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Kong Gateway Enterprise vs Layer7 API Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

Kong Gateway Enterprise
Ranking in API Management
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Layer7 API Management
Ranking in API Management
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
112
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Kong Gateway Enterprise is 6.3%, up from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Layer7 API Management is 3.0%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

Featured Reviews

AmitKanodia - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Ronald D'Souza - PeerSpot reviewer
Has great drag-and-drop features and it requires minimal coding
I have mainly implemented using Layer 7 API Management. Some of the major challenges we were able to meet with a quick release to market methodology. Some of the tasks which we achieved for our customers were: 1. Translation service from SOAP to REST and vice versa. 2. API service to DB (Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL, Snowflake, SAP HANA) -- Created Swagger APIs that were able to perform CRUD operation to the backend API mentioned above and provided routes to query and get data. 3. Integration with Payment gateway service providers to perform (transaction on behalf of the customer with third-party payment gateway service providers white labeled with our APIs ) -- Followed TMF standards for payment gateway integration with the Telcom world. 4. Orchestration of the API. Build multiple microservers and provided orchestration based on route, path, and data in the request and perform actions that would be communicated with multiple APIs and provide a single consolidated response. 5. Provided API-driven security (Oauth 2.0, JWT, SAML, Basic, and a variety of means) to access the API giving the developer the freedom to concentrate only on application/service/microservice and let the gateway handle the threat. 6. Seamless Mutual Authentication allowed good segregation between APIs in the DMZ and internal network.

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 scalability is good...The solution's technical support is good."
"The features I like include ease of operation and implementation in a cloud environment, the dashboarding features for API statistics, and the user-friendly developer portal."
"Kong Enterprise has excellent plugin support."
"Kong Enterprise comes with some ready plug-ins, which is very good for the customers."
"The route limiting feature is very valuable."
"It boasts remarkable speed and stability, and these qualities, particularly the gateway's resilience, are standout features for me."
"It offers a wide range of plugins that we leverage, including OIDC, Rate Limiting, Lambda functions, and more."
"I like everything about it. It provides the security we need."
"The scalability has been good. We haven't had to scale up a whole lot, even with all the extra transactions we're running through it. We're in the area of about 2 and 1/2 million OAuth tokens issued per hour, and it's performing fine with that."
"We loved the portal part the most, which had monetization and showed how people were using the stuff. It is a good product as a whole and has a lot of microservices and granular features."
"The Gateway can front our APIs very easily."
"The solution helped us to quickly publish and monetize APIs. I have used versioning responses to publish or send APIs to different customers with different versions."
"The benefits are rapid development and deployment of APIs, which means that your information, your ability to handle information, to receive it and to send it, to visualize it, to report on it, to get intelligence out of it, happens fast and happens with accuracy."
"Has great drag-and-drop features and requires minimal coding."
"It's pretty easy to use, and once we have templating set up we can add new APIs, at least through the gateway, and apply the security to them; it takes a minute."
"This improved our organization, because it gives the management data to discuss for the next course of action and it suggests what to work on, as the next thing."
 

Cons

"They could focus more on pricing."
"The open-source version of Kong does not support a dashboard, which would be very helpful."
"From an improvement perspective, the product should offer more readily available connectors and also allow for more seamless AI integrations."
"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."
"Because it is open-source, it should be less expensive than others."
"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 would like to see an automatic data API when we have a table in the database."
"Kong Enterprise fails to provide live tracing of the APIs, which is possible nowadays."
"Some problems with response time."
"It is not possible for clients to migrate to a newer version."
"From the last version, they have added more dashboard support, but there is still a lot they need to improve. In terms of monitoring, it's almost all covered. The interface can be improved, though."
"we cannot add gateways on the fly because there are a lot of moving parts; endpoint connectivity is one of them. If we add more nodes then the rate-limiting feature is affected. This kind of gateway always has the scalability issue. But, I think CA is coming up with its Microgateway, which is in Beta. If they stabilize their Microgateway platform, we could do very well in terms of scalability."
"It would be nice if we could create APIs directly from Swagger files. We're doing that ourselves with a middle layer. But if you could integrate with open API Swagger specs, and then just create a Swagger and upload it to the gateway and it would create all my API template policy, and would apply the OAuth restrictions, the types of security restrictions I have on there, that would be pretty cool."
"Layer7 API Management should improve the quota policy for the number of API calls."
"More developer focused tools. They have a nice debugger inside of the program, but when you are developing code with their policies, it is tough to visualize that sometimes as a developer."
"The solution should prioritize ease of use and align with the growing trend of cloud-native environments."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are many factors that influence the price of Kong Enterprise, such as scale, licenses, and usage."
"The licensing is expensive."
"The licensing fees are paid yearly."
"I don't have any information on licensing costs currently."
"Kong Enterprise is cheaper than Apigee. I rate its pricing as four out of ten."
"The product is reasonably priced because it goes by the SaaS model."
"Basically, my company uses the tool's open-source version."
"There is a need to pay towards the licensing charges...In some areas, the functionalities are available free of charge."
"It depends on your use case of course, how much you want to go with that, because it can get pricey and depends on the size of your company."
"If you do a TCO of more than five years, then you will see a big jump in costs for some vendors."
"Our customers found the product’s cost a little higher. They are looking for open-source solutions."
"At the time we bought the product it was a perpetual users license and there has been no need for additional licensing fees."
"I feel that it is costly for medium-sized companies."
"This solution is a bit more expensive than competitors."
"It has a reasonable pricing model by instance."
"The price of Layer7 API Management is too high and should be reduced. However, it is a good solution in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
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 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...
What needs improvement with Layer7 API Management?
Layer7 API Management could be improved in its logging and alert mechanisms. Furthermore, although cloud deployment has been introduced, I am not familiar with all recent updates. In previous versi...
 

Also Known As

No data available
CA API Management, CA Live API Creator, Espresso Logic, CA API Gateway
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cargill, Zillow, Ferrari, WeWork, Healthcare.gov, Yahoo! Japan, Giphy, SkyScanner
1. IBM  2. Microsoft  3. Oracle  4. Salesforce  5. SAP  6. Cisco  7. Dell  8. HP  9. Adobe  10. VMware  11. Accenture  12. Capgemini  13. Deloitte  14. PwC  15. Ernst & Young  16. Infosys  17. TCS (Tata Consultancy Services)  18. Wipro  19. Cognizant  20. HCL Technologies  21. Tech Mahindra  22. Fujitsu  23. Hitachi  24. NEC  25. NTT Data  26. Ericsson  27. Nokia  28. Siemens  29. AT&T  30. Verizon  31. Vodafone  32. Orange
Find out what your peers are saying about Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. Layer7 API Management and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.