I really don't like."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is on the less expensive side. It provides a significant saving for us in terms of cost and other things. It is open-source. We just download it from the open-source framework and use it."

"We use the tool's open-source version, so there are no hidden fees or additional costs associated with it."

"You can deploy Istio free of cost and don't need to pay for it."

"I have tried for my personal research and all those things. I have tried only the open-source version. So, for me, it was always free."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

27%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Istio?

Istio provides a significant saving for us in terms of costs since it is open source. However, Istio can still come at a price. It has a steep learning curve and might require more manpower hours ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Istio?

We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Istio?

At the moment, there are no immediate improvements needed. Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial.

See all answers

What do you like most about Kong Mesh?

It is a scalable product.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kong Mesh?

I have tried for my personal research and all those things. I have tried only the open-source version. So, for me, it was always free.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Kong Mesh?

See all answers

Comparisons

HAProxy vs Istio

Compared 32% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Istio

Compared 7% of the time

NGINX Service-Mesh vs Istio

Compared 6% of the time

AWS App Mesh vs Istio

Compared 5% of the time

Traefik Enterprise vs Istio

Compared 3% of the time

More Istio Competitors

Envoy vs Kong Mesh

Compared 30% of the time

HashiCorp Consul vs Kong Mesh

Compared 10% of the time

Traefik Enterprise vs Kong Mesh

Compared 6% of the time

AWS App Mesh vs Kong Mesh

Compared 2% of the time

More Kong Mesh Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Istio

January 2025

Download Istio product report

Buyer's Guide

Service Mesh

January 2025

Download Kong Mesh product report

Also Known As

No data available

Kuma

Learn More

Video not available

Isito

Video not available

Kong

Overview

Connect
Intelligently control the flow of traffic and API calls between services, conduct a range of tests, and upgrade gradually with red/black deployments.

Secure
Automatically secure your services through managed authentication, authorization, and encryption of communication between services.

Control
Apply policies and ensure that they’re enforced, and that resources are fairly distributed among consumers.

Observe
See what's happening with rich automatic tracing, monitoring, and logging of all your services.

Kong Mesh is the ultimate universal service mesh designed for enterprise organizations, offering simplicity and scalability with Kuma and Envoy technologies. This cloud-native solution is versatile, deployable on Kubernetes, VMware, and various environments. Kong Mesh excels in ease of installation, configuration, and management, making it a top choice for organizations seeking streamlined service mesh implementation. With robust features like fine-grained traffic control, observability tools for in-depth monitoring, and comprehensive security mechanisms such as authentication and encryption, Kong Mesh ensures that microservices are both secure and high-performing. Its multi-zone and multi-mesh support allow for distributed deployments, making it a flexible and powerful choice for those looking to enhance their service infrastructure.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

First AbuDhabi Bank, CISCO, Papa johns pizza, Samsung, Expedia

Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, Envoy, HAProxy and others in Service Mesh. Updated: January 2025.

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