What I like best about Kong Gateway is its flexibility and ease of managing APIs at scale. It provides a strong plugin ecosystem, solid performance, and smooth integration with Kubernetes and cloud-native environments. I also appreciate the centralized control it gives for security, traffic management, and observability, which makes operations much more efficient for both developers and platform teams. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I dislike most about Kong Gateway is that it can feel complex to configure and manage at first, especially for teams that are new to API gateways or service mesh concepts. Some advanced features also seem better suited to larger organizations, which can make it feel heavy for simpler use cases. In addition, troubleshooting and understanding plugin interactions can sometimes take more time than expected. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cloud-based management makes administration easy.

Built-in analytics help monitor API performance and usage.

Developer Portal and API Products make API publishing simple.

Easy integration with third-party Identity Providers.

Supports hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Developer Portal can be made more mature and customizable for organization-specific needs.

Documentation can be improved with more detailed examples and use cases.

More features and plugin support at the API Product level would be helpful, especially for rate limiting.

Better visibility and management options for API Products and developer onboarding would enhance the overall experience. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The biggest benefit for me is the reduced API latency, which is especially useful when handling millions of requests per day. It also supports both REST and GraphQL. Overall, the standout feature is its performance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The biggest con, in my opinion, is the high licensing cost. For a small organization with a small team, this can easily become one of the largest expenses. Also, if the team doesn’t have prior gateway experience, it can be difficult for them to get hands-on and get up to speed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

A fast-to-deploy API gateway that you can get up and running in a minute with Docker, plus a lot of plugins. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Memory & Performance Overhead

Wait, isn't Kong famous for being fast? Yes, but there’s a catch:

Plugin Bloat: Every plugin you enable adds a small amount of latency. If you stack 15+ plugins (Auth, Logging, Rate Limiting, Transformer, etc.) on a single route, you will see your P99 latency start to creep up.

Resource Usage: Because it runs on Nginx, it’s highly efficient, but if you're running it in a "sidecar" pattern in Kubernetes for every single microservice, the cumulative memory footprint can become significant compared to lighter alternatives like Envoy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I use Kong Gateway for streamlining microservices and better visibility. I appreciate that it offers insight into all my microservices on a single platform. I like its versatility and how it can handle a huge number of transactions per second (TPS) without needing equivalent infrastructure. Kong Gateway offers almost 50K TPS per node, which is impressive in its segment, and it's cost-effective. My team switched from APIGEE to Kong Gateway for some parts of our business due to its cost efficiency and 100% operational efficiency without the risk of vendor lock-in. The initial setup is pretty easy, especially with the new Kong Docs Portal. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

From my hands-on experience, Kong Gateway can feel a bit too DevOps centric for teams that would rather have more guided management through a rich GUI(KONG Manager type), since so much of the control is handled through configuration and APIs.

If you run it in DB mode, you also need to plan carefully for PostgreSQL operations and failover as part of the overall gateway design. And although Lua plugins are powerful, it’s not always easy on real projects to find people who are comfortable extending Kong at that level. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

High performance – Built on NGINX/OpenResty, handles heavy API traffic with low latency

Plugin-based architecture – Easily add features like auth, rate limiting, logging

Scalable – Suitable for microservices and large distributed systems

Cloud-native friendly – Works well with Kubernetes and containerized environments

Strong security features – Supports OAuth2, JWT, key authentication, etc.

Centralized management – Control APIs from a single platform

Flexible deployment – Can be deployed on-prem, cloud, or hybrid

Active community & support – Good documentation and ecosystem Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Advanced features are paid – Many enterprise capabilities (analytics, RBAC, dev portal) require paid versions Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Its reliability in keeping our APIs available is excellent, and it comes with robust API management tools. It also offers a solid mechanism for API protection, and the tracking tool is genuinely useful for monitoring what’s happening. I especially appreciate its developer management features. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Report generation could be improved, and the documentation needs to be more detailed. The user interface could be simplified, and it doesn’t feel well synchronized with the development tools. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One of the Popular opensource API Gateways which help us to manage APIs deployed anywhere from a simple infra to complex multi cloud environment.

As per my obeservation Kong is capable to handle different protocols like REST, GRPC, Graphql which enables us to manage almost all of our APIs needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Need improvement on AI features and plugins in Kong Gateway is limited, impacting overall functionality and performance.

There is lack of analytics and monitoring in Kong Gateway, hindering effective performance tracking. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It’s fast, reliable, and doesn’t add unnecessary complexity when managing APIs at scale. Setting things up is straightforward, and the plugin system makes it easy to add features like security, traffic control, or monitoring without rewriting everything. It also plays really well with modern setups like Kubernetes, which saves a lot of time when deploying or scaling services. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

feel a bit heavy and complex once you move beyond basic use cases. The learning curve gets steeper when dealing with advanced configurations, custom plugins, or debugging issues, especially for teams new to API gateways. The admin and observability experience can also feel fragmented unless you invest time and effort into tuning it or upgrading to enterprise features. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really like the UI dashboard of Kong Gateway. Its performance and speed are impressive, using an ultra-lightweight NGINX engine that can handle up to 50,000 transactions per second, which I find really good. I also appreciate its deployment flexibility, whether it's on-premise, in the cloud, or using the Kong Ingress Controller for Kubernetes. The platform is architecture-dependent with lots of options, and I find it really good for my needs. Additionally, it supports managing gateways via YAML and Kubernetes CRDs, which seamlessly integrates into GitOps and CI/CD pipelines. Setting it up was very easy; I was able to do it within an hour and start working on it right away. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think the documentation could be a bit simpler and should include more examples. There's also an enterprise wall, and while the open source resources are good, the paid product is also there, which can be a bit of a barrier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.