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Kong Gateway Enterprise vs WSO2 API Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

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
WSO2 API Manager
Ranking in API Management
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of Kong Gateway Enterprise is 6.1%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WSO2 API Manager is 4.7%, up from 4.1% 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.
VishalSingh14 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It boasts remarkable speed and stability, and these qualities, particularly the gateway's resilience, are standout features for me."
"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."
"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."
"The route limiting feature is very valuable."
"It offers a wide range of plugins that we leverage, including OIDC, Rate Limiting, Lambda functions, and more."
"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 most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise is its capability to integrate with various security tools."
"Yes WSO2 API Manager is scalable"
"WSO2 is very stable."
"The most interesting feature is its Mac-based function."
"Its open-source features are very good, especially for your production work."
"Functionality-wise, I like WSO2 API Manager - Publisher API and WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus."
"Based on the information I have, the solution's most valuable feature is its capability of implementing custom solutions."
"It's a good product."
"The solution is open source and easy to configure."
 

Cons

"Because it is open-source, it should be less expensive than others."
"Understanding the configurations and knowing what needs to be done can be a bit difficult initially."
"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."
"They could focus more on pricing."
"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."
"There should be an easier way to integrate with other solutions, even though it's the same API solution layer. Comparability will be a good improvement."
"It becomes difficult if you try to scale it up to multiple clusters."
"The product hasn’t been updated for some time."
"The professional support and licensing aspects of WSO have been a challenge."
"The interface needs to be modernized and made more user friendly so the product continues to have a growing community of users."
"The tool's commercial aspect could be improved. Pricing varies with partners, so selecting the appropriate pricing can be challenging."
"The solution could be more user friendly for engineers."
"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."
"From a product perspective, the first thing is that although the documentation provided by WSO2 is good, it could be much better. We're in the middle of a complex migration, moving away from VMs to Kubernetes with the latest version of WSO2 and good documentation is essential to us right now."
"The pricing models offered by WSO2 API Manager could be more flexible and should offer different options so that more people can access them."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is really reasonable compared to that of alternative solutions."
"The product is reasonably priced because it goes by the SaaS model."
"Kong Enterprise is cheaper than Apigee. I rate its pricing as four out of ten."
"Basically, my company uses the tool's open-source version."
"Kong Enterprise's pricing is at par compared to the other technologies."
"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."
"It is costly, around ten thousand per year, per instance"
"We have not opted for the paid version of WSO2 but we have implemented the free and open source WSO2 software to a great extent and it is working as per our expectation."
"There is a subscription-based pricing structure and also the open-sourced version available."
"WSO2 API Manager is an open-source solution."
"My previous company paid about 1.2 million dollars, and my current company pays about 300k. Both companies are at the enterprise level."
"It's not expensive, but it could be cheaper."
"It is an open-source product."
"For our projects, we found the pricing to be a little high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
8%
Manufacturing 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 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 scalability.
What needs improvement with WSO2 API Manager?
One area for improvement is monitoring. Dashboards for application monitoring of the APIs would be beneficial, allowing us to check for faulty APIs.
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.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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 Kong Gateway Enterprise vs. WSO2 API Manager and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.