--- title: Kong Konnect Reviews meta_title: 'Kong Konnect Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 346 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Kong Konnect works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 346 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-09-08' parent_category: name: Development url: https://www.g2.com/categories/development --- # Kong Konnect Reviews **Vendor:** Kong Inc **Category:** [API Management Tools](https://www.g2.com/categories/api-management) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 346 **AI Verified:** At least 10 G2 reviewers have confirmed using this product's AI features and functionality. ## About Kong Konnect Kong is an AI and API connectivity platform designed to help platform engineering teams, DevOps organizations, and enterprise architects deploy, secure, observe, and govern API traffic across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. Built on open-source foundations, Kong facilitates the management of the entire lifecycle of APIs and AI traffic at scale, encompassing everything from development and deployment to runtime policy enforcement and observability. Targeted primarily at mid-market and enterprise organizations with complex distributed architectures, Kong is particularly beneficial for those utilizing microservices, multi-cloud deployments, and AI-powered applications. The platform caters to a diverse audience, including platform engineers, API program managers, security architects, and development teams that require consistent and governed API access across both internal and external systems. By addressing the challenges of API sprawl, inconsistent security enforcement, and observability gaps, Kong provides a robust solution for organizations navigating the complexities of modern infrastructure. Kong's capabilities are extensive and designed to tackle several recurring infrastructure challenges. The platform's API Gateway and Lifecycle Management features enable efficient routing, load balancing, authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and transformation for various API types, including REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and event-based APIs. Additionally, with the rise of generative AI, Kong has developed an AI Gateway specifically for managing traffic to large language models (LLMs) and AI agents. This includes functionalities such as prompt and response management, semantic caching, and token-based rate limiting, ensuring that organizations can effectively govern their AI workloads. Another significant feature of Kong is its Service Mesh, which provides east-west traffic management between services within a cluster or across clusters. This includes support for mutual TLS (mTLS), traffic policies, and observability at the service level, enhancing security and monitoring capabilities. The Konnect SaaS Control Plane further streamlines the management of Kong deployments globally, offering centralized analytics, developer portal capabilities, and API catalog management. Kong's extensibility is another key differentiator, featuring a plugin architecture with over 100 pre-built integrations that cover a wide range of functionalities, including logging, authentication providers, observability backends, and AI providers. Available as open-source software, an enterprise distribution, or a fully managed SaaS offering, Kong integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes and supports deployment on major cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. This flexibility allows organizations to leverage Kong across heterogeneous environments without necessitating a complete infrastructure overhaul. ## Kong Konnect Pros & Cons Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews. **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **ease of use** of Kong Konnect, complemented by excellent documentation and simple configuration options. (46 reviews) - Users appreciate the **centralized control plane** of Kong Konnect, which enhances API management and reduces operational overhead. (42 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of integration and customization** of Kong Konnect, benefiting from its modular plugin system. (37 reviews) - Users appreciate the **scalability** of Kong Konnect, enabling efficient management of APIs in distributed environments. (34 reviews) - Users commend the **robust security measures** of Kong Konnect, ensuring reliable protection and performance of APIs. (32 reviews) - Users value the **high performance and versatility** of Kong Gateway, praising its support for modern architectures. (29 reviews) - Flexibility (28 reviews) - Performance Efficiency (25 reviews) - Platform Flexibility (24 reviews) - Speed (24 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **limited documentation** for plugins in Kong Konnect challenging, affecting their overall experience. (22 reviews) - Users express concern over the **limited features** of Kong Konnect, noting missing essential functionalities and advanced options. (19 reviews) - Users find that Kong Konnect has **missing features** , particularly in AI capabilities and limited plugin support. (18 reviews) - Users face a **steep learning curve** for configuration and advanced features, complicating initial use of Kong Konnect. (16 reviews) - Users find the **expensive features** of Kong Konnect limiting, especially with essential tools locked behind paywalls. (15 reviews) - Difficult Learning (14 reviews) - Users express a need for **better support and analytics** in Kong Konnect, highlighting gaps in learning resources and integration. (12 reviews) - Users find the **complexity** of Kong Gateway challenging, especially with setup and insufficient documentation for beginners. (10 reviews) - Difficult Configuration (10 reviews) - Users face **developer portal issues** , citing immaturity and inadequate documentation hinder their overall experience with Kong Gateway. (9 reviews) ## Kong Konnect Reviews ### 1. Unified Control Plane for Consistent API Security and Real-Time Analytics **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Keval D. | Web Designer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** September 01, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** The biggest win for us is having a single control plane to manage authentication, JWT validation, rate limiting, and routing across all our environments, instead of duplicating that logic inside every backend service. It’s made our API security policies consistent by default, rather than something we have to audit after the fact. The real-time analytics dashboard is genuinely useful as well—we can catch latency spikes and error bursts early, instead of finding out from a broken frontend. On top of that, RBAC and workspace separation make it easy for different teams to own their own services without stepping on each other, and rolling back a bad config change takes seconds instead of turning into an incident. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** There’s a bit of a learning curve when you’re first getting everything set up, but it becomes much easier once you’re familiar with the platform. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Before Kong Konnect, API logic such as authentication and rate limiting was scattered across multiple services, which made audits painful and led to inconsistent behavior between teams. Now it’s centralized, so new services automatically inherit the same standards from the start. Troubleshooting is also faster because we can check the gateway first, and we have much clearer visibility into which APIs exist, who owns them, and how they’re performing. ### 2. Centralized Hybrid & Multi-Cloud API Management Made Simple with Kong Konnect **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Klodia L. | Admin, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** This review contains authentic analysis and has been reviewed by our team **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 27, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** As a Kong Konnect customer, what stands out most to me is the centralized API management across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. That’s probably the biggest win for us. We run gateways on-prem as well as in AWS and GCP, and Konnect gives us a single control plane to manage everything without having to stitch together separate tools for each environment. The hybrid deployment model—control plane in Konnect, data planes wherever we need them—also strikes a great balance: we get the convenience of SaaS while still keeping control over where our traffic actually flows. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Here’s a fair rundown of the main pain points. Pricing and cost predictability: Konnect’s pricing model, which is based on API calls and service consumption, can get expensive and is a bit difficult to forecast as usage scales—especially compared to running a self-managed Kong Gateway OSS. For smaller teams or for workloads with unpredictable traffic patterns, costs can rise faster than you’d expect, which makes budgeting and planning harder. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Problem: Fragmented API management across hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure. Before Konnect, our APIs and gateways were spread across multiple environments, and we didn’t have a single, consistent way to manage, monitor, or secure them. Konnect gives us one control plane for everything, so we’re not duplicating work or losing visibility when traffic moves between environments. ### 3. Clear, Convenient API Gateway Management in One Dashboard **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ful M. | SDE, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** This review contains authentic analysis and has been reviewed by our team **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** September 02, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** what i like most about Kong Konnect is that it gives me a clear place to manage APIs, routes, services, and plugins. The interface is fairly easy to navigate, and having everything in one dashboard makes managing and monitoring the gateway much more convenient **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** The main downside for me is that it can take some time to understand where everything is especially when you re new to API gateways. There are quite a few options and settings , so the initial learning curve can feel a little steep. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Konnect helps simplify the management of APIs and services by putting routing , plugins and gateways configuration in one place. This makes it easier to keep APIs organized, apply policies consistently, and spend less time managing different pieces separately . ### 4. Kong Konnect Simplifies API Management with a Clean, Efficient Workflow **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Riya D. | Founder's Office, Food & Beverages, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** The best thing I like about Kong Konnect is that it simplifies API management and has a clean interface. With Kong Konnect, I’ve reduced manual data transfer between my CRM and marketing platforms, which has made my workflow more efficient and better organized. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** There’s nothing I dislike about this product now. Still, when I first started using it, I found it pretty challenging because it has so many features that needs experience in API category., and it took me some time to figure out how to use them properly. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps reduce manual work by connecting different tools and keeping all the data flowing smoothly between systems. This has made my workflows more organized and efficient, and it also saves me time when I’m managing a large amount of lead data. ### 5. Centralized API governance and sub-millisecond proxy routing for microservices **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kirpalsinh R. | Cyber Security Intern, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** September 03, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** Managing API routing across a distributed microservices environment requires strict consistency, and Kong Konnect's hybrid architecture handles this exceptionally well. The SaaS control plane provides a unified view for configuring services, while the self-hosted data plane instances run locally near our Kubernetes workloads to keep proxy latency negligible. Implementing edge concerns—such as OAuth2 token validation, rate-limiting, and request transformation—via out-of-the-box plugins offloads significant overhead from our application code. Furthermore, managing the gateway state declaratively using the decK CLI seamlessly integrates into our GitOps pipelines, making deployment changes across staging and production environments predictable and fully version-controlled. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Developing custom plugin logic still requires working with Lua or building WebAssembly modules, which introduces extra friction for development teams accustomed to higher-level languages like Python or Go. When troubleshooting synchronization mismatches between the SaaS management console and self-hosted runtime groups, navigating low-level proxy logs to isolate SSL certificate or schema errors can be time-consuming. Additionally, licensing costs scale up quickly as request throughput and the number of active runtime instances expand across enterprise environments. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** It eliminates fragmented traffic management and inconsistent security policies across independent backend services. Prior to adopting the gateway, individual teams implemented their own authentication layers and throttling mechanisms, creating maintenance debt and audit risks. Centralizing policy enforcement at the gateway level establishes uniform security standards across all endpoints while freeing developers to focus entirely on domain-specific business logic. ### 6. Makes API testing easier during Flutter development **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vaidehi G. | Jr. Flutter Developer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** September 01, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** As a Flutter developer, I mainly use Kong Konnect when working with APIs for our mobile app. Having the API routes, traffic, and basic details in one place makes it easier to check if an issue is coming from the app or the API. I also find the logs and monitoring useful when an API request is not working as expected. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Some of the settings were a little confusing for me at first, especially because I am more focused on flutter development than backend work. It took some time to understand where to check certain API settings and errors. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Before using Kong Konnect, when an API failed from the Flutter app, it was not always easy to know if the problem was in my code or on the API side. Now I check the API status, request details, and logs in one place, which helps me find the issue faster and reduces the time spent going back and forth with the backend team. ### 7. Unified Control Plane for Consistent API Security and Fast Rollbacks **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rahul M. | Senior Software Developer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** September 01, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** As a Full Stack .NET Developer working extensively with ASP.NET core Web APIs and third-party API integrations, the greatest advantage has been having a single control plane to manage authentication, JWT validation, rate limiting, and routing access all of our environments, eliminating the need to duplicate this logic within every backend service. This has made our API security policies consistent by design, rather than something we need to audit for after deployment - which matters a lot when you are integrating multiple external APIs alongside our own .NET services. The real-time analytics dashboard has also proven valuable, allowing us to identify latency spikes and error bursts early rather than discovering issues through a broken Angular frontend experience. Additionally, RBAC and workspace separation have made it straightforward for different teams to manage their own services independently, and rolling back a problematic configuration change now takes seconds rather than escalating into a full incident. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** There is a moderate learning curve during initial setup, through it becomes considerably easier to navigate once the team become familiar with the platform. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Prior to adopting Kong Konnect, our API logic - including authentication and rate limiting - was distributed across multiple ASP.NET Core services, which complicated audits and led to inconsistent behavior between teams. With Konnect, this logic is now centralized, ensuring that new services inherit the same standards from the outset. Troubleshooting has also become more efficient, as we can review the gateway directly rather than searching through multiple codebases and SQL logs, and we now have significantly clearer visibility into which APIs exist, who owns them, and how they are performing. ### 8. API Management Simplified for the Enterprise. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohini G. | Information Technology Infrastructure Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** September 01, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** I like most about Kong Konnect is having complete visibility into and control of our API traffic. Administering numerous services in various stages of development across our environments can become cumbersome. Having visibility into and governance of all traffic passing through Kong has been a game changer. API Gateway features, authentication policies, rate limiting, and traffic controls have allowed us to minimize effort from our infrastructure and development teams. It has also been extremely valuable as we ensure consistency of APIs across our environments while enabling modern microservices-based applications. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** The platform has plenty of power under the hood but does require a good understanding of API gateways, networking, and security rules. Teams new to API management may spend some time initially configuring the gateway and associated policies. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** What Kong Konnect allows us to do is simplify how we manage API complexity. Previously, gaining visibility into our API traffic and trying to implement uniform security policies between numerous services was more difficult. With Kong Konnect we are able to manage our APIs better, operate them more reliably, and have greater control over how our applications communicate. ### 9. Reliable API Management for Backend Engineers. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Purnima G. | Backend Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** As a backend engineer, I appreciate how Kong Konnect allows our team to centralize the management, security, and monitoring of APIs across all our services. Gateway configuration is straightforward, and using plugins for authentication, rate limiting, and traffic management saves us the time we would otherwise spend building these features from scratch. This was particularly beneficial when working with microservices-based applications, where managing dozens of individual APIs can be challenging. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** The initial setup requires a bit of a learning curve, as do some advanced configurations-such as complex routing or multi-environment setups. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Konnect enables us to standardize how we implement API security, routing, authentication, and traffic policies, rather than building these features individually into every backend service. This reduces redundant development effort and allows us to maintain our microservices more effectively. Centralized monitoring also helps us quickly identify API errors and performance issues, thereby improving our troubleshooting capabilities and the overall robustness of our applications. ### 10. Robust routing control and declarative API deployments for modern services **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Raj C. | Senior Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** Running API proxies across distributed environments usually creates a massive management headache, but Kong Konnect handles this cleanly through its separation of data planes from the cloud-managed control plane. Being able to run data nodes directly inside Kubernetes pods while managing configurations through the cloud console keeps request latency down to single-digit milliseconds. The declarative tooling via decK makes synchronizing gateway configurations across staging and production environments predictable and easy to integrate into CI/CD pipelines. Additionally, native plugins for OAuth2/OIDC token validation, upstream health checks, and rate limiting handle heavy networking concerns right at the gateway layer, saving considerable boilerplate code in downstream microservices. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Writing custom plugins still requires familiarity with Lua or compiling Go plugins via WebAssembly (Wasm), which slows down onboarding for engineers used to higher-level application languages. When synchronization issues occur between self-hosted data planes and the cloud control plane, inspecting low-level proxy logs to find schema or certificate mismatches can be tedious. Pricing can also scale steeply once you expand into multiple enterprise runtime groups and high-volume traffic tiers. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** It standardizes traffic management and API security policies across our entire backend footprint. Before adopting the platform, individual engineering squads handled authentication and request throttling inconsistently across separate services. Centralizing these policies at the gateway layer ensures uniform security compliance, simplifies auditing, and allows development teams to focus purely on building business logic rather than reimplementing edge security features. ### 11. Good platform to manage APIs at scale. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hema G. | Platform Engineering Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 29, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** Integration across Kong Enterprise features One thing I like best about Konnect is that it centralizes how we manage APIs. We have several teams splitting their time across different services. Having one place to manage gateways, APIs, and access is very helpful. I also like how developers can self-serve a good amount of what they need without having to rely on the platform team. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Setting Konnect up is not as simple as pressing a button. We had to spend a decent amount of time thinking through how we wanted things structured. This was especially true for team organization, permissions, and separating out environments. Other pieces also feel overcomplicated for simple tasks. Once you get accustomed to using it though, it becomes easier. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Lots of API work was done in teams silos and it was hard to standardize. Konnect has allowed us to clean this up. We have better visibility into our APIs. What APIs are running, who owns them, and how they are configured. We've also seen a reduction in repeated requests to the platform team. ### 12. Kong Konnect Makes API Consumption Easier with Clear Dev Portal Docs and Faster Loads **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hemanshi G. | Web Developer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** Working mostly on the front end, I mainly interact with the APIs Kong Konnect manages, and it's made life easier just from a consumption side. The dev portal gives clear docs for each endpoint, so I am not constantly pinging the backend team to ask what a field means or what status code to expect. Response caching set up at the gateway level has also helped page load times noticeably on some of our data-heavy views without us touching the frontend code at all. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Sometimes when an API call fails, the error message coming back through the gateway is a bit generic, so I still have to loop in a backend dev to figure out the actual cause. It would help if error responses gave a bit more context by default. Also, the interface takes a little getting used to if you are not the one managing configs day to day. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Before, if an endpoint changed or broke, I'd usually find out the hard way when something on the UI stopped working. Since routing and monitoring got centralized through Kong, issues on the API side get caught and flagged before they trickle down to the frontend. That's meant fewer surprise bugs showing up in the parts of the app I am responsible for. ### 13. Smooth Onboarding with Strong RBAC, Workspaces, and API Version Control **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nevil M. | Technical Lead, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 27, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** Onboarding a new team onto Kong Konnect has been smoother than I expected. RBAC and workspace separation let different team manage their own services without stepping on each other, which matters a lot once you scale past a handful of squads. Version control for APIs is also solid - rolling back a bad config change takes seconds instead of a whole incident response. CI/CD integration was straightforward too, so pushing gateway config changes through our existing pipeline didn't need a separate process. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Support response times can vary depending on the issue's complexity - simple questions get answered fast, but anything touching hybrid mode sync took longer than I'd like. Also, when we hit a scaling point with a larger number of consumers and routes, the dashboard started feeling a bit sluggish. Nothing that broke functionality, just slower load times that added friction to daily use. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** We had API logic scattered across multiple services, with each team handling auth and rate limiting differently. That made audits painful and caused inconsistent behavior between environments. Moving that logic into Kong Konnect gave us one place to enforce policies, so new services inherit the same standards from day one instead of us chasing teams to fix gaps later. It's also made incident response faster - when something breaks, we check the gateway logs first instead of digging through five different codebases to find where a request failed. ### 14. Single point of handling APIs **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Saanvi P. | Software Development Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 27, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** I like that it allows us to have a central hub to manage APIs, routes, authentication, and policies. I feel like this would save me time debugging not having to go into each application to ensure these things are configured since I only work with consuming services. Utilizing the panel you can also view the current state of your APIs and help troubleshoot what may be failing. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Learning some of the gateway / service configurations was a bit confusing to me when initially creating them. You have to take time to read through all your options to determine what should be where. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Manages many of our backend APIs in one central location. Routing, identification, and ensuring consistency with API configurations between services are made simple. Troubleshooting is much easier now that we can visualize what is happening instead of logging into each service to compare. Also allows our dev team to not repeat tasks. ### 15. Centralized API Management with Konnect: Easy Auth, Routing, and Real-Time Analytics **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kritika M. | Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** I love that I can now centrally configure authentication, JWT validation, rate limiting, and traffic routing for all my development and staging environments from the Konnect control plane without embedding any repetitive code in my backend services. I also can take advantage of features such as the developer portal and real-time analytics dashboard. Monitoring latency metrics, catching error bursts, and verifying throughput metrics across all my APIs has never been easier. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** The biggest thing that took me a little while to learn was writing Lua or Go plugins. Additionally,I was tripped up by not being able to see what stage my config sync was at if there was an issue. Sometimes you have to look at gateway logs to figure out where a sync got hung up. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Without Kong Konnect, I was forced to implement policies like token validation, rate limiting, and CORS repeatedly in every single Spring Boot service. While this works, now I can abstract these policies out to Kong and maintain them in one place. I’m able to ensure consistency across my API security settings and keep my source code clean. ### 16. High performance API gateway that offloads security concerns, but has a steep learning curve **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yogesh S. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** The biggest advantage of implementing Kong Konnect is how easily it handles cross-cutting concerns like OAuth2 and rate limiting at the gateway level. My engineering team no longer has to code custom authentication logic into every single microservice we deploy. The speed and API latency reduction are noticeable immediately, especially when our endpoints are handling millions of requests. I also heavily rely on the plugin ecosystem; securing a new service with the OIDC plugin is just a simple configuration commit rather than a multi-week engineering project. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** The initial setup and configuration can be overly complex, especially if your engineering team does not have prior API gateway experience. The documentation, while adequate, is not quite on par with major cloud providers like AWS or Google, which makes the learning curve steeper than necessary. Additionally, there are often multiple ways to achieve the same routing task, which can lead to confusion and inconsistent configurations across different development teams. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** It significantly reduces our engineering overhead by centralizing API management and security. By standardizing our authentication policies and throttling at the gateway, we have actually reduced our debugging time during regression cycles by roughly 25% to 30%. It allows our developers to focus on writing core business logic instead of maintaining bespoke security protections for every new endpoint. ### 17. Kong - the big guy that simplify your routes **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mostafa A. | DevOps Technical Lead & Solution Architect, Telecommunications, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: Seller invite:** Invitation from a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** February 14, 2023 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** The new Global Service Catalog Integration is an absolute game-changer for anyone dealing with a messy, multi-cloud microservices architecture. Honestly, keeping an API registry up to date is usually an administrative nightmare. With this feature, microservices running literally anywhere across our infrastructure are automatically discovered and cataloged into Konnect's central registry with minimal manual configuration. It completely eliminates the drift between what's actually running in production and what’s documented in our control plane. It just works, saving our engineering team massive amounts of manual overhead. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** While the platform’s feature velocity is incredible—especially with the new AI gateway and catalog capabilities—the documentation can sometimes feel a bit text-heavy when you're trying to implement complex topologies quickly. To match how fast these features are dropping, I'd really love to see Kong enhance their learning resources by providing more advanced video guides for the various features. Walking through deep-dive configuration scenarios visually would make onboarding these advanced capabilities significantly smoother. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Routing of application components in microservices. Works well with GitOps. The powerful REST API of Kong helps in automation. DevPortal is a potential place to help developers in creating their APIs. ### 18. From Product Creation to Future Market Dominance **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anshul A. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through Google using a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: Seller invite:** Invitation from a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2024 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** One thing I’ve really liked about Kong Konnect is how much easier it makes managing APIs across different environments. The centralized control plane gives good visibility into services and traffic without adding a lot of operational overhead. I’ve also found the developer portal and analytics features to be much more polished than before, making it easier for both API consumers and platform teams to work effectively. The cloud-managed approach reduces maintenance effort, which lets us focus more on building and improving APIs rather than managing infrastructure. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** While Kong Konnect is a strong platform overall, there are a few areas that could be improved. Some workflows in the UI can feel a bit complex, especially when managing larger numbers of services and routes. I’d also like to see more built-in guidance for troubleshooting configuration issues, as diagnosing problems sometimes requires digging through multiple logs and settings. Better visibility into request flows and dependencies would make day-to-day operations easier. Finally, simplifying the setup process for hybrid and multi-environment deployments would help reduce the learning curve for new users. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** API Traffic Management Security Extensibility and Customization Observability and Monitoring ### 19. Makes API management easier across environments **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) This reviewer's identity has been verified by our review moderation team. They have asked not to show their name, job title, or picture. **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 25, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** Kong Konnect gives us one place to manage APIs, gateways, policies, and traffic. The dashboard is clear once everything is set up, and the analytics help us spot errors and performance issues without jumping between several tools. It also works well when APIs run across different cloud environments. For our current usage, the pricing feels fair. It saves us time on gateway management, monitoring, and policy updates. The cost can increase as usage grows, so it is worth checking the pricing carefully before expanding. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** The initial setup has a learning curve, especially if you are new to Kong’s terminology and control plane structure. Some settings also take time to find. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a central view of APIs running across different environments. Kong Konnect helps us manage access, monitor traffic, and apply policies consistently. It saves time and makes API issues easier to track down. ### 20. Robust Security and Flexible Deployment with Kong Konnect **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lucas A. | Network Engineer, Computer Hardware, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: Seller invite:** Invitation from a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** I really appreciate how Kong Konnect tightens security and organizes traffic across our services. The ability to route upstream connections cleanly has reduced 502 errors, and the added visibility allows me to trace faults quickly. The dashboard provides a clear view of gateway activity, which is incredibly helpful. What I love most is the deployment flexibility, as I can set it up on-premise, in the cloud, or on Kubernetes clusters without having to change my approach each time. The initial setup was straightforward too, allowing me to start handling traffic with minimal configuration hassle. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** I find the documentation unclear, and a fuller set of worked examples would help me save time when configuring something less common. There's also the enterprise wall. The open-source resources are strong, yet the more capable features sit behind the paid tier, which can feel like a barrier when I want to push further. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Kong Konnect to tighten security and manage service traffic effectively, reducing 502 errors and ensuring reliable connectivity. Its dashboard helps me trace faults quickly, and I appreciate the deployment flexibility across different environments without network disruptions. ### 21. Makes API testing and troubleshooting easier **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anvi M. | Quality Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 25, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** I primarily use Konnect to validate APIs across our test environments. Having the ability to see services/routes and traffic all in one place is convenient, especially when debugging an API test that suddenly starts failing and wanting to verify if the problem is originating from application or gateway. Request volume, error, and latency analytics are also great to have during regression testing. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Some gateway configuration/settings and plugins were a bit difficult to grasp initially. And when you have lots of services, navigation feels cluttered and I find myself having to use filters to locate the exact API I'm looking for. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Allows us to manage and monitor our APIs in one place instead of having to look across different systems. As a QA, it allows me to quickly trace failed requests, verify routing/config changes and identify latency/error spikes before promoting a build. ### 22. Automation and Efficiency with Kong Konnect **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rodolphe K. | Network Fabric Automation Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: Seller invite:** Invitation from a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 06, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** I really appreciate how Kong Konnect takes on cross-cutting concerns and lets the gateway manage OAuth2 and rate limiting, which means I don't have to code them into every service. It's incredibly freeing to know that new services can inherit a uniform security posture and be production-ready without my having to code bespoke protections. The speed of Kong Konnect is impressive, and watching the Kong Ingress Controller automate routing configuration through Kubernetes-native resources and GitOps is a real turning point for me. The OIDC and Rate Limiting plugins saved us from a long stretch of custom development and secured new services without affecting performance. I also value the plugin ecosystem, which allows me to extend the gateway's capabilities through configuration rather than code, making enhancements a simple reviewed commit instead of a major project. The setup was pretty smooth overall. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** My reservation lies with the drift away from a fully supported open-source model. It nudges teams toward Enterprise and Konnect licensing sooner than planned, and for smaller projects, that shift carries real overhead. Weighing cost against the production-grade features we cannot do without has complicated our longer-term roadmap more than I would like. The pull toward Enterprise licensing forces me to weigh production-grade features against cost earlier than I would like, which means some smaller client environments that could once ride on open source now face a spending decision before they scale, complicating how I sequence fabric rollouts across the roadmap. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Kong Konnect to offload authentication and rate-limiting tasks, allowing new services to become production-ready quickly. Its automation with Kubernetes and GitOps streamlines routing and security configuration, freeing me to extend the network instead of rebuilding protections repeatedly. ### 23. Centralized API Management with Helpful Analytics **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** rakshita s. | Intern, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** For me, the biggest advantage is having one centralized place to manage APIs, security policies, routing, and monitoring. The analytics are also useful because they help me quickly spot performance issues and better understand how our APIs are being used. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** There’s a bit of a learning curve for new users, and some of the more advanced settings can take a while to fully understand and configure. I also think the documentation could be more detailed in a few areas to make those parts easier to navigate. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps address the complexity of managing APIs across different environments by consolidating management, security, and monitoring into a single platform. As a result, we get clearer visibility into API performance, troubleshooting is more straightforward, and there’s less manual effort involved in coordinating and maintaining multiple services. ### 24. API Management made easy, plus it's Open Source toooo!! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Akanksha M. | Technical Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through Google One Tap using a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** April 29, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** I appreciate Kong Gateway for providing better visibility into APIs and upstream services. The Kong Proxy performs way better than other alternatives like NGINX Proxy. I particularly like the 'Plugin first' approach since the plugins in Kong are modular like legos, making tasks like rate limiting or blacklisting certain APIs much easier without having to write lots of code. The built-in, out-of-the-box plugins reduce latency effectively. The setup process is super easy, thanks to the right scripts and developer documentation available, making installation and setup straightforward. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** The support for Custom Plugins needs to be improved even further, a bit more streamlining in terms of building and developing plugins using Lua. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway gives me better visibility into APIs and upstream services, and its proxy outperforms others like NGINX. The modular plugins make tasks like rate limiting or blacklisting easy without extra code, reducing latency with built-in solutions. ### 25. CentralizeI found this really helpful when working with multiple APIs.d Routing and Auth Management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rutika M. | Back End Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** Mostly develop backend APIs myself, and Kong Konnect allows me to manage routing, auth and other API specific configs in one place. Routing/Authentication/ etc could get split across services previously, so having a central location makes things a little easier and saves time when dealing with lots of APIs. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Of course there are many configuration options and can sometimes take awhile troubleshooting an API if it's not behaving when you need to determine if the issue is with Kong's config or the backend service. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong is mainly allowing us to manage our APIs more efficiently. Not having to manage every individual routing/access rule within each service keeps our backend code cleaner and managing multiple becomes less of a headache. ### 26. Intuitive UI, Powerful Features, and Excellent Support **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Said V. | Associate Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** June 15, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** It’s useful for securely storing credentials and retrieving them at runtime whenever they’re needed. The user interface is well designed and intuitive, so after a few days of training it feels accessible to just about anyone. I also really like the analytics dashboard; it’s clear and easy to use, and it lets us see who is using our products, which helps guide our decisions on what to develop next. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** It’s honestly hard to find anything I dislike—I love everything about Kong, mainly because of its wide range of features. I really don’t have anything negative to say. The documentation is thorough and easy to follow, it requires minimal coding to get started, and the support team is excellent and always ready to help when needed. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Kong Konnect to reliably manage, develop, deploy, test, and monitor our services. Its policy-based architecture helps us move quickly with API development while maintaining strong security, traffic control, and analytics. It also supports reusable governance, so we can apply consistent standards without needing excessive custom code. ### 27. User-Friendly API - Simplifying SAP and Finance System Integrations **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** PANKAJ g. | Senior executive, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** simplifies API management by providing a user-friendly platform with strong security, monitoring, and scalability features **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** it takes time for new users to become fully comfortable with all configuration and Mgt. options and finding some specific settings , troubleshooting issues , time consuming for doing some settings due to multiple screens **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** During month-end closing, we process a large volume of vendor invoices and GST-related transactions. Kong Konnect helps monitor the interfaces between SAP and vendor management applications, reducing manual follow-ups and helping IT teams resolve issues faster. ### 28. Flexible, High-Performance API Management at Scale with Kong Gateway **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Danyal A. | Senior Research Assistant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway is solving the challenge of securely exposing, managing, and monitoring APIs across multiple services and environments. Instead of handling authentication, rate limiting, routing, and observability separately in each service, we can centralize those capabilities in one platform. That reduces duplication, improves consistency, and makes it easier to enforce policies across teams. The main benefit for me is simpler API operations. It helps improve security, speeds up onboarding for new services, and gives better visibility into traffic and performance. As a result, we spend less time on repetitive infrastructure work and more time delivering actual product features. ### 29. Kong is best tool for future **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Akshay Kumar T. | Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through Google using a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: Seller invite:** Invitation from a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** June 10, 2024 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1. Low Latency 2. We can monitize API using Dev portal 3. Easy to setup 4. Booming product 5. Easy to use ### 30. Standout Performance: Reduced API Latency at Massive Scale **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bhawna P. | Technical Account Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 06, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** It has helped our organization manage high throughput and address latency issues. It also feels more secure. Another major factor is scalability. For a mid-level organization, it’s amazing to have Kong Konnect. ### 31. Fast-to-Deploy API Gateway with a Rich Plugin Ecosystem **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** pongthep p. | system engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** April 02, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** A fast-to-deploy API gateway that you can get up and running in a minute with Docker, plus a lot of plugins. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** With your technical background, Kong feels “fast” because it can replace months of custom coding with just minutes of configuration. ### 32. High-Performance API Gateway with Strong DevOps Alignment and Evolving UI Experience!! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) This reviewer's identity has been verified by our review moderation team. They have asked not to show their name, job title, or picture. **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account added to their profile **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** April 29, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway addresses the core need to control, secure, and standardize how APIs are exposed, without requiring changes to the backend services themselves. It provides a consistent layer where I can apply authentication, rate limiting, transformations, and logging across APIs in a uniform way, which significantly cuts down on custom code at the application level. Because it supports declarative configuration and is designed with automation in mind, I can manage API behavior through versioned configuration files and CI/CD workflows rather than relying on manual updates. This improves governance and security while also making deployments more predictable, repeatable, and easier to scale across different environments. ### 33. High-Performance, Cloud-Native API Gateway with Flexible Plugins and Strong Security **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** purva s. | Associate Consultant, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: Thank You page:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** March 31, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** 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 **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Advanced features are paid – Many enterprise capabilities (analytics, RBAC, dev portal) require paid versions **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway helps by: Centralizing API management Improving security (auth, rate limiting) Handling traffic efficiently Standardizing policies across services Benefit: Saves development time, improves scalability, and makes APIs more secure and manageable. ### 34. Reliable API Availability with Robust Management and Protection **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Zaki H. | Associate Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** June 14, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** I’ve used it to publish my APIs, and both the documentation and the blog are excellent. It also lets us protect our APIs and makes application development and deployments easier. If you’re looking for API security, this feels like an ideal product, with several built-in features that support that goal. ### 35. Kong: A Powerful Open-Source API Gateway for Managing APIs Across Any Environment **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ravi S. | Senior Operarional Lead, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **G2 Icon:** Our network of Icons are G2 members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions and commitment to helping others through their expertise. **Reviewed Date:** March 27, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** While using other backend APIs, we ended up in applying many of the below architecture characteristics to every individual APIs to support the general requirements. That will be a lot of work. Authentication/Authorization, Monitoring, Logging, Traffic control, Caching, API Administration etc.. While using Kong Gateway it will take away all these cross-cutting concerns in managing these APIs and put them all across in a single plane. This will provide us with a lot of architecture advantages. ### 36. Fast, Reliable API Gateway That Scales Smoothly with Kubernetes **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hrutik J. | Senior Associate Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Source: Organic:** Organic review. This review was written entirely without invitation or incentive from G2, a seller, or an affiliate. **Reviewed Date:** April 07, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway solves the business problem of controlling, scaling, and securing API traffic as companies grow their digital products. As applications move to microservices and multiple teams build and deploy services independently, managing APIs can become slow, inconsistent, and risky. Kong acts as a central layer that standardizes security, traffic management, and access control without forcing teams to redesign their services. ### 37. Seamless Transition to Kong Gateway with Superior Performance **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shivansh V. | Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** April 07, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** 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. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway improves security and gateway configuration, managing upstream services and reducing 502 errors. It enhances performance and debugging, handling over 50,000 transactions per second. Its deployment flexibility integrates well with Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines, offering seamless integration. ### 38. Flexible API Management with a Steep Learning Curve **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chandra Prakash A. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** April 02, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** I really appreciate Kong Gateway's plugin-based architecture and flexibility. It allows us to centralize security and traffic management while keeping services simple, which scales well in cloud-native environments. The architecture helps us to centralize cross-cutting concerns like authentication, rate limiting, and observability, significantly reducing duplication and keeping services focused on business logic. From a platform perspective, it improves consistency and makes it easier to enforce policies across all APIs without touching individual services. Its flexibility also helps us respond quickly to changing requirements by updating configurations at the gateway level instead of redeploying services, leading to better scalability, faster iteration, and a more maintainable system overall. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** I find the learning curve can be steep, especially for teams new to API gateways. Configuration complexity increases as the number of services grows. Debugging issues across plugins and routing rules can sometimes be non-trivial. The initial setup had a steep learning curve due to the Lua-based architecture and our plugins were in Go language, which was not supported out of the box. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Kong Gateway to centralize API management, improve scalability, and maintain consistency. Its plugin-based architecture helps focus services on business logic, while flexibility enables quick adaptation to changes, enhancing scalability, iteration speed, and system maintainability. ### 39. Kong Konnect Streamlines the Full API Lifecycle with Flexible Gateway Deployment **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shirish Z. | Senior Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Source: Organic:** Organic review. This review was written entirely without invitation or incentive from G2, a seller, or an affiliate. **Reviewed Date:** March 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** Konnect simplifies the entire lifecycle—from designing and securing APIs to monitoring performance and scaling—without adding unnecessary complexity. Its cloud-hosted control plane removes a lot of operational overhead, while still giving full flexibility to deploy gateways anywhere: on-premise, cloud, Kubernetes, or hybrid environments. Overall, it helps teams move faster, maintain better control, and deliver reliable APIs with far less effort. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** What I dislike about Kong Konnect is that some parts of the platform can feel a bit complex when you first start using it, especially for teams that are new to API gateways or Kubernetes. The documentation is extensive, but sometimes you need to piece together information from multiple places to get a complete picture. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Konnect helps us centrally manage, secure, and monitor all our APIs, which reduces complexity and makes operations more efficient. It gives us consistent security, better visibility through analytics, and flexible deployment options. Overall, it improves speed, reliability, and control across our API ecosystem. ### 40. Phenomenal Speed and GitOps-Friendly Routing with Kong Ingress Controller **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) This reviewer's identity has been verified by our review moderation team. They have asked not to show their name, job title, or picture. **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** March 27, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** The speed is phenomenal, but the real game-changer is how the Kong Ingress Controller allows us to automate our entire routing configuration through kubernetes native resources and GitOps best practices. Using the OIDC and Rate Limiting plugins saved us weeks of custom development, instantly securing our services with zero performance hit. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** The shift away from a fully supported Open Source (OSS) model is disappointing, as it forces teams to move toward the Enterprise/Konnect licensing much earlier than expected to maintain security and stability. This transition adds significant overhead for smaller projects and complicates our long-term roadmap when balancing cost against the need for basic production-grade features. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Before Kong, we were bogged down manually coding cross-cutting concerns like OAuth2 and rate limiting for every new service, but now we offload all that complexity to the gateway. This "kickstart" approach has slashed our initial development time by weeks and ensures our entire API ecosystem has a consistent, high-quality security posture from day one. ### 41. Fast, Scalable & Reliable API Gateway **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Neeraj H. | Technical Operation Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account added to their profile **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** What I like most about Kong Gateway is its high performance and scalability, which make it a strong fit for managing APIs in production environments. It also has a rich plugin ecosystem for authentication, rate limiting, logging, and security, so I can customize behavior easily without heavy coding. The setup feels straightforward, and its support for a microservices architecture helps streamline overall API management. On top of that, the flexibility to deploy either on-premise or in cloud environments makes it versatile for a wide range of use cases. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** One downside of Kong Gateway is that the initial setup and configuration can feel complex, especially for beginners. You really need a solid understanding of plugins, routing, and the different deployment modes to get everything working smoothly. In addition, some advanced features are only available in the enterprise version, which can drive up costs. Debugging and troubleshooting can also be challenging at times, particularly when visibility is limited unless you have the right monitoring set up. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway helps us address key API management challenges, including handling high traffic, securing APIs, and efficiently managing multiple microservices. It centralizes authentication, rate limiting, and logging, which cuts down on development effort and strengthens overall system reliability. In our experience, it has improved performance, made API monitoring simpler, and enhanced security, enabling faster deployments and giving us better control over our services. ### 42. Reliable API Gateway with Strong Flexibility **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Denis S. | Data Analyst, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** What stands out most is the flexibility and control it gives us over our API traffic. The plugin-based architecture has been especially useful: we can apply authentication, rate limiting, and logging in a consistent way without having to build everything ourselves. It also integrates smoothly into our existing stack and supports both cloud and on-prem setups, which matters for us given our regulatory and data constraints. Performance has been solid under load as well, and that reliability is critical for our use cases. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** The biggest challenge for me is the initial setup and the ongoing maintenance. It isn’t always straightforward, especially for teams that aren’t deeply familiar with API gateway concepts. When configuration issues come up, debugging can take a while, and although the documentation is extensive, it can feel a bit fragmented when you’re working through more advanced scenarios. I also get the sense that some enterprise features are more necessary than optional, which can affect cost considerations. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong has helped us centralise API management and apply consistent security policies across our services. Before we started using it, many of these controls were implemented separately within each service, which led to duplication and inconsistent behaviour. Now we rely on a single layer for authentication, routing, and monitoring, which lowers risk and makes governance much simpler. ### 43. Lightweight, High-Performance KONG Gateway for Secure Banking API Management **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Samatha V. | PEGA Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Source: Organic:** Organic review. This review was written entirely without invitation or incentive from G2, a seller, or an affiliate. **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** Its lightweight architecture and high performance API Gateway is best for industries like us (Banking). We use for our API management, considering risks in banking we need a secure system to connect to API's for which we use KONG Gateway. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** It is good, but needs full expertise to unlock full potential. Initial set up, configuration might feel complex if you have no prior experience. Additionally to unlock some advanced capabilities require license. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is used to fulfill our integration requirements in a secure way. We use it to replace oracle integration use cases. ### 44. Future-Ready Kong: Thoughtful Features, Flexible Automation, and Great Support **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anudeep V. | Senior Technical Lead, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** I started working with Kong about six months ago as a beginner. What I appreciate most about Kong is that the features they release are well thought‑out and come ready for use. Most capabilities can be easily performed through the UI, CLI, or Admin API, which makes automation straightforward and flexible. Kong also supports a wide range of architectures, from legacy setups to modern, cloud‑native designs. Their development process is strong, user feedback is actively considered, enhancements are delivered quickly, and the overall support experience has been very good. This has made learning and working with the platform much easier and more effective. The introduction of AI Gateway capabilities further positions Kong ahead of the market, making it a future‑ready platform. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** One area where I see room for improvement is that some capabilities which were previously available—and are still relevant and commonly expected in the API gateway space—have been deprecated or are no longer supported. For example, earlier versions allowed API products to be created with the same name, which enabled a single‑organization model while differentiating environments such as Production and Non‑Production, and publishing them to their respective developer portals. With the v3 Developer Portal, this is no longer supported, as API products must have globally unique names. This results in a less optimal user experience or requires maintaining separate organizations for Production and Non‑Production, which in turn increases operational and maintenance overhead. It would be valuable to revisit this capability to better support common enterprise environment‑segregation use cases. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Based on my experience with Kong, one feature I particularly appreciate is the ability to assign approvers to individual APIs as part of the self‑service journey, without requiring any external approval workflow. This was something we struggled to implement in our previous developer portal. Additionally, Kong makes it very easy to integrate with observability and monitoring tools such as OpenTelemetry and Splunk, enabling seamless visibility into API behavior and performance. ### 45. High-Performance, Scalable API Traffic Handling with Flexible Plugins **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chirang M. | Technical Lead, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account added to their profile **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** April 02, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** Kong Gateway stands out for its high performance and scalability, handling large volumes of API traffic with low latency. Its flexible plugin architecture also makes it easy to extend functionality for security, monitoring, and authentication. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** The learning curve can be steep, especially when dealing with advanced configurations and plugins. It can also become complex to manage at scale without strong operational practices and tooling in place. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway solves the challenge of managing, securing, and scaling APIs in a centralized way, eliminating the need to handle these concerns individually in each service. This benefits me by simplifying operations, improving security consistency, and allowing faster development and deployment of APIs. ### 46. Kong Konnect: Simple UI, Seamless SSO, and Strong On-Prem Performance **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abhijeet P. | Technical Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Source: Organic:** Organic review. This review was written entirely without invitation or incentive from G2, a seller, or an affiliate. **Reviewed Date:** March 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** Earlier we were using Kong enterprise and recently we migrated to Kong Konnect, the Konnect is absolutely a good enhancement that we wanted because UI is simple to check DP & CP, i can check all created Gateway's including how many servers are present in the DP. Integration with organization SSO is very seamless without any issues. Also there are plenty of new features for future enhancement like AI gateway and LLM connection. We have deployed CP in our on-prem and performance quite good and it was in ms only by using validations and authentication plugins. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** There are not major downsides, if we get a screen to deploy custom plugins or build custom plugins then that will be very helpful. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building custom plugins or readymade drag n drop functionality to build custom plugin and developer portal. ### 47. Kong API journey **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Investment Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) This reviewer's identity has been verified by our review moderation team. They have asked not to show their name, job title, or picture. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **G2 Icon:** Our network of Icons are G2 members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions and commitment to helping others through their expertise. **Reviewed Date:** December 31, 2021 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** Kong Gateway's new features focus on enhancing its AI Gateway capabilities and improving overall performance and security. There are rumours that Kong is promoting the Gateway to General Availability and introducing semantic intelligence for accelerated GenAI performance and LLM security. That would be awesome! **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Possibly think on ways where its usage can be cheaper or easier to adopt by SMB. **Recommendations to others considering Kong Konnect:** Ensure you evaluate Kong when applying your API strategy due to their vision and approach in this space. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** With an API strategy, corporations can start to bridge the gap between legacy systems and new channels or platforms required to be more agile, flexible and easier to implement. Kong offers not only that but also the ability to have an API platform implemented by baby steps that is always a big advantage and solves many questions about 'what is needed to open ourselves into the external partner community'. These are some of the benefits and problems solved by the API strategy and using Kong as your partner. **Official Response from Taylor Page:** > Hi Nuno -- I love to read reviews like this! You're absolutely right that our vision is to help our customers re-imagine what their API ecosystem looks like and how it can be optimized to best serve their customers (both internal and external). Would love to get more insight into your suggests around the ways we can improve the way we explain our solution to new Kong API Gateway users. Thanks so much for your review and feedback! ### 48. Empowers API Management with Ease, Despite Initial Setup Hurdles **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** kiranmayee K. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was not provided any incentive by G2 for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** I like that Kong Gateway is a very useful tool for building secure and scalable applications. It helps me organize, secure, and manage all my APIs easily in one place. What I liked is that many features, like security and rate limiting, can be added easily without much coding. I like how it makes managing and securing APIs simple and organized. I enjoy its speed and how smoothly it integrates with my work. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** Initial setup can be tricky and debugging could be simpler. Debugging is sometimes hard because errors aren't clear. Clearer error messages or a visual dashboard could make it easier. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kong Gateway helps securely manage and organize all my APIs efficiently, handling traffic smoothly. It simplifies adding features like security and rate limiting without much coding and integrates well with my workflow. ### 49. Flexible API Management with Bit of a Learning Curve **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aakash S. | Sr. Technical Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** May 03, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** I like that Kong Gateway provides a runtime that can be managed by me on Kubernetes or Docker, or alternatively, it can be managed by Kong itself. This gives me multiple options based on specific requirements or the governance and compliance needs of different clients. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** The setup can be Kubernetes-based and requires some special skills on the platform side, which means it has a bit of a learning curve before people become conversant with the interface. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Kong Gateway to manage APIs, centralizing API keys and policies, reducing costs related to security and observability. It allows us to modernize communication by changing record formats and handling older patterns, effectively acting as a strangler interface. ### 50. Performance Powerhouse with Strong Security Features **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** José Heriberto S. | Software Engineer/Mulesoft Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite on behalf of seller:** Invitation from G2 on behalf of a seller or affiliate. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Kong Konnect?** I really like Kong Gateway for its performance and flexibility. It’s great how it’s built from the engines of Kong and can handle tasks with low latency, making it a strong fit for environments where performance is crucial. The plugin-based architecture is a huge advantage, making it straightforward to extend functionality for things like authentication, logging, and rate limiting without overcomplicating the core setup. **What do you dislike about Kong Konnect?** I think it would be helpful to have more real case scenarios where companies use Kong Gateway. The initial setup was not easy. I recommend that Kong provides more real case scenarios or company use examples. **What problems is Kong Konnect solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Kong Gateway to secure and manage API traffic. It helps me maintain a strong security environment in my API setup and gives me a solid foundation in routing and flow management. ## Kong Konnect Discussions - [What is the use of Kong API gateway?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-the-use-of-kong-api-gateway) - 2 comments, 1 upvote - [What does KONG software do?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-does-kong-software-do) - 3 comments, 1 upvote - [What is Kong API Gateway used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-kong-api-gateway-used-for) - 1 comment - [What is Kong API management?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-kong-api-management) - 2 comments - [Is Kong Devops tool?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-kong-devops-tool) - 6 comments - [View Kong Konnect pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/kong-inc-kong-konnect/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-09-08+15%3A19%3A59+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=6fb3ad94-03a6-4b52-8446-0d45089ef84f&secure%5Btoken%5D=c6f03ce83cc0d4c2da9dae0a38a3cc3bd6ceb1316305b4196a31d12dedc62073&format=llm_user) ## Kong Konnect Features **Additional Functionality** - Tagging - Natural Language Processing - Data Extraction - Multi-Language - Predictive Analytics - Drag & Drop - Speech Recognition - Reporting/Analytics - Data Storage Management - Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA) - AI Copilot - Customer Segmentation - Collaboration Tools - Data Import/Export - Generative AI - For eCommerce - Role-Based Permissions - Customizable Branding - Search/Filter - Monitoring - Document Management - API - Data Visualization - Trend Analysis - Machine Learning - Access Controls/Permissions - Alerts/Escalation - Performance Metrics - Real-Time Data - Third-Party Integrations - Mobile App - Multiple Data Sources - For Sales Teams/Organizations - Sentiment Analysis - Activity Dashboard - Chatbot - Workflow Automation **Additional Functionality** - Code Generation - Text to Image - Generative AI - API - Natural Language Processing - Virtual Characters and Avatars - Content Generation - Personalization and Recommendation - Conditional Generation - Transformer Model - Automated Image & Video Editing - Interactive and Co-Creative Systems - Text Summarization - Data Augmentation - Variation Autoencoder Models - Adversarial Training - Transfer Learning and Fine-tuning - Simulation and Scenario Generation - Creative Design - AI Copilot - Prompt Engineering - Foundation Model **Development** - API Testing - Data Security - Orchestration - Scalability **Functionality** - Supported Protocols - Container Orchestration - Extensibility - Monitoring **Customization** - SEO - API Contracts - Change Management **Prompt Engineering - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps) ** - Prompt Optimization Tools - Template Library **Inference Optimization - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Batch Processing Support **Development - API Platforms** - API Testing - Scalability - Orchestration - Data Security **Traffic Management & Performance - AI Gateways** - Token-Aware Rate Limiting - Semantic Caching - Multi-Model Routing & Fallbacks **Cloud Visibility** - Data Discovery - Cloud Registry - Cloud Gap Analytics **API Construction** - API Testing - API Security - Orchestration - Scalability **Collaboration** - Design Management - Access Control - Visibility **Networking** - Networking - Load Balancing - Traffic Filtering - Service Discovery **Organization** - Respository - Third-Party Integration - Access Management **Model Garden - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Model Comparison Dashboard **Collaboration - API Platforms** - Visibility - Access Control - Design Management **Governance & Observability - AI Gateways** - Data Privacy - Cost Tracking - Centralized API Key Security **Security** - Data Security - Data loss Prevention - Security Auditing - Real-Time Data - Cloud Application Security - SSL Security **API Management** - Traffic Control - Logs/Documentation - API Monitoring - Monetization - API Gateway - Performance Monitoring - Real-Time Monitoring - Version Control **Protection** - Policy Management - Secure Communications **Custom Training - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Fine-Tuning Interface **API Management - API Platforms** - API Monitoring - Traffic Control - Gateway - Logs/Documentation - Monetization **Identity** - SSO - Governance - User Analytics - Real-Time Analytics - Visual Analytics - Reporting/Analytics **Data Integration** - App Integration - Data Transformation - Plugins - Real-Time Data **Application Development - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps) ** - SDK & API Integrations **Additional Functionality** - Alerts/Notifications - AI Copilot - Access Controls/Permissions - Endpoint Management - Intrusion Detection System - Compliance Management - HIPAA Compliant - Search/Filter - API - Two-Factor Authentication - Data Visualization - Risk Assessment - Real-Time Monitoring - Event Logs - Activity Dashboard - Audit Management - Cloud Security Policy Management - Vulnerability Protection - Anti Virus - Incident Management - Threat Intelligence - Real-Time Reporting - Reporting & Statistics - User Management - Encryption - Vulnerability Scanning - Generative AI - Status Tracking - Third-Party Integrations - Real-Time Notifications - Patch Management - Monitoring - Cloud Encryption **Additional Functionality** - Search/Filter - Document Management - Developer Portal - Activity Tracking - API Governance - API Design - API Lifecycle Management - Compliance Management - Application Management - Dashboard - Usage Tracking/Analytics - Data Mapping - Reporting/Analytics - AI Copilot - Rules-Based Workflow - Generative AI - Data Import/Export - Self Service Portal - Multiple Data Sources - Data Connectors - Drag & Drop - Testing Management - User Management - Data Synchronization - Real-Time Reporting - Database Support - Workflow Management - Access Controls/Permissions **Model Deployment - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps) ** - One-Click Deployment - Scalability Management **Guardrails - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Content Moderation Rules - Policy Compliance Checker **Model Monitoring - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Drift Detection Alerts - Real-Time Performance Metrics **Security - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Data Encryption Tools - Access Control Management **Gateways & Routers - Large Language Model Operationalization (LLMOps)** - Request Routing Optimization ## Top Kong Konnect Alternatives - [MuleSoft Anypoint Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/mulesoft-anypoint-platform/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (657 reviews) - [Swagger Studio](https://www.g2.com/products/swagger-studio/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (185 reviews) - [Postman](https://www.g2.com/products/postman/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (1,754 reviews)