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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 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 WSO2 API Manager is 4.6%, up from 4.0% 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

"Kong enterprise has significantly enhanced our ability to manage and secure our Microservices. Its most valuable feature is monitoring."
"Kong Enterprise comes with some ready plug-ins, which is very good for the customers."
"We use the solution for load-balancing, caching, and rate-limiting APIs."
"Kong Enterprise has excellent plugin support."
"The solution provides good performance."
"In our buying companies' perspective, it was easier to use compared to other platforms. The markets were pretty familiar with the solutions."
"I like everything about it. It provides the security we need."
"Kong Gateway helped to improve performance. It's good enough for our users."
"The flexibility is definitely a highlight. We have flexible mapping capabilities, allowing us to provide common mappings or create custom ones as needed."
"The scalability is fine for our purposes."
"Most of the time, we need to install a plug-in without having any lapse in services or restarting the application. The WSO2 platform can do all deployments without any downtime."
"It's very scalable, which is one of the best features."
"The user interface is easy to navigate, and the documentation is extensive. It's open-source, so everything is available, and we can create what we need. That's not necessarily a feature, but it's an advantage."
"There are a lot of tools to help the manager. WSO2 is very easy to install. It has all the principal functionalities that you think about when you want to put up the management solution. It's a very friendly tool."
"The documentation is good."
"This solution is a little bit faster, easier to use, and has better integration than the other solutions I have experienced."
 

Cons

"The tool needs to improve in areas like documentation and UI."
"The software version upgrade process should be improved."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The OS upgrades are not as frequent as they should be and they are bulky."
"Understanding the configurations and knowing what needs to be done can be a bit difficult initially."
"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."
"Because it is open-source, it should be less expensive than others."
"Kong Enterprise fails to provide live tracing of the APIs, which is possible nowadays."
"For fresh graduates and engineers, the setup process can be very difficult."
"The solution could be more user friendly for engineers."
"The user interface needs to improve, it is a bit outdated."
"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."
"Integration is an area that needs to be improved."
"Lacks some new features and updated functionalities."
"Providing easy configuration for email and SMS notifications, layout and customization of admin and developer landing pages."
"API Manager is not easy to scale because some of its components lack scalability. It's a difficult point. Especially because companies are so cloud-based these days, microservice scalability is a major thing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Kong Enterprise is cheaper than Apigee. I rate its pricing as four out of ten."
"Kong Enterprise's pricing is at par compared to the other technologies."
"There is a need to pay towards the licensing charges...In some areas, the functionalities are available free of charge."
"I don't have any information on licensing costs currently."
"The price is really reasonable compared to that of alternative solutions."
"It's expensive in Thailand (10 million baht, in Thai currency)."
"The licensing fees are paid yearly."
"Basically, my company uses the tool's open-source version."
"For our projects, we found the pricing to be a little high."
"There is a subscription-based pricing structure and also the open-sourced version available."
"My previous company paid about 1.2 million dollars, and my current company pays about 300k. Both companies are at the enterprise level."
"It is an open-source product."
"The solution costs less than 20,000 euros a year. I'm not sure of the exact number."
"It's not expensive, but it could be cheaper."
"The challenge is the increasing pricing, which has led some customers to consider alternatives, like using Spring Boot solutions instead. The rising costs, especially as cores and usage increase, have been a concern, prompting some to migrate to other products."
"I am using the free version."
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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.
841,004 professionals have used our research since 2012.