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Istio vs Kong Mesh comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Customer Service

No sentiment score available
Users manage issues via self-help and forums; direct engagement provides expert support, with abundant online documentation available.
No sentiment score available
 

Room For Improvement

Sentiment score
7.5
Istio faces challenges with setup complexity, performance, and support, highlighting the need for improved documentation and user-friendly features.
No sentiment score available
Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial.
 

Scalability Issues

No sentiment score available
Istio is highly rated for scalability with Kubernetes, offering automation and control plane improvements, yet some performance challenges remain.
No sentiment score available
Handling large-scale environments with proxies can strain resources, but horizontal scaling can improve fault tolerance.
 

Setup Cost

No sentiment score available
Istio provides cost-effective open-source deployment, although infrastructure and integration with observability tools may incur additional expenses.
No sentiment score available
Integration with observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Elasticsearch incurs additional costs.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Istio is generally stable and reliable under moderate traffic, but proper setup is vital to avoid misconfigurations and bugs.
No sentiment score available
The architecture, configuration, and resource management can impact stability.
 

Valuable Features

No sentiment score available
Istio enhances observability, security, and management through load balancing, traffic routing, monitoring tools, and flexible integration capabilities.
No sentiment score available
The security feature with mutual TLS authentication, which is identity-based, and the traffic management using cloud load balancers are very valuable.
 

Categories and Ranking

Istio
Ranking in Service Mesh
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Kong Mesh
Ranking in Service Mesh
6th
Average Rating
6.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of Istio is 21.9%, down from 22.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kong Mesh is 18.2%, up from 13.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Service Mesh
 

Featured Reviews

JETTI DINESH REDDY - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
Arjun Pandey - PeerSpot reviewer
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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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
21%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

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 ...
What do you like most about Istio?
We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic.
What needs improvement with Istio?
There's a new product being worked on, with contributions from the team at Solo.io, called Ambient Mesh. This is being built into the open-source project. The purpose of Ambient Mesh was to make it...
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.
What needs improvement with Kong Mesh?
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 d...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Kuma
 

Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
First AbuDhabi Bank, CISCO, Papa johns pizza, Samsung, Expedia
Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, Envoy, VMware and others in Service Mesh. Updated: November 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.