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.
"Its customer service is good."
"There is plenty of support documentation available."
"The most valuable feature of Apigee is its simplicity of deploying an API and restricting access, like rate limit, with the API."
"The most valuable feature is the API gateway."
"The most valuable features of Apigee for me are analytics, security, ease of use, and integration capabilities."
"Apigee provides out-of-the-box policies, so it is ready to use with minimal configuration to those policies. You can govern your API and manage the life cycle of the API completely with the Apigee tool."
"It's a good return on my investment."
"The initial setup was easy - there was an onboarding document with steps that we followed."
"Kong Enterprise has excellent plugin support."
"I like everything about it. It provides the security we need."
"In our buying companies' perspective, it was easier to use compared to other platforms. The markets were pretty familiar with the solutions."
"Kong enterprise has significantly enhanced our ability to manage and secure our Microservices. Its most valuable feature is monitoring."
"It boasts remarkable speed and stability, and these qualities, particularly the gateway's resilience, are standout features for me."
"Kong Enterprise comes with some ready plug-ins, which is very good for the customers."
"The route limiting feature is very valuable."
"The tool's scalability is good...The solution's technical support is good."
"Apigee's user interface could be more straightforward and have more options. Also, it would be nice if it were ready to work out of the box without so much configuration."
"The analytical aspect of it could be better. I think it is fair if Apigee lets you configure some of the metrics of the key details you want to monitor in terms of analytics."
"The company needs to better support webhooks. It used to support webhooks and their policies and they have since stopped. They had some issues in the product and they abandoned the support for them. It's not come back since."
"The entire user across all the layers should be singly authenticated through an external authentication system."
"Google isn't enthusiastic about supporting older versions. Google is now trying to move all of its clients to X within the cloud."
"Since it is based on various open sourced projects, we might have to depend on the fixes provided by those components rather than Apigee directly fixing the issues."
"In terms of the functionalities of a typical API gateway, Apigee is actually doing its job, but when it involves integration with backend applications, which some gateways have, I don't believe it has this functionality. You have to do Java or do some other low-level coding before you are able to do the integration. Apigee has a lot of components, which means that management will be a bit difficult. It probably has ten different components, and all of these components leverage open-source utilities, such as NGINX. When those open-source vendors upgrade their utility, Apigee usually lags behind because they need to do a lot of tests and any required development in their own platform. They need to do rigorous testing to make sure that nothing breaks. Because of that, it takes them a while to upgrade whatever components have been upgraded by the open-source vendor that owns the utility. We've been chasing them for a particular upgrade for well over a year and a half, and they have not done that upgrade. It is creating a security risk for us as an enterprise, but that upgrade has not been done, even though the open-source vendor, the owner of the utility, has upgraded it a long time ago."
"The integration could be improved within the solution. There is a need to pay more attention to this."
"The tool needs improvement in UX."
"The technical support team's response time needs to be improved."
"We would like to see an automatic data API when we have a table in the database."
"Kong Enterprise has decided not to support the web portal feature anymore, but I think that feature should stay in the on-premises solution."
"Because it is open-source, it should be less expensive than others."
"The developer portal needs to be improved."
"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."
"It becomes difficult if you try to scale it up to multiple clusters."
Apigee is ranked 2nd in API Management with 82 reviews while Kong Gateway Enterprise is ranked 6th in API Management with 18 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, Amazon API Gateway, WSO2 API Manager and Axway AMPLIFY API Management, 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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