We compared Apigee and Kong Enterprise based on our users reviews in five parameters. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
The setup process for Apigee can be either straightforward or complex, while Kong Enterprise generally has a smooth and easy installation process, although some users needed additional support.
Apigee is notable for its robust capabilities, analytics functionality, developer portal, and pre-configured policies. It also offers sandboxing, scalability, and extensive customization options. In contrast, Kong Enterprise excels in plugin-driven network services, authentication and authorization features, and Lua script customization for observability. It also delivers strong performance and a route limiting feature.
Kong Enterprise has room for improvement in various areas such as pricing, automatic data API creation, customization for integration, solutions for east-west communications and Zero Trust architecture, scaling up process, and developer portal with isolated data plans for federated teams.
Apigee is known for its costly setup, including high licensing fees that may discourage certain users. On the other hand, Kong Enterprise's setup cost is influenced by factors like scale, licenses, and usage, but its licensing expenses are deemed reasonable when compared to other products.
Apigee is praised for its exceptional customer service, particularly in terms of technical support during the initial design phase. They go above and beyond by providing an architect to define the architecture. Similarly, Kong Enterprise also offers commendable customer service, with a responsive and helpful technical team.
Comparison Results
Based on user feedback, Apigee and Kong Enterprise have distinct strengths and weaknesses. Apigee is highly regarded for its robust features, analytics function, developer portal, and security measures. However, it requires enhancements in terms of user-friendliness, iPaaS capabilities, pricing, customization options, and documentation. Conversely, Kong Enterprise receives praise for its seamless installation process, plugin-based network services, authentication and authorization features, and customization through Lua script. It could benefit from improvements in pricing, automatic data API creation, customization for integration, scaling up process, and developer portal. Overall, Apigee offers a broader range of capabilities and features, while Kong Enterprise excels in providing a straightforward installation process and plugin support.
"The central monitoring feature is the most valuable. It also provides security for the APIs and high availability for our use cases. Apigee is the best product in the industry in comparison to other API management solutions. It helps in fast development, which is a top point. It also supports a lot of industry standards and has excellent documentation."
"There are just a lot of security features in general."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"They capture the details of all the incoming and outgoing traffic of your APIs. Based on 300+ default dimensions you can generate beautiful and insightful reports on usage and consumption of APIs."
"Apigee is a great product with good feedback and recommendations from clients."
"Apigee makes proxy management very simple."
"If you have numerous applications and high traffic, Apigee is a strong choice for its excellent features and outstanding performance."
"I use it because it's simple, it automatically updates, and It hasn't given me any issues."
"The route limiting feature is very valuable."
"I like everything about it. It provides the security we need."
"Kong Enterprise comes with some ready plug-ins, which is very good for the customers."
"The most valuable feature of Kong Enterprise is its capability to integrate with various security tools."
"The tool's scalability is good...The solution's technical support is good."
"It boasts remarkable speed and stability, and these qualities, particularly the gateway's resilience, are standout features for me."
"We use the solution for load-balancing, caching, and rate-limiting APIs."
"The solution provides good performance."
"Compared to its competitors, such as Axway AMPLIFY API Management and Layer7 API Management, Apigee could benefit from having more policies to cater to various use cases. This would reduce the need for writing custom JavaScripts. If more features come straight out of the box, we can leverage them instead of writing custom code to achieve the same functionality."
"They should improve the monitoring tools for on-premises environments."
"When it comes to the rate limit, we don't have a specific category for rate limits for a particular customer."
"The pricing of the solution could be improved upon. We'd like it if it was less costly."
"There should be an integrated continuous integration and continuous deployment approach with Apigee. Currently, for development at a more integrated level, you have set it up yourself."
"I would like them to add features, such as caching and mediation policies."
"Sometimes there are glitches, which means there's still room for improvement in the platform."
"The pricing for the product was a bit higher. I also found it challenging to manage sometimes."
"The tool needs improvement in UX."
"The OS upgrades are not as frequent as they should be and they are bulky."
"Kong Enterprise needs to improve its pricing, which starts at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pricing should be based on API usage rather than monthly. It should improve its documentation as well."
"They could focus more on pricing."
"Kong is meant for north-south communications, so it will be interesting to see what solutions they can come up with in the realms of east-west communications, service-to-service communications, and Zero Trust architecture. I believe that if they can provide for these areas, then they will be able to solve the overall integration and security concerns for microservices architecture in general."
"We would like to see an automatic data API when we have a table in the database."
"We are facing issues with the solution's features like reports and traffic analysis."
"The technical support team's response time needs to be improved."
Apigee is ranked 2nd in API Management with 82 reviews while Kong Gateway Enterprise is ranked 6th in API Management with 20 reviews. Apigee is rated 8.2, while Kong Gateway Enterprise is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Apigee writes "Has a robust community and outstanding performance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kong Gateway Enterprise writes "Provides role-based access control and can be easily customized with Lua script". Apigee is most compared with Microsoft Azure API Management, IBM API Connect, WSO2 API Manager, Amazon API Gateway and IBM DataPower Gateway, whereas Kong Gateway Enterprise is most compared with Microsoft Azure API Management, WSO2 API Manager, Apache APISIX, Layer7 API Management and MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager. See our Apigee vs. Kong Gateway Enterprise report.
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