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User-friendly developer portal but licensing model changes for each geography
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
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.
The plugin architecture is simple and easy to implement.
What needs improvement?
There is room for improvement in the licensing model. It charges differently for each geography. If I have to use Kong in two different geographies for the same organization, it charges me twice. When it comes to Azure, it doesn't charge me twice. Azure has a more economical model.
The licensing in the Middle East, where we work. The licensing of Kong and Azure is a lengthy process. It was not readily available. We had to talk to the product owner to make the Kong Gateway available as a solution on the Azure marketplace. The licensing is only as an on-prem or separate product.
The difference between billing on the cloud and outside the cloud is if I purchase Kong outside, I have to pay the AMC every year or so. The purpose of cloud implementation is to have a consolidated billing for all resources purchased on the cloud. You don't need to deal with multiple vendors. If you have purchased five applications on the cloud marketplace, you get a single consolidated bill every month.
The ease of billing is lost when Kong is not available directly on the Azure marketplace. This is one area where they can improve. There could be a problem with the Middle East geography. They may have Kong available on the Azure marketplace in other geographies, but this is how it is in the Middle East.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it for two and a half years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a very stable product.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten, with one being one scalability and ten being high.
The scalability aspect has a limitation with geography. I can expand it to any country within one region, but not beyond. There are licensing implications.
Technologically, it is scalable to whatever extent required, without any limitations. The limitation is only across geography. It cannot be scaled beyond one region.
There are around 25 technical people using this solution in my organization. We use it daily.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Kong is the first API solution we used. We started API solutions with Kong.
How was the initial setup?
I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy.
The first implementation took three months.
What about the implementation team?
The deployment was done by a vendor.
What was our ROI?
Kong Gateway doesn't save anything, actually. It is not for that purpose. It's a technological solution, we cannot directly attribute revenue to Kong alone. Multiple applications work together to offer the APIs, and those API solutions have brought in some revenue, but not entirely because of Kong, so I cannot quantify that.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing is expensive. I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Our parent organization has been using Kong and evaluated all the possibilities. We took their reference. Recently, we did an evaluation and migrated to Azure API Management from Kong.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend using it. It is a very powerful tool with lots of features. It's stable, user-friendly, and easy to learn.
Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.
Kong API GW is a popular for managing APIs. It's known for being fast,flexible and easy to set up.
What do you like best about the product?
-->High performance and scalability
-->Flexibility and ease of use
-->Extensibility with plugins
-->Flexibility and ease of use
-->Extensibility with plugins
What do you dislike about the product?
Security configuration complexity
Management overhead for multiple Gateways
Management overhead for multiple Gateways
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Centralized API Security
Improved Visibility and Monitoring
Flexibility for Different Deployments
Improved Visibility and Monitoring
Flexibility for Different Deployments
Comes with some ready plug-ins and provides good security and redundancy
What is our primary use case?
Our e-commerce customers use Kong Enterprise.
What is most valuable?
Customers cannot use the public cloud because of regulations. Kong Enterprise can be used in any environment, like the Red Hat and Openshift environments. Kong Enterprise comes with some ready plug-ins, which is very good for the customers. Kong Enterprise supports hierarchy and redundancy.
What needs improvement?
Kong Enterprise has decided not to support the web portal feature anymore, but I think that feature should stay in the on-premises solution.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Kong Enterprise for four to five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's technical support is good and responsive.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of the solution is very straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
You can install Kong Enterprise in five minutes or half an hour. If the customer is ready for deployment with the Kubernetes or VMware environment, Kong Enterprise's installation is very easy.
What other advice do I have?
The solution's scalability is very nice. Kong Enterprise is a key product in the market with good stability and high availability. Our customers can easily integrate their existing CICD pipelines with Kong Enterprise.
We chose Kong Enterprise because it is a software-based company, and latency and redundancy are very important for our client. Most of the other vendors use the old-school appliance-based solution. Kong Enterprise is very keen to apply the existing CI/CD pipeline. I would recommend Kong Enterprise to other users because of its scalability, security, and redundancy.
Overall, I rate Kong Enterprise ten out of ten.
Has monitoring features but UX needs improvement
What is most valuable?
Kong enterprise has significantly enhanced our ability to manage and secure our Microservices. Its most valuable feature is monitoring.
What needs improvement?
The tool needs improvement in UX.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the product for six months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten. My company has five to seven users.
How are customer service and support?
I have encountered communication issues.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
How was the initial setup?
I rate the tool's deployment a ten out of ten, and it took a few hours to complete.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Kong Enterprise's pricing is reasonable for our company size.
What other advice do I have?
I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.
Improves performance and comes with rate limiting features
What is our primary use case?
My company is a financial company involved in credit card processing. We use the solution for internal IT secure gateway.
What is most valuable?
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.
The solution has improved our organization's performance.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the product for six months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is horizontally scalable and very useful. My company has one customer for Kong Enterprise. I rate its scalability a ten out of ten.
How are customer service and support?
I haven't contacted technical support yet.
How was the initial setup?
The product is easy to deploy and gets completed in one hour.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Kong Enterprise is cheaper than Apigee. I rate its pricing as four out of ten.
What other advice do I have?
Kong Enterprise can connect with other tools easily. It has features like APIs and logging that programmers can use to link it up with different systems. I haven't used its integration features much, but I know its possibilities. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
Your APIs deserve a Kong
What do you like best about the product?
Stable, powerful, easy to configure, extensible, fast and quality customer support.
What do you dislike about the product?
Product development removes features we're using, like vitals (fine grained metrics), developer portal, insomnia free on-premise git sync.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
With Kong API Gateway we have a central place for internal and external systems to call a variety of exposed API's. Kong provides security (apikey / OAuth2), access control and the API catalogue.
Used for managing microservices and in-built APIs, but the technical support team's response time could be improved
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution for managing microservices and in-built APIs.
What is most valuable?
Kong Enterprise has induced the API governance we need for our banking operations. It has increased the security and improved the gateway features such as rate limiting, throttling, and security.
The most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise is its capability to integrate with various security tools. For OAuth implementation, we connect it to the external OAuth providers. Some inbuilt out-of-the-box features of the solution, like API key generation and usage of client credentials, are also very good.
What needs improvement?
The technical support team's response time needs to be improved. Kong Enterprise should improve its resiliency when it comes to the active DR setup.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Kong Enterprise for more than six months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Kong Enterprise is a stable solution.
I rate the solution an eight out of ten for stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Kong Enterprise has seamless scalability. Around 240 developers are working with the solution in our organization, and we are planning to increase our usage.
I rate the solution a nine out of ten for scalability.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support team's response time needs to be improved. The support engineer's capability should be improved because we have to induct them often regarding the problem. A lot of data needs to be provided before they start looking into the problem.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used TIBCO and MuleSoft.
How was the initial setup?
The solution’s initial setup was easy.
What about the implementation team?
Since we are a financial institution, setting up and onboarding the solution took around one and a half months. It took some time to go through all the security and run through the different stakeholders.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Kong Enterprise's pricing is at par compared to the other technologies.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Kong Enterprise, we evaluated Tyk. We chose Kong Enterprise because we felt it was more secure than Tyk.
What other advice do I have?
Kong Enterprise is a gateway that we leverage. From an API security perspective, it has excellent features. We have used a couple of plugins, such as the OIDC plugin and rate-limiting plugin, for our APIs. Our experience with the plugins has been pretty good, and they solve the purpose of security. Since Kong Enterprise is just a gateway, the onboarding services were very seamless. I rate the solution five out of ten for integration.
Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
An easy-to-integrate tool with good scalability features
What is our primary use case?
My company gave Kong Enterprise to only one company in the manufacturing sector, and now we are in talks with another manufacturing company.
Kong Enterprise is very useful, especially for IoT applications. Palo Alto Networks is also good for IoT applications. Kong Enterprise has a great licensing model. I am scanning capabilities, making it a good tool for infrastructures.
What needs improvement?
In comparison to Fortinet, Kong Enterprise fails to offer a huge number of ports in lower models of the solution. From an improvement perspective, the number of ports in lower models of the solution should be made available.
The GUI of the product is not very user-friendly, making it in areas where improvements are required. In Fortinet, the GUI allows users to deal directly with the configuration part.
The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have experience with Kong Enterprise.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
High-end models are available for large-scale businesses, but the same models are not available for small or medium-sized businesses.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The tool's scalability is good.
My company has around 300 to 500 users of the product.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's technical support is good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have experience with SonicWall and Fortinet. I chose Kong Enterprise since it is better in areas like throughput. The tool is also not easily vulnerable and provides patch updates.
How was the initial setup?
The product's initial setup phase was straightforward.
The deployment process was good. The product could be deployed in two to three hours.
Around seven to ten people, consisting of managers, engineers, managers, and developers, take care of the deployment and maintenance of the product.
What about the implementation team?
The product can be deployed with the help of our company's in-house members.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
There is a need to pay towards the licensing charges. My company also needs to make payments to use SD-WAN, which is usually an in-built feature in other products. In some areas, the functionalities are available free of charge.
What other advice do I have?
In our organization's workflow, we use Kong Enterprise since it helps the research and development team to check for certain updates, send patches, and scan for viruses, making it a good product.
Kong Enterprise's plug-in systems have enhanced our company's API management solution since they allow users to generate reports easily. My company hasn't worked to a great extent with the API management part of the tool.
The full-fledged features of the product are only available in the high-end models. For small and medium-sized businesses, not many ports are available for use. In SonicWall, if you take one box with the full software subscription and get another box with no software subscription, it would still offer HA, but in Palo Alto Networks, both boxes have to be the same.
I recommended the product to those who plan to use it.
I rate the ability of Kong Enterprise to match our organizational demands in terms of performance and scalability at a seven to eight out of ten.
It is easy to integrate Kong Enterprise with existing systems and infrastructures.
The benefit of using the solution is that I feel my network is more secure.
I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.
It's great & reliable to use
What do you like best about the product?
It's best in connection pool (i.e connection is good ), as compare to usage it is great as compared to other API
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing as such of now I seen in my experience
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I have created portal for api, manage them and adjust for scaling
Best Cloud Native API Platform
What do you like best about the product?
Kong API Gateway is valued for its scalability and flexibility, with open-source architecture, extensive plugin support, and a vibrant community. It excels in managing, securing, and optimizing API traffic
What do you dislike about the product?
Some users find the initial setup and configuration of Kong API Gateway to be complex and challenging
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Kong API Gateway addresses challenges in managing, securing, and optimizing API traffic, providing benefits such as enhanced scalability, flexibility in deployment, robust performance monitoring, and a customizable architecture through plugins. It streamlines API management, fostering improved reliability, security, and overall efficiency in handling diverse and complex API ecosystems.
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