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Kong Gateway Enterprise vs MuleSoft API Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 30, 2023
 

Categories and Ranking

Kong Gateway Enterprise
Ranking in API Management
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
MuleSoft API Manager
Ranking in API Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Kong Gateway Enterprise is 6.1%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MuleSoft API Manager is 6.1%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

Q&A Highlights

NC
Oct 26, 2021
 

Featured Reviews

Karthick Sampangi - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 25, 2023
The solution provides protocol transformation and allows each client to have a specific UI experience
We had worked for a client from the travel industry who wanted to propose an API manager. They had built microservices on Java and another integration tool. They wanted to apply policies, register their APIs in the API manager, and enforce policies and plugins, like client ID, client secret…
SA
Apr 3, 2023
Easy to set up with good reliability and helpful drag and drop capabilities
We primarily use the solution for integration purposes.  The solution offers good policies. We have all the policies available via drag and drop. It made it very easy. I don't have any notes for improvements. I'm happy with it.  I'd like more monitoring and analyzing features included in the…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"In our buying companies' perspective, it was easier to use compared to other platforms. The markets were pretty familiar with the solutions."
"The solution provides good performance."
"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 companies and must ensure they adhere to their allocated usage limits. Without rate limiting, there's a risk of excessive usage, which could result in significant costs."
"I like everything about it. It provides the security we need."
"Kong Enterprise has excellent plugin support."
"Kong Gateway helped to improve performance. It's good enough for our users."
"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."
"The ESB, the enterprise service bus is what we primarily use. In addition to that, the API management. These are the two tools which we have been using extensively. The enterprise platform."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the low code environment, the drag-and-drop functionality, and the ability to drop the connectors on the fly, which are extremely helpful."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"This is a good API management product."
"Whenever there was an issue, the support was excellent."
"The tool has a private area. It also has a cloud deployment option."
"Both the cloud and on-premises options are available. Customers can leverage the MuleSoft Cloud platform to deploy the applications or set up their own online infrastructure to deploy applications."
"We can use both on-premises and cloud setups."
 

Cons

"It becomes difficult if you try to scale it up to multiple clusters."
"Kong Enterprise has decided not to support the web portal feature anymore, but I think that feature should stay in the on-premises solution."
"The technical support team's response time needs to be improved."
"The tool needs improvement in UX."
"From an improvement perspective, the product should offer more readily available connectors and also allow for more seamless AI integrations."
"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."
"Understanding the configurations and knowing what needs to be done can be a bit difficult initially."
"They could focus more on pricing."
"The initial setup is very complex."
"Anypoint could be improved by making it more open and configurable for small companies, who tend not to consider the solution as it's expensive and requires a lot of costs upfront."
"I would like to see more automation. Operations are done manually. It should also automate in the operation."
"Their analytics needs a lot of improvement. It's really lacking right now."
"Licensing costs should be reduced, it's quite expensive."
"I'd like to see improvements in API Exchange. Currently, we can only expose APIs publicly. I want to categorize some APIs and expose them just to internal stakeholders. It would be great if they could log in to a developer portal, see our current APIs, view Swagger or RAML docs, and try request-response payloads."
"With respect to the live help, I have language issues because I can't understand some of the things that I hear."
"In the next release, Mulesoft should make it easier for people who don't have the native connectors to build their own rather than using the APA from the power platform or outlet."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is really reasonable compared to that of alternative solutions."
"Kong Enterprise's pricing is at par compared to the other technologies."
"It's expensive in Thailand (10 million baht, in Thai currency)."
"The product is reasonably priced because it goes by the SaaS model."
"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."
"Kong Enterprise's pricing is reasonable for our company size."
"I don't have any information on licensing costs currently."
"I'm unsure about licensing costs because I'm not the person who handles this. But, ballpark, it's probably somewhere around $300,000-$400,000 or something like that."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"The pricing is very expensive, although you get a lot of power from the product."
"It's not very expensive, reasonably priced. There are no additional costs."
"The price of Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager is very high."
"The product's main drawback is its cost. It's expensive for our company, and their recent change in pricing strategy last year complicated things further. That's the only thing we're not happy with."
"When it comes to determining price, the pre-sales team interacts with the customer's primary integration team and the price is negotiated based on the specific usage of the system."
"Our customers have a lot of concerns about the increased pricing. The customer feels MuleSoft is very costly, and they are also exploring other integration tools for a lesser price. Maybe we should retain the existing customers by offering some discounts. At least the existing customers can be retained this way. This is regarding the licensing part only because customers based out of North America and Europe have shown many concerns recently. They are a bit concerned about pricing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
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 tool needs to improve in areas like documentation and UI. The product needs to have good documentation and a good UI where we can see the other features. It was difficult for our company to und...
How does Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager compare with Amazon API Gateway?
I have found that Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager is the best integration tool out there for API management. It is easy to implement and learn; it provides several options for deployment, (including ...
What do you like most about Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager?
The most valuable features of the solution for securing APIs stem from the tool's ability to allow users to deploy policies.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager?
The product's main drawback is its cost. It's expensive for our company, and their recent change in pricing strategy last year complicated things further. That's the only thing we're not happy with.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Anypoint API Manager
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cargill, Zillow, Ferrari, WeWork, Healthcare.gov, Yahoo! Japan, Giphy, SkyScanner
Coca-Cola, Splunk, Citrix, UCSF, Vertu, State of Colorado, National Post, TiVo, Deakin, LLS, Oldcastle Precast, ParcelPoint, Justice Systems, Ube, Sumitomo Corporation, PacificComp, University of Witwatersrand, Groupe Initiatives, Camelot, Panviva
Find out what your peers are saying about Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. MuleSoft API Manager and other solutions. Updated: September 2024.
801,394 professionals have used our research since 2012.