Best Kong Gateway Alternatives 2026
Unleash the power of your microservices with Kong Gateway, the cloud-native API gateway for modern architectures. Seamlessly manage, secure, and scale your APIs with unparalleled flexibility and performance. Simplify complexities, optimize performance, and drive business growth with Kong Gateway.
Kong Gateway provides a flexible solution for securing and managing APIs. It can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, and provides a variety of plugins for extending functionality. With features like authentication, rate limiting, and traffic control, Kong helps ensure your APIs are secure and performant. This lightweight approach makes it a strong choice for microservices, offering high scalability.
Recent Reviews
"Kong Gateway has been a game-changer for our microservices architecture. Its plugin ecosystem is incredibly rich, allowi..."
"Kong Gateway has simplified our API management significantly. While the initial learning curve for configuring custom pl..."
"Kong Gateway is a powerful API gateway with a lot to offer, but it's not without its challenges. We experienced some ini..."
Kong Gateway
Kong Gateway is a lightweight, scalable API gateway for managing microservices and APIs. It offers features like authentication, traffic control, and transformations.
Platform Highlights
- Lightweight and scalable
- Extensible through plugins
- Traffic control features
- Complex configuration
- Plugin compatibility
Based on 6,500+ creator reviews
Kong Gateway Alternatives
Compare top api tools platforms with detailed reviews and ratings
Insomnia
Insomnia is a cross-platform API client designed for testing and debugging REST and GraphQL APIs. It features a clean interface and collaboration tools.
"Insomnia has become an indispensable tool in my QA workflow. Its ability to easily manage and organize API requests acro..."
RapidAPI
RapidAPI is a marketplace for APIs, allowing developers to discover, test, and connect to thousands of APIs. It also offers API management solutions.
"RapidAPI has completely streamlined my API integration process. The unified platform makes discovering, testing, and con..."
Stoplight
Stoplight offers tools for API design, documentation, and governance. It helps teams build consistent, well-documented APIs with collaborative workflows.
"Stoplight has become an indispensable tool in our API design workflow. The ability to collaboratively design and documen..."
Assertible
Assertible focuses on API testing and monitoring. It helps ensure APIs are reliable with automated tests and continuous monitoring for uptime and performance.
"Assertible has been a game-changer for our API testing strategy. The ease of setting up assertions and the detailed repo..."
Swagger
Swagger (OpenAPI) is a popular tool for designing, documenting, and consuming RESTful APIs. It helps create interactive documentation and client SDKs.
"Swagger has completely revolutionized our API development workflow! The ability to visually design, document, and test A..."
Apigee
Apigee is a comprehensive API management platform that provides analytics, security, and scalability. It helps businesses design, secure, and manage their APIs effectively.
"Apigee has been instrumental in modernizing our API infrastructure. The policy enforcement capabilities are robust, allo..."
What users say about Kong Gateway
Real experiences from our community of users who have tried Kong Gateway and its alternatives.
Kong Gateway has been a game-changer for our microservices architecture. Its plugin ecosystem is incredibly rich, allowing us to easily implement authentication, rate limiting, and other essential functionalities without writing custom code. The declarative configuration is a huge time-saver, and the observability tools provide valuable insights into our API traffic. I highly recommend Kong to anyone managing a complex API landscape. Setting up the ingress controller was straightforward and easily integrated with our existing Kubernetes cluster. We've seen significant performance improvements since switching.
Kong Gateway has simplified our API management significantly. While the initial learning curve for configuring custom plugins can be a bit steep, the documentation is comprehensive and the community support is excellent. The ability to centrally manage and monitor all our APIs through a single platform is a huge advantage. We've automated our deployment pipeline using Kong's APIs, which has streamlined our release process considerably. The performance monitoring tools are invaluable for identifying and resolving bottlenecks quickly. It's a robust and scalable solution that has helped us improve the reliability of our APIs.
Kong Gateway is a powerful API gateway with a lot to offer, but it's not without its challenges. We experienced some initial difficulties with the community edition limitations and had to upgrade to the enterprise version to unlock some of the features we needed, like advanced rate limiting and support for more complex authentication flows. The declarative configuration is great for automation, but debugging can be tricky at times. However, the performance and scalability are impressive, and the plugin ecosystem is constantly expanding. The team continues to address issues raised in their forums.