The console is clean and easy to navigate, and is slotted into our existing microservices setup without friction thanks to its plugin ecosystem. It held up well under real traffic with solid latency, and support has been fast and genuinely knowledgeable, which made onboarding smooth.

What I like the most about Kong Konnect comes down to the fact that, it is a middleware between my backend and client, so it naturally fits between everything I already work with. It works with Ai APIs, other paid APIs, which otherwise you'd have to manage yourself. Coming to performance, I like the Kong Gateway as it can easily handle high API traffic efficiently, without massive overhead when applying policies and plugins. Pricing is genuinely interesting because it centralizes a lot of things into one platform, from analytics to rules to security, basically instead of managing everything yourself, Kong can do it for you in one platform. UI is clean and modern, its easy to use, even for a beginner, which is very important for something this important, because UI should not be confusing for a platform which sits between your backend and your client. Onboarding process was also smooth, they offer one month free trial for starting up, and also offer buying with AWS marketplace, easy to onboard, load your workload and start using. Ai is the USP of this platform, and very very important in 2026, API costs of Ai can be massive, Kong allows us to set rate limits, auth, etc. on the same platform, which is very smooth and convenient.

What I like most about Kong Konnect is that it gives us one centralized place to manage, secure, and monitor our API gateways across different environments. I also like the separation between the cloud control plane and local data planes, which makes deployment easier without adding latency to our backend traffic. Setting up things like OAuth2, rate limiting, and mTLS using the available plugins is also quite straightforward. The service catalog and Developer Portal are useful as well, especially when multiple teams are working with different APIs.