Kong Gateway
API design tools
API management tools
API platforms
Generative AI software
Large language model operationalization (LLMOps) software
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
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What is Kong Gateway
Kong Gateway is an API gateway used to manage, secure, and route API traffic across microservices and distributed environments. It is typically used by platform engineering, API, and DevOps teams to enforce policies such as authentication, rate limiting, logging, and traffic control. The product supports deployment in cloud, Kubernetes, and on-premises environments and is commonly extended through plugins and configuration-as-code workflows.
High-performance traffic gateway
Kong Gateway is designed for low-latency request routing and policy enforcement at the edge of services. It supports common gateway functions such as load balancing, retries, timeouts, and circuit-breaking patterns through configuration and plugins. This makes it suitable for high-throughput API and microservice environments where the gateway is a critical path component.
Extensible plugin ecosystem
The gateway supports a broad set of built-in and community plugins for authentication, authorization, rate limiting, transformations, and observability integrations. Teams can add custom behavior via plugin development to meet organization-specific requirements. This extensibility helps organizations standardize cross-cutting concerns without rewriting application services.
Flexible deployment options
Kong Gateway can run in containerized and Kubernetes environments as well as traditional infrastructure, which supports hybrid deployment models. It fits into GitOps-style operations by allowing declarative configuration and automated promotion across environments. This flexibility is useful for organizations that need consistent API controls across multiple runtimes and regions.
Not an API design tool
Kong Gateway focuses on runtime traffic management rather than API design, mocking, or collaborative specification authoring. Teams typically need separate tools for API-first workflows such as OpenAPI authoring, testing, and developer collaboration. This can increase toolchain complexity for organizations seeking an all-in-one API lifecycle suite.
Operational complexity at scale
Running an API gateway fleet requires careful configuration management, versioning, and policy governance to avoid drift across environments. Plugin selection and custom plugin maintenance can add ongoing operational overhead, especially with multiple teams publishing APIs. Organizations may need additional platform practices and tooling for change control, auditing, and incident response.
AI/LLMOps scope is limited
While Kong offers capabilities in the broader ecosystem for managing and securing API traffic, Kong Gateway itself is not a full LLMOps platform for model lifecycle management, evaluation, or fine-tuning workflows. AI use cases often require additional components for prompt management, model routing, safety evaluation, and telemetry beyond standard API metrics. Teams building generative AI platforms may need complementary tools to cover end-to-end LLM operations.
Plan & Pricing
| Plan | Price | Key features & notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free trial (Konnect) | $0 for 30 days (no credit card required) | Full Kong Konnect platform trial: enterprise functionality for 30 days, no Gateway limits, analytics retained for 30 days. |
| Plus (Kong Konnect Plus) | Pay-as-you-go (see per-unit rates below) | Self-serve plan billed monthly. Includes up to 5 Serverless Gateways, up to 2 Hybrid Gateways, up to 2 Dedicated Cloud Gateways; 1M API requests/month included; RBAC; email support (2-business-day SLA). |
| Enterprise (Kong Konnect Enterprise / Gateway Enterprise) | Custom pricing — contact sales | Contract-based, annual billing; unlimited Gateways and portals, SSO, audit logs, 24x7 support, dedicated customer success and TAM, professional services and migration support. |
Additional explicit per-unit rates and fees (as listed on Kong's official pricing page):
- Dedicated Cloud Gateway (DCGW) control plane: $500/month per control plane.
- DCGW bandwidth: $0.15 per GB.
- Serverless API Gateway control plane: $25/month per control plane.
- Hybrid API Gateway control plane: $200/month per control plane.
- API requests included (Plus): 1 million API requests/month; cost per additional 1M requests: $200/month.
- AI Gateway model proxy: $100/month per unique LLM (measured hourly, enforced monthly) for Plus; Enterprise is custom.
- Advanced analytics overage: $20 per 1M API requests above 1M (no cost for less than 1B contracted API requests).
- Developer Portal: cost per additional portal $200/month; cost per additional published API: $20/month for first 10 APIs, $10/month for each extra API thereafter.
- Service Catalog additional governed service: $75/month per governed service.
Seller details
Kong Inc.
San Francisco, CA, USA
2017
Private
https://konghq.com/
https://x.com/thekonginc
https://www.linkedin.com/company/konghq/
